ABSTRACT
Henri Lefebvre develops rhythmanalysis by means of his contact with artistic practices, especially those of the Situationist International. Rhythmanalysis offers the guidelines for an applied poetics; it goes as far as creating forms, textures and styles for urban living. This urban poetics, as a creative act steeped in knowledge, proceeds through experimentation; it restores the rhythmic game that enriches our aesthetic experience of urban space and time. Cyclic rhythms compose the temporalities of agrarian and traditional societies, in which repetitions of periods in social life are ritualised to become part of symbolic exchanges between life and death, or the cosmic relation of the community to the earth. Bachelard’s rhythmanalysis is alien to the study of social time. The contemplative philosopher prefers solitary time, free from the requirements of social life. By placing rhythmanalysis in the framework of the production of space, Lefebvre articulates it with the appropriation and the abstraction of urban space and time.
