ABSTRACT
In numerous places in this book, there have been references to the political dimensions of Lefebvre’s social theory and particularly its utopian orientations, including his openness to the future and his championing of emancipatory modes of political action. Throughout his writings on everyday life, the state and the politics of space, Lefebvre’s analysis is always attuned to the potential for resistance to established forms of power and the transformation of existing sociospatial relations. In this chapter, I consider some of the ways in which Lefebvre articulates this utopianism, and the spatial, political and legal implications that flow from it. As a point of departure, I suggest that there is a convergence between Lefebvre’s depiction of the potential that lies within everyday ‘moments’ and collective expressions of festivity, and some aspects of the utopian thought of the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. In particular, I explore the similarities between what both Lefebvre and Bloch refer to as ‘concrete utopia’ – the anticipatory striving towards possibilities that are latent within the present – through spatial practices, aesthetic forms, imaginary symbols and political action. I then move to an analysis of two forms of concrete utopianism that are acknowledged expressly in Lefebvre’s work. The first of these is the series of designs and models for the imaginary city of ‘New Babylon’, developed between the mid-1950s and early 1970s by the Dutch painter and experimental architect Constant Nieuwenhuys. The second example is his own more directly political proposal for the potential emergence of a differential space from the contradictions inherent within abstract space. Lefebvre presents differential space as the outcome of a politics of autogestion, pursued through the assertion of two spatial demands: the right to the city and the right to difference.
