The Urban Revolution Quotes

“a point of arrival for existing knowledge and a point of departure for a new study and new projects: complete urbanization. The hypothesis is anticipatory. It prolongs the fundamental tendency of the present. Urban society is gestating in and through the “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution

“agricultural production has lost all its autonomy in the major industrialized nations and as part of a global economy. It is no longer the principal sector of the economy, nor even a sector characterized by any distinctive features (aside from underdevelopment). Even though local and regional features from the time when agricultural production dominated haven’t entirely disappeared, it has been changed into a form of industrial production, having become subordinate to its demands, subject to its constraints. Economic growth and industrialization have become self-legitimating, extending their effects to entire territories, regions, nations, and continents. As a result, the traditional unit typical of peasant life, namely the village, has been transformed. Absorbed or obliterated by larger units, it has become an integral part of industrial production and consumption.”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution

“In this sense, a vacation home, a highway, a supermarket in the countryside are all part of the urban fabric. Of varying density, thickness, and activity, the only regions untouched by it are those that are stagnant or dying, those that are given over to “nature.” With the decline of the village life of days gone by, agricultural producers, “farmers,” are confronted with the agricultural town.”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution

“The specialized sciences (sociology, political economy, history, human geography) have proposed a number of ways to characterize “our” society, its reality and deep-seated trends, its actuality and virtuality. Terms such as “industrial and postindustrial society,” “the technological society,” “the society of abundance,” “the leisure society,” “consumer society,” and so on have been used. Each of these names contains an element of empirical or conceptual truth, as well as an element of exaggeration and extrapolation. Instead of the term “postindustrial society”—the society that is born of industrialization and succeeds it—I will use “urban society,” a term that refers to tendencies, orientations, and virtualities, rather than any preordained reality.”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution

“The rationalism that culminated in Descartes accompanied the reversal that replaced the primacy of the peasantry with the priority of urban life. Although the peasantry didn’t see it as such. However, during this period, the image of the city came into being. The city had writing; it had secrets and powers, and clarified the opposition between urbanity (cultured) and rusticity (naive and brutal).”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution

“La Révolution urbaine first appeared in 1970, in the aftermath of the May 1968 uprising in Paris. Cities around the world from Detroit to Tokyo, Prague to Mexico City, were the scene of major revolts, connected less through any organizational affiliation than through political empathy linking highly diverse struggles, and as the 1960s culminated in worldwide challenges to capitalism, war, racism, patriarchy, imperialism, and the alienation of modern urban life, the book was inevitably received as a political testament to the possibilities for fundamental political and social change.”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution

“It expresses an inveterate hopefulness and openness toward the future that has often been hard to sustain in the three decades since its publication but which characterizes Lefebvre’s philosophically induced intellectual and political optimism.”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution

“Urban revolution” identifies a long historical shift, from an agricultural to an industrial to an urban world, according to Lefebvre’s account, but it also captures a shift in the internal territorial form of the city, from the originary political city through the mercantile, then industrial, city to the present “critical phase,” the harbinger of a certain globalization of the urban.”
― Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution