The right to the City

In "Loose Space," Lefebvre’s explication, the ”right to the city” encompassing the “right to freedom, to individualization, to habitat and to inhabit” is borrowed to lay theoretical ground for arguing freely used public space. Then I realized that "The right to the City" is both a piece and a section in Lefebvre's "Wrtings on Cities". This seemingly banal phrase is actually related to his pursuit for "urban people in the urban," which encourages revolutionary approaches and practice in humanism, especially architects and planners and who else serve the making of the city but slip beyond the narrowly-defined professional categories (see on 152-153 how he criticize us!!).

In this regards, Lefebvre calls for new urban strategy(see 154-157) and interestingly cries for the philosophical sense of "art" to help fashioning the practice. As he suggests,

" As necessary as science, but not sufficient, art brings to the realization of urban society its long meditation on life as drama and pleasure."(156)

After grounding the context, he turns to arguing the significance of "the right to the city." To my surprise, he actually parallels “rights to the city” as cry and a demand in the face of the emergence of the pseudo-right, as coined, “the right to nature." As I am concerned, he implicated that people would rather suffer in the city with the hope to find compensation in the nature without dreaming for change our city today. Such cruel comment is given, " people are everywhere and nowhere” (159). We don't "inhabit," as he would suggest. Here the task comes, how can people find right to the city, or in an updated fashion, “right to urban life”? As urban folks, we might have to ask ourselves, how can we facilitate people to make it?

The point for Lefebvre is that the urban environment, “place of encounter, priority of use value, inscription in space of a time promoted to the rank of a supreme resource among all resources, find its morphological base and its practiceo-material realization.”(158) Besides, he also highlights the working class as key agent to support and to realize such utopian urban inhabited by the urban people, the dweller.

Is it inspiring and disappointing? What a revolutionary project that has been proposed for decades that still remains a task.

As follows is from the annotated bibliography from "Loose Space" (293)
Lefebvre, H.(1996) Writings on Cities
Lefebvre criticizes the "functional" understanding of both cities and urban spaces, counterposing it to the diversity and creativity of everyday "use value." He notes that throughout history, city centers were not only commercial but also ocncentrations of religious, intellectual, political and economically productive activity. It is in urban spaces that people meet their needs for socialization, representation and play. The diversity of social needs inevitably leads to tension, to the confrontation and negotiation of difference, and also to disequilibrium and unpredictability. This is part of what attracts people to urban space. The book's introduction provides a digestible overview of Lefebvre's ideas and his influences on a later generation of US scholars.

"raisins in dough"-Victor Turner's ethnographic approach

Some description and quotations found in Wiki's entry of Victor Turner are so impressive as follows. I personally appreciate his using raisins in dough as metaphor to implicate flickers and flashes of thoughts.
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Turner was also a committed ethnographer who constantly mused about his craft in his books and articles. Eclectic in his use of ideas borrowed from other theorists, he was rigorous in demanding that the ideas he developed illuminate ethnographic data; a theorist for theory's sake he was not. A powerful example of his attitudes can be found in the opening paragraph of the essay “Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors” in Victor Turner (1974) Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. There he writes,

In moving from experience of social life to conceptualization and intellectual history, I follow the path of anthropologists almost everywhere. Although we take theories into the field with us, these become relevant only if and when they illuminate social reality. Moreover, we tend to find very frequently that it is not a theorist’s whole system which so illuminates, but his scattered ideas, his flashes of insight taken out of systemic context and applied to scattered data. Such ideas have a virtue of their own and may generate new hypotheses. They even show how scattered facts may be systematically connected! Randomly distributed through some monstrous logical system, they resemble nourishing raisins in a cellular mass of inedible dough. The intuitions, not the tissue of logic connecting them, are what tend to survive in the field experience.

Why Gossip? on Everyday Urbanism?

I do believe that everyone enjoys gossiping to certain degree. It just varies in topics and manners. Sometimes you don't realize that you are actually practicing it. Yet you could not deny it is a rather easy way to communicate and to share.
Then, the point is what to share. As you could see, our target should be "everyday urbanism." To be plain, the motivation to share thoughts here is a proposal for mapping and understanding this notion in a more dynamic way. Since the notion itself is such a concept in flux, I hope the discussion about it could be more creative and unlimited, as if we are practicing our everyday life in such a virtual space. So, let's gossip.

If you don't know how to get started, here are some suggestion:

1. A term that confuses you when reading literatures in this vein
2. An academic that you would suggest anyone interests in this topic should learn from
3. Any interesting book? or books that suck?
4. Any creative practice that you happen to learn?
5. Cool thing or idea? Any thought?

I actually have a hope that a glossaries of "everyday urbanism" could be accumulated by these gossip-style collaboration. The more diverse materials and perspectives we share, the richer the content will be.