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December 7, 2009
Henri Lefebvre in this interview says that the Situationist's idea of derive was more of a practice than a theory.
In the course of its history the city was once a powerful organic unity; for some time, however, that unity was becoming undone, was fragmenting, and the derive was more of a practice than a theory. It revealed the growing fragmentation of the city. In the course of its history the city was once a powerful organic unity; for some time, however, that unity was becoming undone, was fragmenting,....We had a vision of a city that was more and more fragmented without its organic unity being completely shattered.
Lefebvre adds that:
Afterward, of course, the peripheries and the suburbs highlighted the problem. But back then it wasn't yet obvious, and we thought that the practice of the derive revealed the idea of the fragmented city . .... The experiment consisted of rendering different aspects or fragments of the city simultaneous, fragments that can only be seen successively, in the same way that there exist people who have never seen certain parts of the city .... One goes along in any direction and recounts what one sees.
The Situationists abandoned derive in favour of the idea that all urbanism is an ideology when the city completely exploded with suburbs and they abandoned the problem of the city. What was the problem of the city? The right to the city cannot be conceived of as a simple visiting right or as a return to traditional cities and it can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life.
The city has been thoroughly commodified: it is a privileged space for the consumption of commodities and it is consumed as if it were one big commodity. For urban inhabitants to start really living, they must make use of their cities. But the word "use" must be considered as broadly as possible; it must include appropriation, which inevitably involves re-creating ("inventing" or "sculpting") existing space(s), that is to say, the production of new space(s).
Lefebvre argues that the promises of modernist capitalist architecture and city planning had failed and he developed his conception of a “right to the city” for all urban dwellers.This would restructure the power relations which underlie urban space, transferring control from capital and the state over to urban inhabitants. The right to the city is an argument for democratization of urban development decisions and placing power over how space is used with “citizens.”The “right to the city” is the right to “urban life, to renewed centrality, to places of encounter and exchange, to life rhythms and time uses, enabling the full and complete usage of … moments and places.”
David Harvey says in New Left Review that:
The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.
This implies greater democratic control over the production and utilization of the surplus. Since the urban process is a major channel of surplus use, establishing democratic management over its urban deployment constitutes the right to the city.
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