10/29/2014
A quick post: On "Urban"
“(Urban) Society is completely urbanized,”(1) as hypothesized by Henri Lefebvre stems from the ideological framework that the product produced from the process of complete urbanization (through industrialization) is yet to reach its final state. Though, he rejects the state-driven and market-driven systems of urbanization defined by the resulting form of agglomerations, he refocused its definition on the post-industrial productive dialectic of society and the exchanges of such agglomerated “cities” and non-“cities,” which could produce this idealized form. However, it seems that the existence of the product from such processes of urbanization is but a conceptualized notion (even though Lefebvre would argue that its virtual existence is a form of reality) and that if we do reach this final transformation then we have also reached the end of urbanization. Therefore the ideology of “urban” is anti-urbanization. As such, its discontinuity is mediated by continuous process within its symbiotic dichotomy.
However, the process is far from complete, and it would be dogmatic to claim that it was. To do so would mean inserting the concept of an “urban society” into a questionable epistemology that we should be wary of because it is premature, because it places the categorical above the problematic, thereby halting, and possibly shifting, the very movement that brought the urban phenomenon to the threshold of awareness in the first place. (2)
Through which the (urban) society’s autonomy has blighted its own possibility of existence at the very moment of its conception in the framework of either state simplification or technocratic dominion, which seeks to understand the complexity of these processes in order to exhaustively generate Capital from. Theorizing new forms of an end product of urbanization processes in the context of in-existentialism under the system of Capital are but fictitious ambitions. Although, is there a possibility to create new typologies and taxonomies of potential urban forms that would denounce such systems of stricture without negating and halting the process of urbanization? It seems that through social equilibrium, with the removal of a hierarchical system (both in social and economic aspects), the technocratic Capitalistic system could potentially be overthrown. This in turn could produce evenness in the process of urbanization (both in form, function and product) and would finally enable the state’s obsessive compulsion of comparing such “urban forms,” as they would exist under the same agency of creation and mediation of continuous even growth—at the same time eradicating the once-existing diverse formations.
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(1) Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1.
(2) Ibid., 165.
