Utopian Prospect of Henri Lefebvre

http://sac.sagepub.com/Space and Culture

http://sac.sagepub.com/content/16/3/349The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/1206331213487152 2013 16: 349 originally published online 6 June 2013Space and Culture

Nathaniel ColemanUtopian Prospect of Henri Lefebvre

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Space and CultureAdditional services and information for

http://sac.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://sac.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

http://sac.sagepub.com/content/16/3/349.refs.htmlCitations:

What is This?

- Jun 6, 2013OnlineFirst Version of Record

- Sep 25, 2013Version of Record >>

at Ondokuz Mayis Universitesi on April 24, 2014sac.sagepub.comDownloaded from at Ondokuz Mayis Universitesi on April 24, 2014sac.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://sac.sagepub.com/

http://sac.sagepub.com/content/16/3/349

http://www.sagepublications.com

http://sac.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

http://sac.sagepub.com/subscriptions

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

http://sac.sagepub.com/content/16/3/349.refs.html

http://sac.sagepub.com/content/16/3/349.full.pdf

http://sac.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/05/30/1206331213487152.full.pdf

http://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtml



Space and Culture16(3) 349 –363

© The Author(s) 2013Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1206331213487152

sac.sagepub.com

Article

Utopian Prospect of Henri Lefebvre

Nathaniel Coleman1

AbstractUtopia is the lynchpin of Lefebvre’s enterprise. Attempting to understand architecture and the city with Lefebvre but without Utopia impoverishes his theoretical construct. His ethics, his ideas on practice and the methods he elaborated, are fundamentally utopian. Although there might seem to be no place for Utopia in the present, Lefebvre reveals this as little more than a self-serving affirmation that “there is no alternative” to social and political detachment. Demanding the impossible may always end in failure but doing so is the first step toward other possibilities nevertheless. Ultimately, to think about Lefebvre is to think about Utopia, and thinking about utopia when thinking with Lefebvre is to make contact with what is most enduring about his project for the city and its inhabitants, and with what is most radical about it as well.

Keywordsarchitecture, Lefebvre, experimental utopia, possible-impossible, the city

The gulf between dream and reality is not harmful if only the dreamer seriously believes in his dream, if he observes life alternatively, compares his observation with his castles in the air and generally works towards the realization of his dream-construct conscientiously.

—Pisarev, cited in Bloch (1995, p. 10)

Utopia as the Prospect of the Possible

Arguably, venturing beyond the given is impossible without Utopia. Making-do with reality may be compensatory, but limits possibility, transforming apparent pragmatic agency into its capture by enclosing realism. Such enclosure may seem an achievement; demonstration of hav-ing overcome the impossible fancy of utopian longing. Although free of the disappointment anticipation assures, the dreariness of this species of adultness is evident everywhere, in increas-ingly unequal societies, marketization of education, transformation of citizens into consumers, and in the seemingly inevitable blight of the built environment. And yet, without Utopia, the future can have no shape (Jameson, 2004).

In common practice, architecture represents whereas sociology engages; a paradoxical condi-tion with deep historical roots that inverts reasonable expectation. Rather than providing settings

1Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Corresponding Author:Nathaniel Coleman, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, The Quadrangle, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK. Email:[email protected]

487152 16310.1177/1206331213487152Space and CultureColemanresearch-article2013

at Ondokuz Mayis Universitesi on April 24, 2014sac.sagepub.comDownloaded from


350 Space and Culture 16(3)

for life, mainstream 20th and 21st century modern architecture proposes environments that, with few exceptions, could only function as planned if the architect had also designed the inhabitants. Moreover, this condition chronicles the drama of architecture and Utopia throughout the 20th century, especially in the West. For example, the city of modern architecture articulated by the CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne) has rarely taken flesh, except in degen-erate form (Giedion, 1982).

By 1945, the so-called Utopian architecture of modernity, identified (mostly inaccurately) with Le Corbusier and (somewhat more accurately) with the CIAM was emerging as the official style of governments, institutions, and corporations (Coleman, 2007). Ultimately, the once rebel-lious European and American architecture of 20th century (utopian) promise was revealed as mostly incapable of touching emotion; a sad outcome for ideals largely built on the 19th century Christian utopian and utopian socialist reform visions of John Ruskin (1818-1900) and William Morris (1834-1896) (Coleman 2005, 2008, 2011). Despite Utopia’s bad name, a positive utopian prospect for architecture and the city persists, though primarily in the hands of nonarchitects, of which Henry Lefebvre (1901-1991) is perhaps the most compelling example. To appreciate the richness of Lefebvre’s dialectical and experimental utopianism, an understanding of his engage-ment with the past through Romanticism is crucial, in particular as the motive force in the devel-opment of his concept of Utopia.

Romanticism and Utopia

At first glance, Lefebvre might not appear to sit well within an English language discussion of utopian prospects for architecture and the city—he was French and his most important work, The Production of Space, written in 1974, was not translated into English until 1991. However, Lefebvre’s thinking is cognate with the transformative and critical visions of Ruskin and Morris. Indeed, his project was arguably built on their earlier insights (Coleman, 2005; Frampton, 2007). Akin to Ruskin and Morris, Lefebvre posits an unshakable bond between aesthetics and ethics (social and artistic reform), and an unbreakable link between the organization and appearance of the city and the kind of life giving rise to it, as much as the kind of life it ought to foster and sustain (Löwy & Sayre, 2001).

Associating Lefebvre with Ruskin and Morris illuminates the intersection between Romanticism—as a problematization of modernity advanced from a dislocated premodern position—and Utopia—as a way of thinking about realization of a Not Yet, or possible-impossible, achieved sometime in the future—built on actual reform efforts in the present; an assertion sup-ported by Löwy and Sayre (2001):

In reality, this bond with the Romantic tradition is one of the sources of the originality—indeed, the singularity—of Lefebvre’s thought in the historical panorama of French Marxism, marked from the outset by the insidious and permanent presence of positivism. Throughout Lefebvre’s entire intellectual itinerary, his reflection continued to be enriched by a confrontation with Romanticism. (p. 223)1

That Lefebvre looked backward to premodern, preindustrial, and thus precapitalist cities and their individual and social life only surprises if one has undue faith in progress. Though grounded in prior experiences, Lefebvre’s utopian and romantic project was neither nostalgic for some impossible return to origins nor futurological. His glance backward was less a rejection of moder-nity than an effort to give his project solid foundations in the achievements of the past. As Löwy and Sayre (2001) observe: “His goal is to transcend the limits of the old Romanticism and estab-lish the foundation for a new Romanticism, a revolutionary Romanticism oriented toward the future” (p. 223). Despite the common association of romanticism and utopianism with morbid attachment to conditions beyond physical or temporal reach, for Lefebvre, confluence of the two was generative. As such, he envisioned a postmodernism of responsive and just social settings



Coleman 351

arising out of modernity; a substantial and liberating alternative to both the trifling city of stylis-tic postmodernist architecture taking shape nearly everywhere since the 1970s, and the near para-lytic relativism associated with the end of master-narratives. The postmodern Lefebvre theorized could overcome the modern without being enervated by its decline, offering a way out of the cul-de-sac of the present by projecting beyond the constraints capitalism places on individual and social life, and the city.

Lefebvre’s holistic critical method effectively reveals the interrelationship of social and archi-tectural forms, including the economic and spatial conditions out of which they arise. A Lefebvrian consideration of a factory building offers a good way to show how the organization of labor it houses and the physical (or architectural) form it takes are intertwined: the emergence of modern European industrial production makes it impossible to reflect on factory buildings without also considering how their architecture images the organization of labor they shelter and facilitate. And if factories and the factory work ongoing within are inseparable, so is the character of the social and economic conditions that make factories and factory labor possible. Thus, the social and spatial arrangements of the factory, as a manifestation of a particular economic sys-tem, will affect the morphology of social and spatial relations on domestic and civic levels as well. Accordingly, the modern city, for all its wonders of bustle, transparency, and alienation, is nothing less than a framework analogizing capitalist production and consumption while concur-rently enabling both. Hence, substantive social reform necessitates correlate spatial reform: the two are inextricable. Only radical critique of the systems that organize society and space can reveal the matrix (substructure) underpinning the superstructure of evident reality (social and spatial), to make it reworkable. Until the substructure of existing conditions is transformed, renewal can do little more than “rattle the cage”: renewed social life requires a concurrent spatial form. Or, as Lefebvre (1991) put it:

In connection with the city and its extensions (outskirts, suburbs) one occasionally hears talk of a “pathology of space” of “ailing neighbourhoods” and so on. This kind of phraseology makes it easy for people who use it—architects, urbanists, planners—to suggest the idea that they are in effect “doctors of space.” This is to promote the spread of some particularly mystifying notions, and especially the idea that the modern city is a product not of the capitalist or neocapitalist system but rather of some putative “sickness” of society. Such formulations serve to divert attention from the criticism of space to replace critical analysis by schemata that are at once not very rational and very reactionary. Taken to their logical limits, these theses can deem society as a whole and “man” as a social being to be sickness of nature. . . . [A]philosophical view [that] leads necessarily to nihilism. (p. 99)

Conceptualization of the city as a disease, that makes society sick, which only radical urban surgery can cure, to also cure society, inevitably avoids the underlying (systemic) causes of the city and society’s morbidity. The bizarre habit of demolishing large swaths of cities in the name of progress, improvement, or economic development actually mirrors the need of capitalism for constant activity and mobility—even alienation—to function and survive (Harvey, 2000). Such capitalist binds led Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) to assert that (1988), “Only the beginnings of a dif-ferent society will make true architecture possible again” (p. 190). Inevitably, because capitalism so fully permeates architecture and urban planning both can offer only limited access to the “Not Yet” Utopia illuminates (Bloch, 1988). Despite the apparent intransigence of the present, Lefebvre attempted to bring reform within reach by way of a circular dialectical process—referring also to the past—for testing what might actually be accomplished.

Generate and Degenerate Utopias

Referencing the social and spatial forms of the premodern city as a means for critiquing the capi-talist city is not, as Harvey (2000) argued, an expression of Lefebvre’s “agonistic romanticism of




perpetually unfulfilled longing and desire” (p. 183). Although Harvey (2000) correctly identifies Lefebvre as “resolutely antagonistic to the traditional utopianisms of spatial form precisely because of their closed authoritarianism,” and highlights his “devastating critique of Cartesian conceptions, of the political absolutism that flows from absolute conceptions of space, of the oppressions visited upon the world by a rationalized, bureaucratized, technocratically, and capitalistically-defined spatiality” (p. 183), his estimation of the concreteness of Lefebvre’s pro-posals is less charitable, surpassed only by his suspicion of Lefebvre’s romanticism:

For him, the production of space must always remain an endlessly open possibility. The effect unfortunately, is to leave the actual spaces of any alternative frustratingly undefined. Lefebvre refuses specific recommendations. . . . He refuses to confront the underlying problem: that to materialize a space is to engage in closure (however temporary) which is an authoritarian act. . . . [T]he problem of closure (and the authority it presupposes) cannot be endlessly evaded. (Harvey, 2000, p. 183)

Lefebvre’s aversion to closure, to proposing concrete spatial forms housing renewed forms of everyday life, avoids entrapment within the dominant system, at least until a new consciousness takes shape in architects (framers of spatial closure) and planners (framers of spatial processes). More important, Lefebvre’s reluctance to prognosticate a specific form of spatial closure reason-ably resists prescribing any particular layout or appearance of the new city, which, as Harvey observes, will only ever be provisional anyway: imagining new spatial forms supporting renewed social forms is more difficult than imagining those new social forms in the first place. Because spatial possibility and its realization is so thoroughly determined by the limiting perspectives of the present—of capitalist realism—thinking beyond such constrictions, more so acting outside of them, risks neutralizing the very possibility of achievement before the fact (Fisher, 2009). In lieu of mental images of radically new spatial forms, Lefebvre (2008a) realized that only recollec-tions could direct future-orientated activities toward the recovery of everyday life:

In ancient rural communities . . . a certain human fulfilment was to be found—albeit mingled with disquiet and the seeds of all the agonies to come. That fulfilment has since disappeared. . . . The result for our rural areas has been a deprivation of everyday life on a vast scale. . . . Bit by bit everything which formerly contributed to the splendour of everyday life, its innocent, native grandeur, has been stripped from it and made to appear as something beyond its own self. Progress has been real, and in certain aspects immense, but it has been dearly paid. . . . Human life has progressed: material progress, “moral” progress—that is only part of the truth. The deprivation, the alienation of life is its other aspect. . . . Rural areas tell us above all of the dislocation of primitive community, of poor technical progress, of the decline of a way of life which is much less different from that of ancient times than is generally believed. Towns tell us of the almost total decomposition of community, the atomization of society into “private” individuals as a result of the activities and way of life of a bourgeoisie which still dares claim that it represents “the general interest.” (pp. 209, 210, 229, 233)

The tension between progress and its cost to everyday life Lefebvre identifies, illustrates the value of engaging the past: reflecting on it illuminates what has been lost and what might be recuperated in the future, albeit in an as yet unfixed and unfinished form. Thus, Harvey’s (2000) charge that Lefebvre’s “romanticism” is “agonistic;” a polemic that goes nowhere except toward “perpetually unfulfilled longing and desire,” seems to carry with it a lingering whiff of positivism (p. 183). Indeed, Lefebvre goes beyond just “some nostalgic hints that they got it right in Renaissance Tuscany” (Harvey, 2000, p. 183): “My favourite city is Florence which has ceased recently to be a mummified . . . museum city . . . [it] has found again an activity, thanks to the small modern industries of the periphery” (Lefebvre, 1996b, p. 208). Here, Lefebvre deftly com-municates a preoccupation with tradition and modernity alike and with cities (ancient or modern) that are vital, rather than preserved in aspic or overwhelmed by progress. Reproducing the past is



Coleman 353

impossible, referring to it, or building out of it, is inevitably interpretative; evincing translation rather than duplication (Coleman, 2005).

Ultimately, the specifics of renewed spatial forms must remain open, to be determined in each instance. Taken together, the potent admixture of reform minded idealism and optimism about the perfectibility of individual, state, and place suggested by Utopia and Romanticism assures a stubborn impracticality that holds out the promise of shattering the bonds of restrictive realism. Romanticism of this sort, as a kind of utopian anticipation, derives its force from the residue of unfinished alternatives blown forward from earlier times. Conceivably, Lefebvre, recognized in the past its uncompleted work, in the form of what Marx (Letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843, cited in Bloch, 1995) described as a “mystical consciousness which is still unclear to itself” (pp. 155-156). Analysis of this obscure, or as yet unintelligible, consciousness—percolating up from the past—might well reveal “that the world has long possessed the dream of a matter, of which it must only possess consciousness in order to possess it in reality” (Marx cited in Bloch, 1995, p. 156).

The dream of which Marx writes correlates with Bloch’s conception of Concrete Utopia, manifesting the anticipatory function of hope in directing thought and action toward achieving the Real-Possible (as opposed to what he called the fruitless Empty-Possible of Abstract-Utopias, which are compensatory rather than anticipatory; Levitas, 1997). However, anticipation of achievable alternatives begins with clarifying the “mystical consciousness” of the past persisting into the present precisely because it remains as yet unfulfilled. Once (re)claimed, this conscious-ness becomes the first concrete step toward making real what has been anticipated. Although Bloch’s conception of the Real-Possible is akin to Lefebvre’s Possible-Impossible, Lefebvre’s inclusion of “impossible” is closer to the real situation in which attempts to exceed the limits of the given are rejected as unachievable, whether or not they actually are. In any event, Lefebvre’s Possible-Impossible can only touch consciousness and thus become potentially achievable by way of “the carrying-through of the thoughts of the past,” which presumes a fluid, dialectical process, rather than some fixed blueprint-like schema (Marx cited in Bloch, 1995, p. 156).

Engagement with earlier periods suggests how alternatives might be imagined even in unpromising times. However, because wholesale return to the past “would be both impossible and inconceivable,” attempting to do so cannot resolve the “crisis of modernity” (Lefebvre, 1995, p. 279). Acknowledging the impossibility of return lessens the chances of being entrapped by enervating nostalgia, even if “[t]owns have always been collective works of art,” but new towns “are born of ugliness and boredom” (Lefebvre, 1995, p. 279). By establishing a dialectical rela-tionship between superior earlier towns and inferior new ones, Lefebvre posits how traditional arrangements can help us think beyond the limits of the present:

Can the people who populate them [new towns], who live in them, who shape them according to their needs, also create them, or will that remain the prerogative of the small group which plans, builds and organizes them? Up until now the answer has been no, and this failure is the crucial problem. (Lefebvre, 1995, p. 279)

Accordingly, only if the people who live in a town are involved in its creation could its concep-tion and construction be liberated from the small group of specialists: planners, architects, and bureaucrats, primarily responsible for the ugly and boring conditions of the modern built envi-ronment. The dearth of beauty Lefebvre lamented was less identified with aesthetic appreciation or sensual delight than with a classical conception of beauty as a sense of wholeness:

Is this not the problem of harmony again, but renewed in another context, the practical context of full and active participation in everyday life, and with a different meaning to the one it has in relation to art and aesthetics taken in isolation? (Lefebvre, 1995, p. 279; see also p. 278)




For Lefebvre, the built environment is a problem of social comprehensiveness, akin to ideas of wholeness drawn as much from Plato as from Renaissance architectural theory (Coleman, 2005).

Building on a foundation of radical romanticism, Lefebvre developed a dialectical and experi-mental utopianism that expands the horizon of possibilities. As such, his Utopian practice sug-gests how architects and planners could recuperate an aptitude for establishing settings where everyday life can flourish. Largely because the failures of 1968 are looked on as Utopia’s last stand, contemporary urban and architectural practices have not really deepened since Lefebvre wrote on cities. Hopes for alternatives have progressively ebbed since then, increasingly replaced by flows of capitalist realism.

Intersection between Utopia and romanticism made Lefebvre’s critique of modernity possi-ble, including imagining a reconstituted future of social and spatial unity, sheltering a revalued everyday life of conviviality. Envisaging the spatiotemporal character of a possible impossible entailed recollecting a condition that could be projected into the future as a not-yet; a once may have been that could be again. Because capitalist spatiality can only be superseded by the possi-ble impossible of its “other,” of the sort Utopias articulate, it matters little if memories of alterna-tive possibilities originate in dreams or daydreams of the not-yet, or in fictional accounts of it.

There Is No Alternative? Or, Lefebvre and Utopia

Beginning with a conviction that everyday life has been progressively colonized by the destruc-tive forces of positivism—planning, development, management—and that this has deformed the quotidian by attempting to subsume it (visible in the increasing disunity and alienation of com-munity life), Lefebvre proposed an alternative unitary theory of the everyday and its possibilities. Although critical of the excesses of 19th century Romanticism, he valued its critique of Bourgeoisie life; its aptitude for acting against the solvent of modernity through clarifying dis-tanciation (set within an idealized, unified, precapitalist past). By unpicking this crucial aspect of Romanticism from its potentially enervating nostalgia, Lefebvre projected a forward-looking Revolutionary Romanticism. The tension this suggests parallels his critical project for engaging Marx to make developments beyond Marxism. In his critique of capitalism, Lefebvre, like Marx, inevitably began with a theory of society as (re)unified, that is, disalientated. In this sense, capi-talism and alienation are analogous, just as inequality and dissolution of everyday life are symp-tomatic of both. Overcoming alienation to reunify everyday life might reasonably enough begin by referencing conditions predating capitalism, such as the premodern provides (Löwy & Sayre, 2001; Shields, 1999). Precisely because the conditions of the present are so unpromising, Utopia endures as a forceful method for recuperating life’s fullness that Lefebvre observed in premodern conditions.2

Although Lefebvre suggested a way beyond the limitations of Marx, the cul-de-sac theorized by Italian architectural historian and theorist Manfredo Tafuri (1935-1994), and the generalized capitulation to the prevailing spatial practices and processes of neoliberalism, his stubborn illu-mination of the limitations of a future thought in terms of revolution only, or progress alone, makes it difficult for architects, planners, and urban designers to translate his discoveries into their actual practices. Understandably so, because the increasing dominance of spectacle in the built environment has, during the past several decades, severely curtailed terrains of conscious-ness beyond its hegemonic domain. Loss of the “prodigious diversity” of “living” that thrived before the spread of modernity troubled Lefebvre (1987):

Today we see a worldwide tendency to uniformity. . . . For example, in the domain of architecture, a variety of local, regional, and national architectural styles has given way to “architectural urbanism,” a universalizing system of structures and functions in supposedly rational geometric forms. (pp. 7, 8)



Coleman 355

Inevitably, the nonplaces Lefebvre warned against have come to dominate as a condition of “supermodernity” (Augé, 1995).

Foremost among the nonplaces of “supermodernity” and universalizing uniformity is the shopping mall, which is the predominant structure and function of our times. So much so that its logic threatens to erase all alternatives, influencing settings of rationalized consumption from hospital to airport and from school to library, and so on. The degree to which the shopping mall has so readily been naturalized as the key setting of daily life suggests that much as the everyday could be a site of resistance to universalizing sameness, its acquiescent tendency is worthy of critique (a double possibility that intrigued Lefebvre).

As Lefebvre (1987) observes, the everyday “constitutes the platform upon which the bureau-cratic society of controlled consumerism is erected” (p. 9). Even so, collusion of the everyday in its own domination by abstract and impersonal forces paradoxically suggests just how those very forces might be overcome in a utopian moment revealing alternatives. According to Lefebvre (1987), the everyday harbors such possibility because it “is . . . the most universal and most unique condition, the most social and the most individuated, the most obvious and the most hid-den,” as such, it is also “a sole surviving common sense referent and point of reference” (p. 9). In these ways, the everyday holds promise for an in-depth understanding of the present, but is also a source for its radical reinvention.

The concept of everydayness does not therefore designate a system, but rather a denominator common to existing systems. . . . Banality? Why should the study of the banal itself be banal? Are not the surreal, the extraordinary, the surprising, even the magical, also part of the real? Why wouldn’t the concept of everydayness reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary? (Lefebvre, 1987, p. 9)

The “extraordinary” revealed in the ordinariness of the everyday is its most resistant, radical moment, out of which real transformation can emerge. But getting at promising moments of potential demands concentrated effort: “Modernity and everydayness constitute a deep structure that a critical analysis can work to uncover” (Lefebvre, 1987, p. 11). Excavating the web of oscil-lating super and substructure formed by Modernity and the everyday promises to illuminate those “certain conditions” required for “transforming the everyday” (Lefebvre, 1987, p. 9). But, “to change life, society, space, architecture, even the city must change” (Lefebvre, 1987, p. 9).

However, the dominant shift toward so-called reality has made it more difficult to imagine change in general, which is why Utopia persists as a crucial moment of possibility; as valuable for getting at the radical potential of the Everyday as for sustaining the imaginary of a possible impossible. Thus, attempting to comprehend the prospects of architecture and the city with Lefebvre without embracing his utopianism can succeed only in impoverishing his enterprise. Utopia, with its aptitude for exceeding practices that foreclose on possibility, is the lynchpin of his project, the means by which he could imagine alternatives. Lefebvre’s ethics—his ideas on practice and methods for achieving the apparently unthinkable—is fundamentally utopian: not only did he write about Utopia, his writing is arguably utopian as well. By reintroducing the necessary link between imagining possibilities and productive thought, Lefebvre (2009a) revealed theory as dependent on Utopia:

Today more than ever there is no theory without utopia. Otherwise a person is content to record what he sees before his eyes; he doesn’t go too far—he keeps his eyes fixed on so called reality: he is a realist . . . but he doesn’t think! There is no theory that neither explores a possibility nor tries to discover an orientation. (p. 178)

Demanding the impossible may inevitably end in disappointment, but doing so takes the first steps toward other possibilities. Moreover, according to Lefebvre, imagining possibilities is a fundamentally theoretical orientation, and thus unthinkable without Utopia. But what, then, is




theory without Utopia, such as that prevails today? Perhaps it is not theory at all, but rather a funhouse mirror reflecting what already is, though distorted and exaggerated.

Lefebvre’s Other Vision of Utopia

Beyond even the queasiness his utopianism evokes, Lefebvre’s stalwart Marxism has conceiv-ably exacerbated his limited influence on the actual design of cities. His attempt to extend Marx’s critical method through enrichment, to make it more tolerant of dreams and imagination, brings Marxism perilously close to Utopia. Reconciling Utopia and Marxism would undoubtedly trou-ble Capitalists and Marxists alike (Lefebvre, 1968). Yet Lefebvre returns the question again and again to the source of disappointment and failure in the modern city, arguing that it lies with neither Utopia nor incompetence but with foreclosure on alternatives for augmented social and physical realities. Lefebvre sought some effective means for critiquing globalized capitalism, precisely because its destructive influence on the character of social life, and the built environ-ment far outstrips the authority any (supposedly) autonomous architect or urban designer could ever have. His response was to project a renewed social life and settings for modernized 20th century cities through a Marxist frame enhanced by Utopia.

Lefebvre’s model of utopian-Marxism proffered positive engagement with the present rather than uncompromising revolutionary rejection of it as the way to transform society. Indeed, his optimism emphasized the ever-present potential for recapturing the meaning and value of every-day life in its depth from the seductive nothingness of pervasive spectacle. He imagined some crack could always be found, even in an apparently closed system. Capitalizing on such cracks, however, demands utopian vision, inasmuch as reimagining or revaluing social life, and the city as its setting, can never be fully divested of a utopian dimension: Utopia remains a prerequisite for creating something anew.

Of course, as soon as one eschews the overpowering philosophy of positivism (which is nothing more than the absences of thought), it becomes rather difficult to distinguish between the possible and the impossible. Nevertheless, there is today, especially in the domain that concerns us, no theory without utopia. The architects, like the urban planners, know this perfectly well. (Lefebvre, 2009a, pp. 178-179)

For Lefebvre, utopian comprehensiveness counteracts the disaggregation of the modern city, in particular the range of separations—as specializations—Capitalism demands: art is isolated from life, theory from practice, and work from play. During the past century or more, all aspects of social and cultural life have become increasingly atomized. The most significant separation for-mulated by capitalism is, of course, division of labor, which leads to all the others, having also a profound influence on the organization of the modern city, not least in terms of zoning. On the other hand, Utopia renders pictures of a whole, including social life imagined as reunified, which is the possible that positivism attempts to paint as impossible.

To achieve its aims, capitalism must be ruthlessly pragmatic, resulting in dramatically unequal societies and spatial practices that uncannily image this. In its own way, applied Marxism is equally pragmatic, even if only apparently so. It presupposes centralization as a means for orga-nizing production, which inevitably tends toward bureaucracy and the production of party func-tionaries who operate unimaginatively in the management of society (producing also a concomitant spatiality). As an alternative to both, Utopia is a searching criticism of existing conditions at the moment of critique. Because reality is never complete, reinvention of an inte-grated whole necessarily remains constant. But for Lefebvre (1968), capitalism is the solvent of integrated social life, which is why he began with Marx, but did not end there:



Coleman 357

Marxian thought alone is not sufficient, but it is indispensable for understanding the present-day world. In our view, it is the starting point for any such understanding, though its basic concepts have to be elaborated, refined, and complemented by other concepts where necessary. It is part of the modern world, an original, fruitful, and irreplaceable element in our present-day situation, with particular relevance to one specialized science—sociology. (p. 188)

The blind eye Marxism turns toward cities was problematic for Lefebvre, an anti-urban attitude that neglects the city as a crucial setting of human desire. Equally, as conventionally practiced, Marxism shies away from wonder, prompting Lefebvre (1968) to theorize a sociology inspired by Marx but unafraid to “address itself to the relations between the following concepts, which are still insufficiently distinguished: ideology and knowledge, Utopia and anticipation of the future, poetry and myth” (pp. 87-88).

Reform organized according to the logic of an applied Utopia could resist the closure that transforms most utopian experiments from hope to despair. Lefebvre’s utopian practice was neither chiliastic nor so totalizing as to be trounced by time and necessity, enabling it to envi-sion superior alternatives achievable step by step without banishing consideration of conse-quences along the way. Incremental moves bring alternatives slightly closer, collapsing the divide “between the possible and the impossible,” making transformation appear convinc-ingly achievable. When awareness of this potential reaches consciousness, even gently, indi-viduals may begin to desire reform and realize it together, by way of Utopia. Augmented existence is recoverable because traces of its brighter moments remain in memory, as sugges-tions for reconstituting social life now. Recollecting alternatives in the remnants of the pre-capitalist city shows individuals that they still possess the ability to access a more authentic, directly lived, everyday life (that the instability of the modern capitalist city conceals and upends).

All or Nothing?

Like the 19th century utopian socialists before him, the alternative Lefebvre imagined could only take shape through practice, its value never lay in its elegance as an exclusively theoretical exer-cise. He embraced Utopia as a way to imagine the real possibility of what seems impossible. Equally, his conceptualization of a vital urban milieu still discloses the potential of small suc-cesses, hard won incrementally through direct action. Lefebvre was not so impatient as to imag-ine that utopian revolutionary efforts must leap into the real all at once to become experimental revolutionary efforts that have apparently already completed the overhaul of existing reality. For him, the usefulness of utopian prospects lies elsewhere. By relinquishing the determinist mindset of positivism, Lefebvre cleared a space for thought, the reflective propensity of which assures that action is not an end in itself.

Research and testing, as a dialectic process, was for Lefebvre (1995), the key to a utopianism that would be constitutive rather than pathological, by opening up pathways “between the pos-sible and the impossible” (p. 357). Organizing consideration of a desirable Not Yet dialectically promised a means for “superseding” both “classicism and romanticism;” however, because of its defamiliarizing capacities, aspects of romanticism should be maintained (Lefebvre, 1995):

Only a kind of reasoned but dialectical use of utopianism will permit us to illuminate the present in the name of the future . . . to criticize bourgeois or socialist everyday life. . . . Only this dialectical use of utopianism as a method will allow us to programme our thought and our lives, and to retain a critical consciousness . . . The possible has ceased to be abstract. . . . [I]t is no longer a question of one leap into the distant future over the head of the present and the near future, but of exploring the possible using the present as a starting point. (p. 357)




For Lefebvre, “dialectical utopianism” opens up future possibilities by way of critical engage-ment with the present by giving concrete form to the possible long before its realization, at least within consciousness. Developing ideas of the future out of a critique of what is, and exploring these incrementally, beginning with conditions as given, limits the danger of the possible-impossible deforming into an absolutist abstraction of the utopian vision it harbors, a positive development only conceivable because,

The possible and the utopian method can no longer be synonymous with foresight, prophecy, adventurism or the vague consciousness of the future. We can no longer see utopianism as an abstract principle like hope, projection, willpower or goodwill, “prescience,” ‘values,” or axiology. (Lefebvre, 1995, p. 357)

Liberated from what Lefebvre saw as outmoded and restrictive conceptualizations of its capaci-ties, a dialectical concrete utopianism based in the everyday and critically engaged with it, could be put to work in sorting out the problems of new towns (Lefebvre, 1995, p. 357). As the stage on which we play out our lives, the built environment is inevitably the most compelling ground for testing the limits and possibilities of dialectical utopianism in formulating achievable alternatives.

Experimental and Theoretical Utopias

In its “old fashioned sense,” Utopia is problematic for Lefebvre because of its tendency toward absolutism or deception at the scale of individual and society alike. To avoid this, Lefebvre (1996a) proposed to reform Utopia by way of “transduction”; an intellectual and practical opera-tion for elaborating on and constructing possible objects “from information related to reality and a problematic posed by this reality”; its operations assume “an incessant feedback between the conceptual framework used” to identify problems and invent alternatives and “empirical obser-vations” of reality as a bulwark against dissociative abstraction (p. 141). The feedback loop “transduction” brings to utopian thinking “introduces rigour in invention and knowledge in uto-pia,” and by so doing releases its potential as the coefficient of radical transformation (Lefebvre, 1996a, p. 141): “Transduction elaborates and constructs a theoretical object. . . . Its theory (meth-odology), gives shape to certain spontaneous operations of the planner, the architect, the sociolo-gist, the politician and the philosopher” (Lefebvre, 1996a, p. 151).

By introducing testing, elaboration, and correction of its propositions, “transduction” makes a truly experimental Utopia possible, suggesting a method for deriving alternatives from the pres-ent that surpass it nonetheless. As distinguished from varieties of positivist Utopia, experimental utopianism can overcome narrow specialization. In fact, for Lefebvre (1996a), only the most specialized activities could be (negatively) free of Utopia. In his view, the insipid thought inher-ent to such specialization diminishes social life, assuring the dreary results of fragmented opera-tions on the city that surround us:

Who is not a utopian today? Only narrowly specialized practitioners working to order without the slightest critical examination of stipulated norms and constraints, only these not very interesting people escape utopianism. All are utopians, including those futurists and planners who project Paris in the year 2,000 and those engineers who made Brasilia! But there are several utopianisms. Would not the worst be that utopianism which does not utter its name, covers itself with positivism and on this basis imposes the harshest constraints and the most derisory absence of technicity? (p. 151)

Paradoxically, the crypto-utopianism of planning and futurology—self-justified by positivism—are, because of their basis in a “closed and dogmatic system of significations,” the worst forms of Utopia, which also associates them with the “not very interesting” noncritical specialists inhib-ited by “stipulated norms,” characterized by a “derisory absence of technicity”; the apparent inability to comprehend or employ the methods of “transduction” (Lefebvre, 1996a, pp. 151, 152).



Coleman 359

Considering questions such as “what makes somewhere a place where it is good to live?” open up underexplored aspects of architectural and urban projection by directing research—before construction—toward those qualities that affect the life of individuals and communities where they live. In the absence of Utopia, such questions threaten to elude the practical people who commission, design, and construct buildings and cities. “Utopia controlled by dialectical rea-son,” such as research promises, “serves as a safeguard against supposedly scientific fictions and grandiose visions gone astray” (Lefebvre, 1996a, p. 156). If “tempered by very concrete analy-ses,” Utopia can resist becoming abstract, assuring that the alternatives it proposes are responsive to the material conditions of the everyday (Lefebvre, 1996a):

Utopia is to be considered experimentally by studying its implications and consequences on the ground. These can surprise. What are and would be the most successful places? How can they be discovered? According to which criteria? What are the times and rhythms of daily life which are inscribed and prescribed in these “successful” spaces favourable to happiness? That is interesting. (p. 151)

The underexplored theoretical and experimental dimension of utopias holds out the potential for distinguishing alternative spatial practices. Utopia’s propensity for research emphasizes its cen-trality for theorizing political and social alternatives. In so doing, it opens up prospects onto “profound economic and socio-political modifications,” as well as spatial ones (Lefebvre, 2009a, p.178). At the very least, revealing all projects (utopian or otherwise) as beyond complete real-ization might sharpen awareness that every plan is provisional.

Although it might seem self-evident that “studying its implications and consequences on the ground” could greatly improve any project, in common practice this rarely occurs, not least because the surprises experimentation might reveal would threaten to destabilize professional confidence in the projects advanced. As a compensation, architects tend to, as Lefebvre (1996a) observed, elaborate their

dogmatized . . . ensemble of significations . . . not from the significations perceived and lived by those who inhabit, but from their interpretation of inhabiting. It is graphic and visual, tending towards metalanguage. . . . [T]heir system tends to close itself off, impose itself and elude all criticism. (p. 152)

Because architects depend on an abstract system of symbols that is ocularcentric, appearance rather than experience is privileged. Consequently, questions regarding “the most successful places” and “the times and rhythms of daily life . . . inscribed and prescribed in . . . ‘successful’ spaces favourable to happiness” inevitably escape most architects because they are fundamen-tally bodily, rather than visual (Lefebvre, 1996a, p. 151). Even when such questions are of inter-est, they are usually subsumed within a “graphic and visual” understanding and representation of reality. However, architectural practices benefitting from the methods of “transduction”—“analysis of the real . . . which is never exhaustive or without residue”—could, like Utopia, become simultaneously more open and grounded; sensitive to the specific quotidian habits a given project will shelter (Lefebvre, 1996a, p. 152).

Utopia’s radical potential thus resides in its capacity for bringing achievement of the possible-impossible closer. Not the prognosticating Utopia of futurists and planners but rather of “the distant possible” (Lefebvre, 2003a, p. 86). In its pathological formation, “utopia is an abstract ideal,” a deception “in which fiction and reality are thoroughly mixed,” and “signs” rather than “things” dominate. Utopia in this sense is at best “half real and half imaginary,” offering little in the way of opening up horizons of the possible (Lefebvre, 2003b, pp. 132-133).

For Lefebvre, there are two sorts of Utopia. In one, as Utopia becomes more abstract it loses its edge; it “attaches itself to . . . distant and unknown or misunderstood realities.” Concrete Utopia, on the other hand, “attaches itself . . . to real and daily life” and springs from “the absences and lacunae which cruelly puncture surrounding reality” (Lefebvre, 1996a, p. 153). Whereas concrete Utopia is grounded, in abstract Utopia “[t]he gaze turns away, leaves the




horizon, loses itself in the clouds, elsewhere” (Lefebvre, 1996a, p. 153). Thought of in this way, “Utopia, i.e., a theory of the distantly possible,” is, according to Lefebvre,

not an “eschatology,” a theory that the process of becoming might be brought to an end. It is a very concrete and positive idea of a history which has at last been oriented, directed and mastered by knowledge and willpower. (Lefebvre, 2008b, p. 73)

Absences and lacunae may indicate something missing, or a gap, but are in no way the equivalent of Eschatological finality. Rather, ideas of the possible can come forward from what is when what is missing is illuminated by an open process with no certain conclusion.

For Lefebvre (2003c), the “possible-impossible” and “Utopia” (or “u-topia,” as opposed to “Utopia”) are basically interchangeable, at least when Utopia is positive: “Exploration of the possible-impossible has another name: U-topia” (p. 186). More importantly, Lefebvre (2003c) argued that—when constitutive—Utopia “alone enables us to think and act.” In fact, “now more than ever there is no thought without u-topia, in other words, without an exploration of the pos-sible and the impossible, i.e. the possible-impossible conceived dialectically” (p. 184). When Utopia (in its affirmative sense) and the possible-impossible are understood as analogous, it becomes much less difficult to comprehend Lefebvre’s belief that Utopia could arise out of the everyday:

In a more profoundly dialectical way, the possible-impossible [utopia] arises and shows itself in the heart of the possible [the everyday]. And conversely, of course. There is no communication that does not include in its possibility the project of the impossible: to say everything. There is no love that does not presuppose absolute love. No knowledge that does not posit absolute knowledge, the inconceivable, unlimited and finite. (Lefebvre, 2003c, p. 186)

Alternatives can arise out of the everyday precisely because it is made out of the habitual—individually and collectively well-known (as much as well-worn)—ordinary activities of indi-viduals and communities. Equally significant is the degree to which the everyday is, as Gardiner (2004) has observed, “elusory” and as such “evinces a not insignificant degree of resistance” to the “panoptic sweep of bureaucratic surveillance, indexing and control,” which often does not even register the “local knowledges and practices of the quotidian, mundane, habitual that char-acterize the greater reality of daily life” (p. 229). However, for a positive Utopia drawn from the everyday to take shape, “one must,” according to Lefebvre (2009b), “want the impossible to realize the possible” (p. 288). He described this as “Urgent Utopia,” “a style of thinking turned toward the possible in all areas” (Lefebvre, 2009b, p. 288).

As it turns out, city modernization is usually a product of impulse rather than thought, which deprives projects—utopian or otherwise—of the distance necessary for measured reflection on the potential consequences of making any plan operational. Thus, realization usually takes shape with little regard for those most affected by it, even as the idealizations that motivate projects are presented as rational thought—as inevitable—but surely not utopian. Counteracting the dangers of realization requires opening up a gap between the projection of ideal models (any project) and the processes that make them real. When the space of reflection is relinquished, results inevitably reveal the footprints of absolutism. Only reflection can redeem the practices that characterize most redevelopment from being positivism masquerading as Utopia.

The Utopian Prospect of Lefebvre

Recuperation of social life as outlined in the writing of Lefebvre is as utopian in form as it is in content. In this way, he not only wrote about a utopian condition that could be redrawn from



Coleman 361

cracks in the present but also the imaginative reconstitution of society he elaborated on was in the form of a Utopia. Thus, to think with Lefebvre is also to think with and about Utopia. And to think about Utopia when thinking with Lefebvre is to make contact with what is arguably most radical about his project of possibility for the city and its inhabitants.

It is not so much that Lefebvre writes about Utopia, as a utopian prospect informs his writing on everyday life and the city and our right to it. Careful consideration of the passages in which Lefebvre specifically identifies Utopia supports this claim. In this sense, Lefebvre’s method is utopian, even when he does not explicitly identify his objective as such, an observation Lefebvre (1984) arguably would have accepted:

Utopist!And why not? For me this term has no pejorative connotations. Since I do not ratify compulsion,

norms, rules and regulations; since I put all the emphasis on adaptation; since I refute “reality,” and since for me what is possible is already partly real, I am indeed a utopian; you will observe that I do not say utopist; but utopian, yes, a partisan of possibilities. (p. 192)

Though speaking its name can be quite uncomfortable, especially for present day architects, planners, and urban designers (among many others), Utopia endures as the tacit coefficient of alternative prospects. Moreover, Lefebvre’s vision is as cognate with More’s Utopia (2003), Ruskin’s Nature of Gothic (1854), and Morris’s News from Nowhere (2007), as it is with Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope (1995; see also Coleman, 2005; Löwy & Sayre, 2001).3

Although it might well seem as though there is no place (or space) for Utopia in the present, Lefebvre challenges this supposed endpoint as little more than a self-serving mainstream declara-tion that “there is no alternative.”4 Whatever impulse there may be to relegate Lefebvre to his-tory, worth remembering is that he accurately documented the conditions that continue to affect the social life and form of present day cities, especially the alienation that post–World War II physical settings concretize, which each of us, as inhabitants of the modern city, enacts. Equally, his work continues to challenge the full range of spatial practices that precondition the design of cities—mostly for the worse—in the present. Hence, Lefebvre’s writing remains to be fully mined for insights into more promising other possibilities, especially with regard to overcoming the emotional emptiness that now pervades spectacular tourist and commercial cities, wherever they are, and no matter how entertaining they may be.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. Shields (1999) also considers Lefebvre’s romanticism (p. 73).2. For more on Utopia as method, see Coleman (2005, 2011), Moylan and Baccolini (2007), Sargent

(2006), Levitas (2000), and Harvey (2000).3. Kellner (1997) notes, “Bloch’s starting point is always the everyday life and existential situation of the

individual, and thus his approach is similar to that of Henri Lefebvre . . .” (n. 4, p. 95).4. As used here, “There is no alternative,” refers to the Thatcherite belief that free-market capitalism is

the only option (The Phrase Finder. Retrieved from http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/376000.html).


http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/376000.html



References

Augé, M. (1995). Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity (J. Howe, Trans.). London, England: Verso. (Original work published 1992)

Bloch, E. (1988). Building in empty spaces. In The Utopian function of art and literature: Selected essays (J. Zipes & F. Mecklenburg Trans.). Cambridge: MIT Press. (Original work published 1959)

Bloch, E. (1995). Cited in The principle of hope, Vol. I (N. Plaice, S. Plaice, & P. Knight, Trans.). Cambridge: MIT Press. (Original work published 1959)

Coleman, N. (2005). Utopias and architecture. Abingdon, Oxon, England: Routledge.Coleman, N. (2007). Building dystopia. Rivista MORUS—Utopia e Renascimento, 4, 181-192.Coleman, N. (2008). Elusive interpretations. Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, International Journal of Architectural

Theory, 12(2). Retrieved from http://www.tu-cottbus.de/theoriederarchitektur/Wolke/wolke_neu/inhalt/en/issue/issues/207/Coleman/coleman.php

Coleman, N. (Ed.). (2011). Imagining and making the world: Reconsidering architecture and Utopia. Oxford, England: Peter Lang.

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Hants, England: Zero Books.Frampton, K. (2007). Modern architecture: A critical history (4th ed.). London, England: Thames &

Hudson.Gardiner, M. E. (2004). Everyday utopianism, Lefebvre and his critics. Cultural Studies, 18, 228-254.Giedion, S. (1982). Space, time and architecture. The growth of A new tradition (5th ed.). Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1948)Harvey, D. (2000). Spaces of hope. Berkeley: University of California Press.Jameson, F. (2004). The politics of utopia. New Left Review, 25, 35-54.Kellner, D. (1997). Ernst Bloch, Utopia, and ideology critique. In J. O. Daniel & T. Moylan (Eds.), Not yet,

reconsidering Ernst Bloch (pp. 80-95). London, England: Verso.Lefebvre, H. (1968). The sociology of Marx (N. Guterman, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage Books.

(Original work published 1966)Lefebvre, H. (1984). Everyday life in the modern world (S. Rabinovitch, Trans.). New Brunswick, NJ:

Transaction. (Original work published 1968)Lefebvre, H. (1987). The everyday and everydayness (C. Levich, Trans.). Yale French Studies, 73, 7-11.Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Oxford, England: Wiley-

Blackwell. (Original work published 1974)Lefebvre, H. (1995). Introduction to modernity (J. Moore Trans.). London, England: Verso. (Original work

published 1962)Lefebvre, H. (1996a). The right to the city. In Writings on cities (E. Kofman & E. Lebas, Trans., pp. 63-181).

Oxford, England: Blackwell. (Original work published 1968)Lefebvre, H. (1996b). No salvation away from the centre? In Writings on cities (E. Kofman & E. Lebas,

Trans., pp. 205-208). Oxford, England: Blackwell. (Original work published 1968)Lefebvre, H. (2003a). Elucidations. In S. Eldon, E. Lebas, & E. Kofman (Eds.), Henri Lefebvre, key writings

(I. Forster, Trans., pp. 84-87). New York, NY: Continuum. (Original work published 1961)Lefebvre, H. (2003b). Preface to the study of the habitat of the “Pavillon.”In S. Eldon, E. Lebas, & E. Kofman

(Eds.), Henri Lefebvre, key writings (I. Forster, Trans., pp. 121-135). New York, NY: Continuum. (Original work published 1966)

Lefebvre, H. (2003c). Time and history. In S. Eldon, E. Lebas, & E. Kofman (Eds.), Henri Lefebvre, key writings (I. Forster, Trans., pp. 177-187). New York, NY: Continuum, 2003. (Original work pub-lished 1970)

Lefebvre, H. (2008a). Critique of everyday life: Volume 1 (J. Moore Trans.). London, England: Verso. (Original work published 1947)

Lefebvre, H. (2008b). Critique of everyday life: Volume II. Foundations for a sociology of the everyday (J. Moore, Trans.). London, England: Verso. (Original work published 1961)

Lefebvre, H. (2009a). Reflections on the politics of space. In N. Brenner & S. Elden (Eds.), State, space, world: Selected essays (N. Brenner & S. Elden, Trans., pp. 168-182). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1970)


http://www.tu-cottbus.de/theoriederarchitektur/Wolke/wolke_neu/inhalt/en/issue/issues/207/Coleman/coleman.php


Coleman 363

Lefebvre, H. (2009b). The worldwide experience. In N. Brenner & S. Elden (Eds.), State, space, world: Selected essays (E. Lebas, G. Moore, N. Brenner, & S. Elden, Trans., pp. 274-289). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1978)

Levitas, R. (1997). Educated hope: Ernst Bloch on abstract and concrete Utopia. In J. O. Daniel & T. Moylan (Eds.), Not yet, reconsidering Ernst Bloch (pp. 65-79). London, England: Verso.

Levitas, R. (2000). For Utopia: The (limits of the) utopian function in late capitalist society. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 3(2/3), 25-43.

Löwy, M., & Sayre, R. (2001). Romanticism against the aide of modernity (C. Porter, Trans). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (Original work published 1992)

More, T. (2003). Utopia (P. Turner Trans.). London, England: Penguin. (Original work published 1516)Morris, W. (2007). News from nowhere (Project Gutenberg eBook). Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.

org/files/3261/3261-h/3261-h.htm (Original work published 1892)Moylan, T., & Baccolini, R. (Eds.). (2007). Utopia method vision: The use value of social dreaming. Oxford,

England: Peter Lang.Ruskin, J. (1854). On the nature of gothic architecture. London, England: Smith Elder.Sargent, L. T. (2006). In defense of utopia. Diogenes, 53(1), 11-17.Shields, R. (1999). Lefebvre, love and struggle: Spatial dialectics. Oxford, England: Routledge.

Author Biography

Nathaniel Coleman is currently a senior lecturer in architecture at Newcastle University. He first studied architecture at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in NYC. He holds an architecture degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, a master’s degree in urban design from the City College of New York, and a PhD in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. A New York State licensed architect, he practiced architecture in New York and Rome before turning to academia. A recipient of Graham Foundation and British Academy grants, his primary research interest is the problematic of Utopia and architecture. He is the editor of Imagining and Making the World: Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia (2011) and author of Utopias and Architecture (2005). He has also contributed chapters to edited books and articles to numerous journals; he is currently working on Lefebvre for Architects, as part of the “Thinkers for Architects” book series.


http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3261/3261-h/3261-h.htm


Documents

Utopian Prospect of Henri Lefebvre