Articoli taggati con ‘Urban Sociology’
The Right to the city by Henry Lefebvre and tendencies to the anti-coercion of its exchange value. Reading hypothesis and analysis.
I believe that it is possible to carry on Lefebvre’s thought trying to fix the coordinates of a possible political economy of the metropolitan space, where there are some contrasting subjective regularities that restore the difference between isotopy and heteropia in the contemporaneous metropolitan paradigm. From this basic assumption, the path of the speech is turned to the synoptic observation of the control and exclusion systems of specific social classes (voluntary and spontaneous isolation, H. Lefebvre, or. 1967, tr. it. 1968); finally, assumptions can be made on how some fragments of the territory can be transformed by fractions of population, whose desires, turned into patterns, originally, conflicting with the normative-symbolic order, must be found in a series of initiatives aimed at the re-appropriation of a physical space, with an increase in subjectivity that redefines the role of space in the metropolis. Although the Right to the city takes its place between a Keynesian, Taylorist, Fordist system and the advance of a Toyotist paradigm, Lefebvre catches the origins of the socio-urban changes in conformity with the fast ratio (space compression, reduction of time with the automation of the production processes combined with the new communication and transport technologies), where several systemic strategies are simultaneously carried out to eliminate the topographic city differences; therefore, Lefebvre establishes new urban development needs in the reconversion of the capitalist pattern, with procedural effects on the territorial planning and on life in a broad sense. With the more and more new cybernetic systems and outsourcing services, the factory, the production as a theatre of struggle and social aggregator, at least in the late-capitalist West, gives way to a conflict that is increasingly centred on the space category and not on the reduction of time to the owner’s authority. In a “two-dimensional decomposition of the everyday life”, (cf. G. Cersosimo 2017, 15,) focusing on a socially organized time and a relatively free time, which is always related to the capitalist organization of production and work, the key to conflict is, nowadays, the re-appropriation of means and resources to enjoy the spare time in a society with no producers recording a clear decrease in employment, with flexible working hours and moments where it is possible to record a higher involvement of the lower classes.
