Thinking the City: The Arena of Conflict
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13133/2532-6562/19022Keywords:
concept of the city, Henri Lefebvre, post-foundational theoryAbstract
This paper examines how the city is conceptualised and defined as a place of conflict and how a critical urban theory can emerge from this very conception.
To this end, I will first analyse Henri Lefebvre’s central urban text Le droit a la ville (1968) and work out its idea of the city. I will discuss whether ‘the city’ is a suitable object of study at all and examine Lefebvre’s position on
this question. Thinking of the city as ‘a thing’ will play a central role. I will then focus on the definitions of the city Lefebvre formulates. Lefebvre offers various ways of conceptualising the city. One of these proposals is to define the city as a place of conflict. This proposal is to be understood in the tradition of Marx and Engels, for whom the relationship between city and conflict played
a major role. I will briefly describe their assumptions putting it in dialogue Lefebvre, as real expert on the idea of the city highlighted by Marx and Engels.
In the other direction of time, the concept of the city as an arena of conflict has various possible connections. I discuss these possibilities and propose a post-foundational concept of conflict with which Lefebvre’s concept of the city can be made fruitful. Eventually, I explore the question of whether – and if so, why
– a concept of the city centred on conflict might be of interest to urban studies.
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