Henri Lefebvre – "Notes on the New Town" – summary and review – part 3

Henri Lefebvre- Notes on the New Town - summary

part 1 - 2 - 3

In the third and last part of his "Notes on the New Town" Henri Lefebvre relates to the paradox imbedded, in his view, in the new industrialized city. On the one hand, as was discussed in the previous section, the new town functions under analytic bourgeois logic which separates everything it can and reduces all objects to their function. On the opposite side for Lefebvre, stands the "tendency tantalization and integration… prevents us from seeing how disjointed everything is becoming". On the one hand we have urban life which is turning more and more fragmented, while on the other hand we have a sense that everything is more centralized, dominated and oppressed.  As Lefebvre puts it: "what is surprising here is that everything is disjointed, and yet all these separate people are governed by a strict hierarchy".   

When people move into the new town they encounter the imperative of adapting to their new surroundings. For Lefebvre "to adapt means being forced into a pre-existing context which has been build without them in mind" and this is because, as mentioned in the previous part of the summary, the links between entities (such as roads) become more important than the entities themselves (and thus highways, filled with moving people, are in fact human wastelands).

In a notion reminiscent of Georg Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life" the urban hierarchy functions for Lefebvre through pride. When everything is the same, when everyone is like everyone else and everyone is at the same time someone and no-one "it becomes enormously important to boost one's pride and prestige no matter how petty the means. Pride is poisoning life".

The way the new town functions on the subject is for Lefebvre "boredom is pregnant with desires, frustrated frenzies, unrealized possibilities. A magnificent life is waiting just around the corner, and far, far away. It is waiting like the cake is waiting when there is butter, milk, flour and sugar. This is the realm of freedom." In this Lefebvre is willing, despite his harsh reservations from the new town, to consider that it might have some potential for human emancipation (for Lefebvre, socialism).  In the closing of "Note on the New Town" Lefebvre holds that the city is transforming the world, and it only remains to be seen, how exactly.

Lefebvre's "Note on the New town can be found at:

 Henri Lefebvre- Notes on the New Town - summary

part 1 - 2 - 3

Henri Lefebvre – "Notes on the New Town" – summary and review – part 2

Henri Lefebvre- Notes on the New Town - summary

part 1 - 2 - 3

When Henri Lefebvre looks at the new town in "Notes on the New Town" his eyes rest on a new housing project which he refers to as "machines for living".  These impersonal, fragmenting structures "act as a mediator between nature and human beings, both as individuals and as groups". This as opposed to the old town in which the connection between people and nature and between members of the community was unmediated.

Lefebvre wonders at the function of such urban spaces, asking "will people be compliant and do what the plan expects them to do, shop at the shopping center, asking for advice at the advice bureau, doing everything that civic center officers demand of them like good, reliable citizens?". At the end of "Note on the New City" Lefebvre concludes that the new city is transforming the world with the question being –"transforming it into what?", and now he is wondering whether the terror of the new town will lead to socialism or supercapitalism.

One of the aspects of the new town that Lefebvre registers, like Georg Simmel, is that everything in it has, and is reduced to, a function ("every object has its use, and declares it"). When the new town will be successfully completed "everything in it will be functional, and every object within it will have a specific function: its own". And when a thing is reduced to nothing but its function, it can only signify itself and nothing else, meaning that the final fate of the city is a kind of total intelligibility, with no surprises of possibilities at hand. The seashell is flattened and functionalized Le Corbusier style, and no traces of the past can be read from it, only the dreads of modernity.

This is related, for Lefebvre, to the Bourgeois capacities for abstraction and separation and their making of analytic thinking their dominant mentality. Under this mentality which rules over the new city "everything which could be has been separated and differentiated: not only specific spheres and types of behavior, but also places and people".  With everything being analytically separated "the links become more important than the 'beings' who are being linked". Bourgeois analysis entails the death of spontaneous organic living which is dissected into categories of monads.

Henri Lefebvre- Notes on the New Town - summary

part 1 - 2 - 3

Henri Lefebvre – "Notes on the New Town" – summary and review

Henri Lefebvre- Notes on the New Town - summary

part 1 - 2 - 3

Henri Lefebvre's "Notes on the New Town" seems at first as a somewhat poetic lamentation on the fate of the old natural or organic working class society with the development of the new industrialized "New Town". The better part of "Notes on the New Town" is an inner monologue Lefebvre has with himself while standing on a hilltop overlooking the new town. Lefebvre hardly holds back on the scorn he pores down on this enslaving, segmented bourgeois way of living, but he finally comes around to considering the potential for emancipation in the new town (very much like Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life")

Lefebvre starts "Notes on the New Town" with a nostalgic account of the old town which soon turns into a somewhat (intentionally?) exaggerated glorying and idealizing portrayal of the Meadville and ancient Greek town. In relating to the old town Lefebvre offers the metaphor of a seashell on the back of a mollusk which without its shell is shapeless (and helpless). This link between animal and shell (that is, humans and their dwellings) "summarizes the immense life of an entire species, and the immense effort this life has made to stay alive and to maintain its own characteristics". Lefebvre sees the old town as the organic continuum of the community which harmonically functions within it.

But this small town, Lefebvre laments, is vegetating and emptying, and has turned boring. As Lefebvre puts it :"it was always boring, but in times gone by that boredom had something soft and cosy about it", but that disappeared in the age of the new town, now the old town is "the pure essence of boredom" with the loss of it vitality and sense of "being in its being as perhaps Heidegger would have phrased it.

In the next part of "Note on the New Town" Lefebvre looks at the new town with a terrified gaze at first, but eventually one that is willing to retreat to the Marxist hope of "things need to get worse before they can become better". 

Henri Lefebvre- Notes on the New Town - summary

part 1 - 2 - 3