Cities under pressure: urban democracy and everyday life

Abstract

While Henri Lefebvre's take on the urban phenomenon has been mostly interpreted as a mere political-economic critique of capitalist urbanization, particularly his century-long oeuvre entitled The Critique of Everyday Life, however, has remained widely theoretically underappreciated in urban studies. This is remarkable, as this part of his work indicates a strong interest in the socio-political and socio-cultural dimensions of urbanization. Lefebvre's many recommendations included an urge to overcome gridlocked and dogmatist frameworks of urban analysis toward an interpretation of the urban phenomenon by using open analytical approaches reunifying philosophy and social theory with one of the intellectual territories seldomly addressed by philosophers and social theorists: everyday life. Lefebvre both analyzed urbanization as a materializing pattern of capitalist modes of production in transformation and as a way to identify political, social and cultural shifts in the human condition. This chapter addresses how this approach might be useful, first, to unravel a crisis of public space; secondly, to address urban dimensions of the crisis of democracy and, thirdly, to pave a way to imagine new alternative political forms of democratization in cities.