Revisiting Complexification, Technology and Urban Form in Lefebvre Stephen Read Faculty of Architecture Delft University of Technology Julianalaan

134 2628 BL Delft The Netherlands s.a.read@tudelft.nl (corresponding author) Martine Lukkassen Yacht Charlotte van Pallandtlaan 12 2272 TR Voorburg The Netherlands Martine.lukkassen@yacht.nl Tadas Jonauskis Spoorsingel 18 2613 BE, Delft The Netherlands tadas.jonauskis@gmail.com

Revisiting Complexification, Technology and Urban Form in Lefebvre Abstract Henri Lefebvre gave suggestive hints at a theory of urban form that have inspired those involved in the design and planning disciplines. His search was for an urban praxis that opened potentials for new forms of social relations and to this end he proposed a metaphilosophy designed to engage with the open-ended material relations of cities and societies. This contradicted however his Marxist commitment to a finality of man and society and his association of technology with alienation. We try here to rethink technology as intrinsic to human and social life: not as means to realise thought in the materialisation of spaces and societies, but as medium and source, in processes of historical realisation, of orders that comes before thought in human practice. We relate this to worlds of practice which are the technically and historically constructed metaphilosophical totalities within which we are enabled and act. This pluralises and technologises world, and Lefebvres urban form becomes a construction of multiple material-technological worlds, each perceived, conceived and lived as wholes. These articulate with one another and evolve historically. It is the articulations and interfaces between spaces rather than the spaces themselves which locate the places of productivity and vitality in the city. The question of an open urban shifts subtly from one of resistance to the abstract rationalities of planning or an authoritarian state to one of the maintenance of open relations between different spaces each with their necessary technical or abstract rationalities. Keywords Lefebvre; urban form; metaphilosophy; complexity; technology; material hermeneutics; technoconstruction.

Introduction Henri Lefebvre has inspired urban planners and designers with the vivid sense his writing gives of a vital and dynamic city implicated with its historical and social dimensions. Urban form, which began for Lefebvre with the marking out of an abstract space, religious and political in character, ... evolved [as] a space which was relativised and historical (Lefebvre 1991: 48). These spaces were aligned with forms of the social through an idea of spatialised praxis so that, for Lefebvre, the city and urban life were formed together in an on-going relation and necessary tension between the political and the historical. It was this evolved urban space that was the source of the vitality and sociability he invoked. He emphasised the political dimensions of this production, setting himself against the homogenisation and concentrations of power of new abstract, nonrelativised spaces that he associated in the mid twentieth century with modern planning. For him, abstract space negates all differences, those that come from nature and history as well as those that come from the body, ages, sexes, and ethnicities (Lefebvre 1979: 289). He outlined a critique of the modern urbanism in which such spaces were conceived and implemented, but offered only some rather obscure hints at how we could turn this critique into a forward thinking urban practice. We can however see quite quickly the broad dimensions of what such a practice might entail in some of the methods he used. Such a practice would certainly not be about the integration of the categories of city and space ... into an overarching social theory (Schmid 2006:165); it would lead us rather away from general solutions and towards situated processes in which city and society emerged together. His concern was that this should happen in ways that enabled people to creatively form their own existences. It is these processes of the production of simultaneously urban and social life and power whose intensities and differences are at the same time obscured by the normalising and regularising procedures that are an equal part of urban processes that we would like to try to begin here to address. We can, we believe, extract from Lefebvres ideas suggestive indications of how we might further his project, and move positively beyond what was essentially an adventure of the twentieth century (Kipfer et al 2008: 2) guided by some very nineteenth century ideas, into one of the twenty-first guided by some ideas of the twentieth, ideas Lefebvre in any case would have been well aware of. But Lefebvre was a man of his time as much as he was ahead of it. His Marxist habits and commitments meant he could not easily abandon his critical orientation to a finality of human and societal completion. This orientation was made problematic however by his own attempts to open Marxist thinking in what he called a metaphilosophy, which involved a concerted engagement with the realities of events and developments in a combination of theory and praxis. We will identify parallel commitments to materiality and an openness of becoming in a hermeneutical philosophy of science and in a contemporary science of complexity and use these to understand the shift implied from a dualist metaphysics which started with philosophy or theory and regarded thought as originary, to an originary logic of inhabitation involving human technique and world. 3

Lefebvre struggled in particular with a Marxist vision of an alienating technology. We will identify another technology that makes it a foundation of all social praxis and enablement. This is an idea that suggests also an essential historicity and contingency of real-world implementations of technologies. Technology here would be neither category nor form in its own right, rather technologies would be contingently and strategically enrolled in forms of human and social praxis, even while the praxes themselves would be inconceivable without the technologies. The concepts we use to represent these forms are those of differential and world. We aim to demonstrate how these adjustments to Lefebvres thinking may lead relatively seamlessly into, and support his theory of urban form. Such a theory will see the urban as a construction of multiple spaces produced in different historical moments, formed as differentials of objects, subjects and practices, and creating, in their articulations with each other, the characteristic and vital places of cities. Beyond philosophy Lefebvre never intended his writing as a guide for urban planners and designers. His was a critical writing, carried out in an open version of Marxism (Charnock 2010). There was at the same time however a strong creative or constructive theme running through it tied to his conception of space and its production. His view of the city was founded around a conception of urban society and spatial developments he called mondialisation. He saw changes occurring in the conditions of our inhabitation of our planet and saw these developments as tied to changes in social and urban relations. He tried to think these issues beyond philosophy and its speculative abstractions and in relation to an urban society embodied in its own material relations (Lefebvre 2003: 64). Urban reality was for him something more than a social or political-economic product, it was a productive force in its own right, producing social relations as well as expressing them (Lefebvre 2003: 15). Lefebvre criticised structuralist Marxism for its determinism and denial of the openings of history and becoming (Elden 2004: 24). He well understood the problems of escaping closure and achieving an open praxis in existing models: philosophy would, according to Lefebvre, always aim for totality and synthesis, attempting to detach its concepts from the contexts and philosophical architectures in which they arose (Lefebvre 2003: 63-64). His metaphilosophy on the other hand refused a disembodied synthesis and sought to enter into a relationship with the real. His method was to get back from the object (product or work) to the activity that produced and/or created it. It is the only way ... to illuminate the objects nature, or, if you will the objects relationship to nature, and reconstitute the process of its genesis and the development of its meaning. All other ways of proceeding can succeed only in constructing an abstract object a model (Lefebvre 1991: 113). His aim was to undermine dualisms of structure and agency, theory and practice, and go beyond them. Philosophy was no help here. It had, according to Lefebvre, not resolved the contradictions around the gap between the conceived and the lived.[1] In place of 4

the analytical procedures of geography, demography, history, psychology and sociology, he proposed we consider the city as a differential, or complex of real relations. The differential space Lefebvre proposed was pure form: a place of encounter, assembly, simultaneity. This form has no specific content, but is a centre of attraction and life. It is an abstraction, but unlike a metaphysical entity, the urban is a concrete abstraction, associated with practice (Lefebvre 2003: 118-119). This form absorbs ... contents ... combines them actively in a totality or virtual synthesis, which does not need philosophy for its fulfilment but can simply be recognised as a channel (strategy) for action (Lefebvre 2003: 122). For Lefebvre any closure of the social portended a marginalisation of civil society and its domination by what he called absolute politics, where power was drained out of everyday sociality and its situations and surrendered to an increasingly abstract and authoritarian state and its knowledge institutions. Lefebvre refused this imposition of a universal rationality over life, recognising instead the autonomy of the practical and material constellations that constituted life. He aimed to go also beyond urbanism, which was for him an ideology that failed to grasp the urban because it understood it as a closed system of coded oppositions like public and private or work and residence that denied historical becoming and its promise of an open sociality. He was concerned with the complexification (Lefebvre 2003: 45) of an urban social order by which he meant something other than the simple complication of things already defined. Rather his concern was the reintegration of the perceptual, conceptual and practical dimensions of social life and space. Lefebvres call for a right to the city was not just about a right to housing and sustenance but the right to the open city and its streets with their spontaneity, sociability and extended networks as means to the open possibilities of life (Lefebvre 1996). The task of metaphilosophy was to find the instruments to make the urban ... more or less the oeuvre of its citizens instead of imposing itself upon them as a system, as an already closed book (Lefebvre 1996: 117). The totality of his other order was different to the synthesis of theory; it was characterised by virtuality, or the way it incorporated the potential of the as yet unmade. It was radically open to diverse outcomes constrained only by its material and spatiotemporal conditions. With this open-endedness he attempted to break with the Marxist-Hegelian progress to societal completion, but also with any social construction of reality that makes the social a category already defined. It was the social itself, its forms and content, that was the open and uncertain outcome of this progress in a spatiotemporal process of urbanisation. However, it was in the orientation of his critical thinking to a necessary telos that Lefebvre could not avoid closure. He was a political thinker before anything else and his politics was driven by the finality of the total or dealienated man (Jay 1984: 295-298), as the end of social theory. In fact, in order to open up a view on the productivity of the urban and the life of the city, this orientation to a political end the assumption in fact of any social or political good before the fact must be necessarily subsumed to this other concern of the open urban. There is no open city which guarantees the rights and well-being of its citizens. Openness and this open right is also openness to failure, 5

and to unexpected mishap or disaster. But it is this open productivity that is also capable of opening up multifarious types of sociability and action while resisting domination. It is with this productivity that we are concerned. But here, distinctions between the lived and the thought, the abstract and the concrete are erased. Spaces are not just perceived, they are perceived as moments of practical sense; they are not just conceived, they are conceived in practice and experience. Osborne and Rose are correct to say spaces and the entities they incorporate are experienced as much as conceptualised, lived as much as represented. These spaces have a materiality which is not merely imagined but is realised (Osborne and Rose 2004: 212). An urban biology Lefebvre saw everyday life as the connective tissue that [gave] the totality its structure and coherence (Gardiner 2000: 70). This seems from the above to be intended to be more than idle metaphor and hints at a discourse around the complex sciences of life, of which Lefebvre would have been well aware.[2] Perhaps the closest Lefebvre came to a readily recognisable complexity view of the city was in his and Rguliers ideas of the polyrhythmy of the city (Lefebvre 2004). Nevertheless a sense of an order intrinsic to the materiality and dynamism of the urban world pervades his writings and there could be some mileage in looking at him as some sort of urban biologist. It is, we argue, his concern with a practical engagement with the limits of philosophy that Lefebvre shares with a science of complexity, and where we may find a convergence with some contemporary biological thinking in which issues of openness, construction and technique come to the fore. What the scientist in biology deals with are not sciences authoritarian doctrines (Elden 2004: 23) but cases on the dissecting table or in the field in an integral and practical process of enquiry that involves at once perceiving, conceiving and doing. He or she actively seeks out and constructs descriptions of the aspect of reality under investigation. Scientists no longer address a system as explained by what they know about it, even if they know it perfectly well ... Their questions imply an open situation: what will it be able to produce? What kind of behaviour will emerge? And the question must be asked each time, with each new situation (Stengers 2004: 96). The scientist finds him or herself having to be attentive, tracking, manipulating and describing detailed and material processes. He or she is in a situation where models are descriptive and provisional, where they change with changing determinations of significance and purpose, and where they produce rather than deduce results. This sort of biological science recognises both history and the relational nature of reality.[3] Isabelle Stengers argues that complexity science is characterised not by new theory, but simply by a commitment to asking the questions a reductive science cannot answer. These involve the investigator no longer as a detached observer of events subject to universal theory, but in involved and open-ended explorations of the event spaces of phenomena. This, according to Stengers, implies a new understanding of what theory itself means: instead of a theory that limits and defines 6

the shape and scope of the problem, and commands it from above or outside the action, what is implied here is theory capable of taking on the singular particularities of things, and of answering specific questions complex realities impose on us. The biological scientist is working with and observing things that already work on their own terms. The material under study is already organised and functional at a visceral level and the scientist stands in an interpretive relationship with it. A different science recognises complex working arrangements not as representatives of genera or abstractions, and their behaviours do not depend at least in the first instance on the values human scientists confer upon them. It is the arrangements themselves to which our definitions need to be fitted. This is often quite literally a matter of life and death as the objects of the science may not be indifferent to their own functions and structures. Science is thus a confrontation between human language, which is also to say human devices, and non-human creation ... and it is a speculative confrontation because it is not life, it is our human languages and devices which are put to the test (Stengers 2000: 93-94). While in classical science, theory establishes the frame within which effects and predictable results are produced, this other science is one where what will happen is by its nature uncertain detail matters, and may induce critical variation and in general the expectation of the scientist is that events will set the terms of their own outcomes in the conditions under which they are investigated.[4] Complexity science is, according to Stengers, characterised by interventions and negotiations: it is a science of a practical staying in touch with reality through our situated constructions and manipulations of it. Reality here is not a product of our categories but of a negotiation with our categories and language, which is to say with our techniques. Science must, according to Stengers, side with creation (Stengers 2000: 96); what complexity scientists do is create effects through technique rather than affirm invariable laws of nature; this involves them as constructors rather than receivers of nature. This involves also a different kind of subject-object relationship: instead of the disembodied Cartesian subject, standing apart from an object framed in universal laws and an absolute space and time, we have living subjects embedded in situations with the objects they are involved with in relations of interpretation. It is the embodied form of this enquiry the relation of the scientist with the reality of the situation under investigation that Stengers holds up as the frame: the totality of perceiving, conceiving and doing that involves subject, object and equipment (Stengers 2004: 97). Procedures, models and equipment are means of embodying enquiry and realising it and modifying at the same time both subject and object. What made this realignment of science around its practice possible what in effect allowed us to escape the dualist metaphysics embedded in classical science was firstly the realisation that there was no direct or unmediated observation.[5] In a hermeneutical philosophy of science, Patrick Heelan collapsed perception and conception and proposed there was no substantive distinction between observational and theoretical entities (Heelan 1977: 29-30). He proposed further that it is the technics (the languages and devices), which define what the scientist sees. The 7

observer is in an intentional orientation to highly synthetic local conditions. He or she manipulates those conditions, shifting the subject or intention side of the subjectobject divide into the technical and material conditions in which scientific results including practical understanding and observed objects are produced. The scientist performs a hermeneutical shift (Heelan 1977: 11) of subjective intention into objective equipment so that equipment embodies the intentionality of the observational act, and observables are produced. Material here does not stand against thought but rather participates practically in, and even enables, it. Heelan calls this material structured to intentionality nonobjective. Model, system and structure are quite different here to the abstractions Lefebvre warns against: models do not substitute for reality; rather reality is understood through the appropriate use of models (Heelan 1977: 37). We will take this material non-objective structuring to be equivalent to space, and note it is a product of a metaphilosophy similar to that of Lefebvre. Non-objective worlds There is a practical holism here of whole situations of technically constructed and manipulated material relations creating the conditions for knowledge. One way of linking this practical condition of totality back to Lefebvre is through Lefebvres notion of world. Lefebvre was not primarily interested in the question of the world as a scale of global geopolitics, he was interested in the process of comprehending the world as a totality in thought and practice (Elden 2008: 80). A source of this emphasis is Marxs concern with realisation but it originates also in Heideggers idea that the world ... worlds (Heidegger 1998: 126). This is the world in which the human and the world are not related as two separate things, but are both enclosed and disclosed together (Fink 1960: 47; 210-211; 232-233; quoted in Elden 2008a: 51; 53). Elden proposes that globalisation comes after and is made possible by this more primitive disclosure of the world, which, following Lefebvre, he calls mondialisation. He quotes Kostas Axelos: Globalisation names a process which universalises technology, economy, politics, and even civilisation and culture. But it remains somewhat empty. The world, as an opening is missing. The world is not the physical and historical totality, it is not the more or less empirical ensemble of theoretical and practical ensembles. It deploys itself. The thing that is called globalisation is a kind of mondialisation without the world. (Axelos 2005:27) Lefebvres view on technology depends on Marx but it depends also on the critique of the alienating power of technology of Axelos (Axelos 1976). In Marx technology is a mode of human labour which develops in the context of our interactions with nature. Technology is the factor we use to meet our needs and further our projects, transforming both nature and ourselves in the process. Our increasing knowledge and skills are embedded in tools and machinery which we then use to further change and control nature and shape human culture and understanding. Man externalises nature in this ongoing development of technique and the direction of technical civilization is an accelerating rationalisation and instrumentalisation with ever more of human society in the service of this production. 8

Axelos, in a reflection of Heideggers later technological thinking, argues that this technologically driven history implies the eventual complete technification of nature and makes Marxist history the history of the development of technique (Axelos 2005: 27). The world becomes what technology (as a category, in the singular and embodying a technological, calculative rationality) presents and produces. For Axelos it is technique itself that is alienating and the history of technology is coeval with the history of alienation. At the same time production in thought in Marx is more primitive than the material output that proceeds from thought. This is the significance of Marxs wellknown axiom about architects and bees in which the architect does what the bee cannot: constructs edifices in thought before they are constructed in material. For Axelos and Lefebvre, the world is an object of thought in its own terms (Elden 2008: 83). But the idealised thought implied here is at odds with the materiality of situated knowing implied by Stengers and Heelan. In their thinking, what is brought to or disclosed in thought will emerge in activity in the material-technical conditions which pertain. A practical knowing involves equipment and a questioning of how exactly and under what material conditions something is known. It is here our metaphysics shifts decisively as technology returns in a different, less categorical and more contingent guise. The non-objective structures in which we know and do things are brought to existence locally and maintained through technique: these structures are technoconstructions (Ihde 1997): totalities constructed and embodied in equipment (while being modified and adjusted in time), and never simply thought (or theory) embodied or disembodied. This radically pluralises world because the world disclosed, in which we are disclosed-enclosed, depends on the particular equipment and technique practically absorbed in particular actions. Here we see worlds worlding (becoming world) through technique and equipment, as perceiving, conceiving and doing are mediated in practical, synthetic situations. We introduce in fact a metaphilosophical basis to the thinking of worlds and the things they reveal. It is also clear there is no pre-technological mondialisation it would be like suggesting Europeans could have known China before ships and camel-trains! We can begin to enrich this view of worlds, and their spaces and times, by looking at another concept from biology. In a previous paper (Read 2012) one of us argued that the view we outlined earlier of the shifting of intentional structures into material has an affinity with Stuart Kauffmans idea of biosphere (Kauffman 2000). Researchers in biosemiotics freely mix theory of language and the kind of material hermeneutics we have been describing to reconnect communication means and meaning through a hermeneutics of the living (Marko et al 2009: 8). Biospheres are spaces manipulated and adjusted by the actions of involved beings. They are, in Heelans terms, non-objective spaces moulded historically by the collective habits, actions and interactions of whole groups or populations of living beings to whom life and being matters. This commonly shared field allows mutual games of understanding, misunderstanding, cheating and imitation at all levels of the biosphere (Marko et al 2007: 237). And it is only after habits have been negotiated, rules settled and artefacts produced, that one can point with the index 9

finger and distinguish this and that, to recognise rules, habits, or even objects (241). The environment becomes a negotiated creation of the beings environed, who shift material (and materially shift) into structures meaningful and usually advantageous at individual, group and species levels. What is this shifting if not technique? What is it if not culture? It is this pathway of exploration of the adjacent possible (Kauffman 2000) in whole worlds that is the key to understanding living beings as participants as well as factors in an historical process of constructive inhabitation, and even as the driving force of habitat development. Biospheres become totalities integrated across different levels of organisation, and the oeuvres of their inhabitants. They are worlds of inhabitation, not as reflections of preconceived social or subjective form, but as non-objective structures that support internally practices of perceiving, conceiving and doing. They are also differentials: pure form ... centre[s] of attraction and life (Lefebvre 2003: 118-119). We see also how these spaces are at the same time complete and multiple. Each species, each population, each culture, each practice, develops its own internal world of inhabitation, which will have relations externally with other worlds. We share with other creatures the character of living in non-objective worlds of communication and significance and acting and reacting within them, choosing for the most part life over death, wellbeing over degeneration, and configuring and reconfiguring worlds in the process. What does this mean for the body and its relation to worlds? Maurice MerleauPonty used the examples of the blind mans cane and that of the feather in the ladys hat to demonstrate how we engage the world through everyday objects which become part of our body-awareness (Merleau-Ponty 1962). We notice these objects only when we engage them directly as objects, the rest of the time they are just part of us. Is the blind man and his cane a unit as Merleau-Ponty suggests? When the blind man and his cane get on the tram are these a unit? If we say yes to both these questions the consequence would be again to problematise a mind-centred (and spaced see Lefebvre 1991: 172-174) notion of subjectivity and displace action and intelligence from the mind to the body and thence to body-technology and bodyworld conjunctions. This seems also to be not foreign to Lefebvre who located the spiders intelligence in its unity with its web. This already begins to clarify what a metaphilosophical production of space might entail; in particular it suggests the roles of technologies and worlds need more detailed, careful and even case by case appraisal. Technology is generalised and reduced to a singular rationality in Lefebvre in his dependence for these concepts on Marx and Axelos. The different take we propose particularises technologies and places them at a more strategic and contingent level in enabling us as actors and producers of worlds integrated in common languages and techniques. We could then start to tackle these multiple worlds and the languages and techniques internal to them through the semiotics of Greimas. In fact both Lefebvre and the biosemioticians Anton Marko and his colleagues do just this. Differential spaces produce particularised differences through the indexing of individuals in relation to each other and to whole communities of individuals. Lefebvre used the 10

term isotopy to describe the internal relations affecting mutually indexed individuals. Isotopy refers to the fact that elements and their differences are mutually contextualised as part of the establishment of a rationale of sense or coherence in the whole: it refers ... to constancy in going in a direction that a text exhibits when submitted to rules of interpretive coherence (Eco 1986: 201). The classic example is the words in a sentence which are all different, all contextualised by each other, and all contribute through their internal relations to the sense of the individual words and of the sentence as a whole. Urban form as non-objective worlds The urban form Lefebvre somewhat tentatively sets out can be understood quite straightforwardly from this point. He speculates on the original city, built as a political and dominated space. Political spaces were purposefully constructed and abstract, a founding violence (Lefebvre 1991: 280), a positive imposition of order against a disordered world. The political city instituted and enforced social order (Lefebvre 1991: 285-287). It achieved and sustained a particular view on the world, administered, protected and exploited a territory, organised drainage, irrigation and the clearing of land for agriculture. It was a place of writing: documents, laws, inventories, tax collection but also of procurement and work to support the activities of political power (Lefebvre 2003: 8). It constructed spaces that internalised and made routine particular practices, languages and techniques and embedded and embodied power through these enablements. But dominated spaces were only homogeneous and devoid of differences in the first instance (Lefebvre 1991: 240; 285). They were spaces without life, vulnerable to their own need to be sustained by what they excluded and what they dominated. Something irregular always escaped domination: against the isotopy of the city was the heterotopy of the border. Space ... then ... reintroduces itself subversively through the effects of peripheries, the margins, the regions (Lefebvre 1976-78 vol 4: 164-165; quoted in Brenner & Elden 2009: 360). Exchange and trade were initially irregular activities, carried out by itinerants, suspicious individuals, ... strangers who acted outside political space. The eventual renewal of the city as something more differentiated and complex was facilitated and eventually made inevitable by the increasing power of the other spaces of the traders and travellers (Lefebvre 2003: 9). These other spaces themselves became regularised and affirmed as spaces: the overland, river and sea routes of the strangers and itinerants became political spaces on their own account by early modern times in Europe, organising, protecting and furthering their own activities and interests. The power of the itinerants was transformed as they distributed and organised their activities across networks of cities. Cities related strategically with one another in an increasingly regularised fashion as new levels of political order emerged, each with their own isotopies of related languages, techniques and practices, and each with their heterotopies of objects and practices standing outside that order, belonging to other spaces. The points of articulation of

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different spaces became heterotopic: in the best cases, places of negotiation and exchange between different spaces. Political spaces were clearly not constrained by any universal rationality: they emerged in different times, and were constructed to specific internal aims, orders and rationalities. Political spaces then overlapped and articulated with one another and relations between them came to reflect not so much a conflict between the regular and the irregular as a negotiation or struggle between different internalised orders. This negotiation between levels and spaces of political power resulted in the rise of merchant cities in Italy and in Western Europe and the Baltic in early modern Europe. It marked, in Lefebvres analysis, a shift in power from the city to the larger intercity network as merchants and their spaces of regularised and regulated trade moved from the marginal spaces and gateways of cities to take over their most central spaces as well (Lefebvre 2003: 10). The trader and his network became essential to the growing complexification and productivity of the city. The city leagues established networks of trade but also of economic, educational, cultural and other practices, including banking systems with credit and exchange norms, exchanges of artistic, technological and production practices, and divisions of labour and interdependencies across networks of cities. This heralded the emergence of an abstract space of capitalist accumulation (Lefebvre 1991: 277-278). There are some important spatial mechanisms implied here which make problematic our tendency to see space as flat and cartographic. Elements exist in relations of isotopy with other elements within a field while they exist in relations of heterotopy with elements outside of that field. Sets of elements in isotopic relations with one another form fields that are bounded only in the sense that their relations are internal. There is no necessary literal boundary. An element that was part of a trading network in the early modern city was heterotopic with respect to the municipal relations of the city, even though that part of the trading network may have been geographically inside the city. In this sense heterotopic elements may be both inside and outside a city at the same time. This is less strange than it sounds if we remember that what defines an element is its relations rather than its position on a map. At the same time however cartographic position matters profoundly because these places of articulation between spaces are characterised by exchange and negotiation and tend to be the most visible and vital parts of cities. An element in a city (a harbour for example) may be in isotopic relations with other elements (harbours) in other cities and be heterotopic with respect to strictly municipal elements and interests in that city. The municipality will exact taxes and levies, and will otherwise benefit through the services it provides to ships and sailors. The municipality will also host other networks, like that of banking for example. Cities become differentiated into layers of practices and politics without being segmented, and it is the crossings of different languages, techniques and practices which define places of heterotopic productivity. Abstract spaces reduce all intensities to internally calculable quantities, which is why from within them the task of understanding the creative and living qualities of space becomes difficult or impossible. In fact, isotopy demands that particular 12

abstract spaces consistently embed particular rationales. These rationales are not universal however; their limits are also the limits of the spaces themselves. Places of productive conflict and exchange exist at the interfaces between spaces. It is in these heterotopies that we maintain the openness of action and evade the closure of rationalities that make claims for universality within their own spaces. The exchange between different spaces also establishes however the vivid and identifiable places that political power then co-opts to its own interests. It is this organisation and articulation of spaces with their creative heterotopies of vivid places that defines cities and their forms. Insert Figure 1 about here.

Isotopy and heterotopy in the industrial city The construction of isotopic, internally ordered political spaces and their consequent heterotopic relations with one another has been the basis of the relativised and historical urban form Lefebvre cites (Lefebvre 1991: 48). In more recent times the imposition of another political space, produced under the conditions of a modern alliance of capitalist industrialisation and social democracy, produced the extensions of European cities of the 19th and early 20th centuries. A new space was built out from the centres of European centres founded on new normative models of social neighbourhood and modern commercial city (van der Woud, 2001: 194). The city was the site of industrialisation and a growing consumerism which introduced different forms of urban life and produced new spaces (Harvey 2006). The new internal rationale of the city facilitated industrial production and consumerism. New telephone, electrical, water and sewage systems were introduced, and technical systems like public transportation were used to integrate city space and organise relations between city and neighbourhood spaces. The neighbourhood meanwhile was integrated around grids of public facilities and neighbourhood streets while it internalised a new rationale of social community and ideals of social welfare and public health. It was in the meeting of spaces of industrial-consumerist city and social neighbourhood that new heterotopic centralities emerged in linear patterns of shopping streets simultaneously connecting and centring neighbourhoods. These streets of communal life were the spaces of passing strangers as well as the central places of neighbourhoods, of catching the tram and of everyday shopping and conviviality. Though the specific contents of neighbourhood and city have changed in the hundred or so years since their building, the characteristic pattern is still readily recognisable today in Rotterdam, in the bustling streets that trace paths through these areas. These still provide a focus for everyday life and display a characteristic urban sociability. Insert Figure 2 about here.

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The imposition of new spaces over existing ones has been the way cities have changed and grown in Europe since early modernity. The rapid urbanisation which marked industrialisation saw also the arrival of the railway and steam shipping. New technical infrastructures connected cities to organise the inter-city logistics of industrialisation, while they organised at the same time the locations of industrial sites in or on the edges of cities. This was also a time of nation-building and a first globalisation and the new infrastructures saw the consolidation of urban centres as national and global places. More recent post-industrial and post-socialist developments have been characterised by the rise of private transportation supported by new regional (publically-funded) infrastructures. The city has been reconfigured into a metropolitan pattern of residential suburbs and commercial, business, industrial and recreational centres organised around new motorway networks (Bruyns and Read 2008). At each stage of this process new urban objects have been enrolled into new political spaces along with new practices and technologies. The new spaces themselves defined normativities like modern city, social neighbourhood, metropolitan region that represented massive, and mostly public, investment in infrastructures and buildings, and were celebrated as planning achievements in their own times. Each opened new conditions and opportunities for the definition or redefinition of social life and the expansion of capitalism (Harvey 2001). One of the most basic organisational logics of these new normative worlds is revealed in the way they presented places to us abstracted and systematised as stops in tram, metro or rail systems, airline destinations, turn-offs on motorways, etc. These new normative worlds have been integrated in and with transportation systems so that our relationships with places and with the social and cultural lives they embed are mediated through transportation technologies. The European historical centre, a place lived in for hundreds of years, has become abstracted to a destination in municipal tram, regional bus and national rail systems. It has become abstracted as a business and tourist destination in continental and global airline systems with shuttle trains and busses completing the link between centre and airport. Places are presented to us in place-disclosing equipment and it is through this equipment we perceive the places we act in and towards and even conceive what it is they are. The equipment abstracts and acts as model, revealing objects and places to us and explicating their logics. But there is also nothing particularly new about this: the historical centre in the sixteenth century was lived in in much the sense a neighbourhood is lived in today, and for anything beyond that this abstraction was a necessary part of the way perception, conception and action towards distant places was enabled. Place abstraction was a character of the destinations in early modern trading networks, and abstraction into particular and regularised times (that of the church bell for example, or the train schedule) is a feature of all urban spaces. It is through the way perception and conception is mediated as a technologically supported abstraction that these worlds present us not only with the means to get from place to place but also with the practical knowledge that these places exist and they are available to us. 14

These abstractions are very concrete achievements; reality here is not a concrete reflection of an abstract network (Lefebvre 1991: 266), it is the network itself, technologically achieved. And at each stage of the development of these concrete abstractions new opportunities for heterotopic crossings of spaces occur which have precipitated serial changes of use and fortune for centres and other significant places in cities over time. Insert Figure 3 about here. Contemporary isotopy and heterotopy Not all these abstract-technological worlds are based around such readily recognisable forms. New global information systems are designed to a logic which seems at first quite foreign to urban space. The Technical Analysis financial trading style for example quite literally collapses space and time into one simultaneous global place in order to present the objects of the global financial market real-time to traders wherever they are (and have access to a terminal) (Knorr Cetina & Bruegger 2002: 179-181). In a powerful evocation of Heelans experimental situation, financial traders do and see things in a non-objective system acutely tuned to the perceptions and conceptions of those accredited to use it. This abstraction is again concrete, requiring wires and cables, the appropriate hardware and software, and regular updating and maintenance. There is little here that can be glossed or written off as an effect of a generalised technology; the space is a specific, highly designed, highly secured and technically realised differential. This system and others like it also express themselves clearly enough in the heterotopic effects they produce like the clusters of glass-clad towers that soar above their surroundings in the downtowns or on the edges of contemporary cities. We see however how the rights to the city places produced in these effects are today vigorously and scrupulously controlled. The spaces of the electronic networks require highly secured portals and interfaces with the spaces of buildings, streets, public transportation systems, hotel, entertainment and shopping districts, and so on. Adjoining spaces are carefully designed and supervised as issues of security and image and the control of public space for dominant interests take precedence over the interests of diversity and sociality. Conflicts over the right to the city have played themselves out historically at strategic locations in the city, and today, as the occupy movement has shown, the key places of resistance to the dispossession of this right are global places, right there amongst the glass towers. It is difficult to see at this point in time however how this knowledge will lead to direct proposals for the permanent reoccupation of the city. However, strategic gains will eventually be won through a better understanding of the possibilities of technological spaces themselves and strategic modifications of their relations. The mechanisms of power and enablement exist at multiple scales and in multiple spaces so that there are multiple locations at which rights can be fought for and won. In order to achieve this better understanding we need especially to question interpretations of contemporary developments that miss both the 15

historical depth and the situated and visceral materiality of processes of power, enablement and urbanisation. The generalised global space that is a feature of much contemporary discussion, is again a product of a generalised technology in this case one that is new, high-tech and virtual (Wellman 2001; Castells 1989; 1996). What we have suggested instead is that technologies have a hand in the differential and virtual nature of all spaces and that we are enabled and emplaced, through these spaces. Access to spaces of enablement is a vital factor of power while opportunities for escaping the closure of these spaces come from the ways they articulate with other spaces. We have suggested that we inhabit, and always have, a layered construction of technological spaces worlds that articulate with each other, and that it is these located articulations and interfaces rather than the spaces themselves which underpin the places of open creativity and vitality of the city. This knowledge also allows us to critique what Don Mitchell calls the annihilation of space by law (Mitchell 2002) the managers of the spaces of the new economy have turned to in order to make urban centres attractive to footloose capital. As Mitchell points out, the ideology of globalisation is a way of masking the degree to which capital must be located. It masks, whats more, the dependency of any urban function and indeed any human action on spaces inherited from deep in human and urban history. The rights to this human patrimony is a matter of simple justice; the good sense of maintaining its openness lies in recognising that exclusionary and sanitised spaces limit social possibilities and repertoires and engender fearful and unimaginative citizens and societies. A clearer understanding of the urban form Lefebvres methods suggest, puts us in a position to critique some of these developments and propose alternative urbanisms that promote no particular space or rationality but find productive articulations between different spaces and rationales, in open engagements with the future.

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Notes 1. In his work these dichotomies were tactical devices, the task of which was to demonstrate their limitations and to transcend them (Lefebvre 1991: 405-6). 2. He would have been familiar for example with the ideas of Edgar Morin. 3. He would have been familiar for example with the ideas of Edgar Morin. 4. This problematises our assumptions about transformation: both Eldredge and Gould and Kauffman have argued against gradualism as a mode of biological or ecological change, arguing instead for punctuated equilibrium (Eldredge and Gould 1985) and a holism (Kauffman 1995) in which changes require shifts from one whole differential form to another adjacent possible form, the whole forms themselves tending towards stability. 5. Mediation becomes synonymous with knowledge there is no knowledge without a mediating world and it is the world (and the subjects intentional stance towards it) that mediates. The historical dimension leaves knowledge open through new worlds and stances.

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References Axelos, K. (1976) Alienation and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx, (Austin: University of Texas Press) Axelos, K. (2005) Mondialisation without the World: Interviewed by Stuart Elden, Radical Philosophy, No 130, 25-28 Brenner, N. & S. Elden (2009) Henri Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory, International Political Sociology 3, 353-377 Bruyns, G. & S.A. Read The Form of the Metropolitan Territory: the case of Amsterdam and its periphery in: H.C. Bekkering, A. ten Doeschate, D. Hauptmann, A.C. den Heijer, U. Knaack & S. van Manen (eds.), The Architecture Annual 2006-2007 (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers). Castells, M. (1989) The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban Regional Process (Oxford: Blackwell). Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. I (Oxford: Blackwell). Charnock, G (2010) 'Challenging New State Spatialities: The Open Marxism of Henri Lefebvre', Antipode, 42, 1279-1303. Eco, U. (1986) Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) Elden, S. (2004) Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible (London: Continuum). Elden, S. (2008) Mondialisation before globalization: Lefebvre and Axelos, in, K. Goonewardena, S. Kipfer, R. Milgrom, C. Schmid (eds.), Space, difference, everyday life : reading Henri Lefebvre (Abingdon: Routledge), 80-93. Elden, S. (2008a) Eugen Fink and the Question of the World, in Parrhesia 5, 48-59. Eldredge, N. and S.J. Gould (1985) Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism in, N. Eldredge Time frames (Princeton: Princeton University Press) 193-223 Fink, E. (1960) Spiel als Weltsymbol (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer) Gardiner, M. (2000) Critiques of everyday life: An introduction (London: Routledge) Harvey, D. (2001) Globalization and the spatial fix Geographische Revue, 2, 2330. Harvey, D. (2006) The political economy of public space in: S. Low & N. Smith (eds.) The Politics of Public Space (London; Routledge) Harvey, D. (2008) The Right to the City New Left Review 53, 23-40 Heelan P. (1977) Hermeneutics of Experimental Science in the Context of the LifeWorld, in D. Ihde & R.M. Zaner (eds.) Interdisciplinary Phenomenology, (Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague), 7-50. Heidegger, M. (1998) Pathmarks, ed. W. McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Ihde, D. (1997) Thingly hermeneutics/Technoconstructions, Man and World 30 pp. 369-381. Jay, M. (1984) Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas (Cambridge: Polity) 18

Kauffman, S.A. (1995) At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of SelfOrganization and Complexity (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Kauffman, S.A. (2000) Investigations (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Kipfer, S., K. Goonewardena, C. Schmid, R. Milgrom (2008) On the production of Henri Lefebvre, in: K. Goonewardena, S. Kipfer, R. Milgrom, C. Schmid (eds.), Space, difference, everyday life : reading Henri Lefebvre (Abingdon: Routledge) 1-23 Knorr Cetina, K. and U. Bruegger (2002) Traders Engagement with Markets: A Postsocial Relationship, Theory, Culture & Society, 19 (5/6), 161-185. Lefebvre, H. (1979) Space: Social Product and Use Value in Critical Sociology: European Perspectives, (ed. and trans. J.W. Freiberg) (New York: Irvington Publishers). Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space, trans by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell). Lefebvre, H. (1991b) Critique of Everyday Life: Volume One, trans. J. Moore, (New York: Verso). Lefebvre, H. (1996) The Right to the City, in Writings on Cities, trans. and ed. by E. Kaufman and E. Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell) 61-181 Lefebvre, H. (2003) The Urban Revolution, trans. R. Bonnano, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) Lefebvre, H. (2004) Rhythmanalysis: Space , Time and Everyday Life, trans. S. Elden & G. Moore (London: Continuum). Marko, A., F. Grygar, K. Kleisner, & Z. Neubauer (2007) Towards a Darwinian Biosemiotics. Life as Mutual Understanding, in: M. Barbieri (ed.) Introduction to Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis, (Dordrecht: Springer) Marko, A. F. Grygar, L. Hajnal, K. Kleisner, Z. Kratochvl & Z. Neubauer (2009) Life as Its Own Designer: Darwins Origin and Western Thought, (Dordrecht Springer) Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge) Mitchell, D. (2002) The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of Anti-Homeless Laws in the United States, Antipode 29 (3) pp. 303-335 Osborne, T. and N. Rose (2004) Spatial phenomenotechnics: making space with Charles Booth and Patrick Geddes, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22, pp. 209-222 Read, S.A. (2012) Meaning and material: phenomenology, science and adjacent possible cities in: J. Portugali et al. (eds.), Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age (Berlin: Springer-Verlag) pp. 105-127 Schmid C. (2006) Networks, Borders, Differences: Towards a Theory of the Urban. In: R Diener et al. (eds) Switzerland: An Urban Portrait, (Basle: Birkhauser) 164173. Stengers, I. (2000), Gods Heart and the Stuff of Life Pli 9, 86-118 Stengers, I. (2004) The challenge of complexity: Unfolding the ethics of science. In memoriam Ilya Prigogine E:CO 6(1-2), 92-99 19

Woud, A. van der (2001) Stad en land: werk in uitvoering in: D.W. Fokkema & F. Grijzenhout (eds) Rekenschap: 1650-2000 (Den Haag: Sdu Uitgevers) Wellman, B. (2001) Physical Place and Cyber Place: The Rise of Networked Individualism, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25(2), 227-52.

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Figure 1.

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Figure 2.

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Figure 3.

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Figure 1. Fragment of: Cornelis Anthonisz. Bird's eye view of Amsterdam. 1544. Woodcut. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. The gate at the centre of the drawing, the Nieuwmarkt, was and remains one of the major market places of the city. The markets at the city gates in 16th century Amsterdam marked the points of articulation of regional networks and internal city space. The harbour marked the point of crossing of Baltic and North Sea trading networks and city space. Within a century the Nieuwmarkt would be immersed in the fabric of the expanding city while it continued orchestrating activity around itself, retaining its market function and a vitality and vividness as a place in the city. The harbour area has likewise continued to orchestrate relations between the city and the larger networks of which the city is a part. Figure 2. 3 neighbourhoods in Rotterdam mapped for everyday events (red dots). The patterns of the heterotopic main streets, interfacing the spaces of neighbourhood and city, are clear to see. Figure 3. Kaunas, Lithuania: a. 1915 b. 1990 c. 2010. At each of these dates a different technological space was dominant (a neighbourhood scale grid of walking in the main; a state-sponsored public transportation network; a regional motorway network) and the city was configured around these worlds. No world ever completely disappears unless it is literally erased so a. was still operating vestigially in b. while a. and b. were operating vestigially in c. But relatively high-tech examples replace lower-technologies that allowed us to use and know the city in different ways. There is a process of innovation and replacement in the making human of the planet which sees camels replaced by airlines and railways and the carvel and fluit by the container ship. Networks and places already made are taken into new dominant spaces while being reconfigured and transformed. At each stage of innovation previous heterotopic places (as the most vivid and activity and opportunity-rich places will usually be appropriated into the new spaces.

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