On the Link Between Urban Space and "Everyday" Resistance

As I continue my research into the practices of urban spatial “reclaiming” and “intervention” that I’m calling “localized spatial contention,” a sort of ongoing project in much of my thinking has been clarifying the connection between urban space and “resistance.” In general this is obvious enough for anyone with a mind for critical human geography or other spatialized political economy, viewing cityspace as a primary site for the production and consumption of capital and thus a primary site for resistance. Sociologists, political scientists and others have likewise emphasized the easily observable fact that cities – their streets, public spaces, and buildings – are frequent cites of popular struggle. More subtly though, what about the ideas of self-expression and ‘critique’ as amounting to sub-revolutionary forms of resisting alienation and false consciousness that can be found in the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and later cultural theorists?

Lefebvre sees the everyday dialectically, not only the trivial, stultifying, and alienating construct of mass culture but also – thus – as the venue for consciousness and transformation. He writes that transformation of society can only be achieved through transformation of the everyday, because the problem of revolutionary totality “is posed and is resolved on the level of everyday life” (1947 [2008], p 250). Consciousness alone is powerful: “consciousness of alienation – that strange awareness of the strange – liberates us, or begins to liberate us, from alienation” (1957 [2008], p 20). And so Lefebvre saw the practice of critique as itself emancipatory and something we might all engage in (even if he is inconsistent on the possibilities here and their value; see also my previous post on Lefebvre’s theory of “moments”).

The connection with space – and urban space in particular – came along with the rest of Lefebvre’s “spatial turn” that came to define his work in and beyond the 1960s. Lefebvre saw “the urban” as a new era or epoch of society, tied to the dominant mode of production (i.e. from feudal to industrial to urban), a “problematic” through which hegemonic social and economic forms (sometimes described as the far order) can be understood – and contested – in the everyday (the near order). These forms or levels come together as a single arena for Lefebvre’s lifelong critical project, the twin dialectics of the everyday and the urban: everyday life is a realm of alienation and false consciousness, yet it is through engagement with everyday life that one might transform the everyday, and thus transform social reality; the urban is where the hegemony of ‘far order’ global-level conditions are at their starkest and space is organized most explicitly for state control and the accumulation of capital, yet it is where the far order and the near order come together, and the site of contention.

In fact, as Goonewardena (2005, p 67) suggests, Lefebvre’s vision of revolutionary struggle is perhaps most clearly understood in terms of all three levels: a struggle waged against the hegemony of the “global,” using the utopian energies and possibilities inherent in the contradictions of “everyday life,” fought on the terrain of the urban intermediary. This is the link between urban space and everyday resistance.

What’s more, the starkness of the contradictions and the need for this struggle are, arguably, all the more apparent in the contemporary, neoliberal city. In The Urban Revolution (1970 [2003], p 92), Lefebvre offers the following appraisal of the city under advanced capitalism and the need for its transformation as part of the revolutionary project, an appraisal that could serve as a rallying cry for the forms of transgressive or counter-normative localized spatial contention that I’m studying:

“Space becomes increasingly rare—it is expensive, a luxury and privilege maintained and kept up through a practice (the ‘‘center’’) and various strategies. The city does indeed grow richer. […] But it collapses under the weight of its wealth. The more it concentrates the necessities of life, the more unlivable it becomes. The notion that happiness is possible in the city, that life there is more intense, pleasure is enhanced, and leisure time more abundant is mystification and myth. If there is a connection between social relationships and space, between places and human groups, we must, if we are to establish cohesion, radically modify the structure of space.”

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Works cited:
Goonewardena, Kanishka. 2005. “The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideology, and the Aestheticization of Politics,” Antipode, Vol. 37, No. 1. 46-71.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1947 (2008). Critique of Everyday Life Vol. I: Introduction, 2nd Ed., trans. J. Moore. London and New York: Verso.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1957 (2008). “Foreword to the Second Edition” in H. Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life Vol. I: Introduction, 2nd Ed., trans. J. Moore. London and New York: Verso.