ABSTRACT
Henri Lefebvre acknowledges the importance of writing and symbolic representation in the urban process but is militantly cautious against the linguistic imperialism that had resulted from the French structuralism of the 1950s and 60s, of which the ‘city-as-text’ and ‘writing-the-city’ metaphors are frequently a proxy. The urban is the utopian dimension of the city, the overcoming of fragmentation, homogenisation, and abstraction. Lefebvre alludes to writing multiple times in Right to the City before the section on urban form, in particular in the three short sections between pages 101–117. In The Production of Space, writing also comes into play early on. In particular, the persistent role of writing as a stable socio-technical support on which digital information and communication technologies seem to depend for their functioning may prompt students of spatial theory to consider upgrading writing to a critical socio-spatial infrastructure, a crucial ingredient in the production of contemporary urban space.
