A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
The experience of a collective urban enjoyment was referred to by several heterodox socialist thinkers from the early nineteenth century onwards, who saw in it not only an approximation of the better life to come, but an emancipatory experience in itself. Amongst them was Henri Lefebvre (1901–91), and this paper will revisit his argument about the emancipatory potential of urban enjoyment by going back to his theorising of the ‘dialectics of centrality’. Developed from within Lefebvre's critique of post-war functionalist urbanism of balancing isolated functions, the ‘dialectics of centrality’ offered an alternative way of defining urbanisation in terms of the contradictory movements of condensation and dispersion. Lefebvre argued that this double movement has the potential for subverting the social order which assigns groups to specific places and times, and that this potential comes to the fore in eruptions of collective enjoyment. The core of this argument was to theorise the urban experience as equally distant from conspicuous consumption as from the traditional asceticism of the communist left. This paper gathers these intuitions under the concept of 'collective luxury' which permeates much of Lefebvre’s reassessment of the architectural utopias of the nineteenth century, his analysis of the May, 1968 events and his critiques of architectures of leisure around the Mediterranean. This paper re-reads Lefebvre's intuitions about collective luxury in view of the on-going dismantling of the welfare state in Europe and its distributive urbanism, and argues that the concept offers orientation points for debates in twenty-first century urbanism.
The experience of a collective urban enjoyment was referred to by several heterodox socialist thinkers from the early nineteenth century onwards, who saw in it not only an approximation of the better life to come, but an emancipatory experience in itself. Amongst them was Henri Lefebvre (1901–91), and this paper will revisit his argument about the emancipatory potential of urban enjoyment by going back to his theorising of the ‘dialectics of centrality’. Developed from within Lefebvre's critique of post-war functionalist urbanism of balancing isolated functions, the ‘dialectics of centrality’ offered an alternative way of defining urbanisation in terms of the contradictory movements of condensation and dispersion. Lefebvre argued that this double movement has the potential for subverting the social order which assigns groups to specific places and times, and that this potential comes to the fore in eruptions of collective enjoyment. The core of this argument was to theorise the urban experience as equally distant from conspicuous consumption as from the traditional asceticism of the communist left. This paper gathers these intuitions under the concept of 'collective luxury' which permeates much of Lefebvre’s reassessment of the architectural utopias of the nineteenth century, his analysis of the May, 1968 events and his critiques of architectures of leisure around the Mediterranean. This paper re-reads Lefebvre's intuitions about collective luxury in view of the on-going dismantling of the welfare state in Europe and its distributive urbanism, and argues that the concept offers orientation points for debates in twenty-first century urbanism.
Collective luxury
Stanek, Łukasz (author)
The Journal of Architecture ; 22 ; 478-487
2017-04-03
10 pages
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
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