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The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

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<strong>The</strong> Claremont Road Situation<br />

these tactics were subsequently embraced by various countercultural movements<br />

not necessarily aware of their provenance. But their employment at<br />

Claremont Road went far beyond what might be expected to have occurred<br />

through some gradual percolation of ideas in the field. We are faced here not<br />

with similarities but with duplications. Claremont Road witnessed probably<br />

the most complete exposition of situationist techniques ever seen in<br />

Britain (certainly in the previous twenty years). For the resident activists<br />

had not just grafted moments of political engagement or radical gesturing<br />

onto otherwise conventional lives. Rather, they had allowed themselves to<br />

be totally absorbed into a radically alternative culture. Every moment of<br />

every day amounted to a political act. <strong>The</strong>y lived revolutionary lives, actively<br />

seeking to transform their world, <strong>and</strong>, in the true situationist manner,<br />

had fun doing so. It is tempting to imagine that both Lefebvre <strong>and</strong> Guy<br />

Debord would have felt vindicated by Claremont Road in the autumn<br />

of 1994.<br />

Although Lefebvre <strong>and</strong> the Situationists advocated similar tactics<br />

for revolutionary living, they came to these from quite different directions.<br />

And neither had particularly emphasized roads in their analyses of capitalist<br />

culture. Equally, it is safe to assume that the Claremont Road activists<br />

had not been reading a great deal of radical French theory from the 1960s.<br />

Yet somehow all three, following different lines of thought, had arrived at<br />

essentially identical proposals. In this chapter, I contend that their congruence<br />

is more than mere coincidence <strong>and</strong> that, if we look more deeply into<br />

the ideas of Lefebvre <strong>and</strong> the Situationists, we can discover at their root a<br />

common underst<strong>and</strong>ing of a space/place dialectic. Nowhere is this rendered<br />

more apparent than in the conflicts surrounding road building. Also, by<br />

constructing a Lefebvrian/situationist analysis of road building, we can shed<br />

new light on the processes that underlay the events at Claremont Road.<br />

Like many of their contemporary Marxist thinkers, Lefebvre <strong>and</strong><br />

Debord were principally concerned with identifying the mechanisms by<br />

which capitalism, contrary to the predictions of Marx, had maintained its<br />

hold on society. Although they conceived of it somewhat differently, they<br />

both emphasized the increasing alienation of life under capitalism: the production<br />

of a “culture of separation.” 5 For Lefebvre, separation was principally<br />

the result of applying scientific rationality to life: the breaking down of all<br />

areas of human experience into “knowable” intellectual categories. He related<br />

this to the calculation required in the search for profit. In other words,<br />

it was a particular consciousness that he identified, a way of thinking that<br />

both underpinned <strong>and</strong> was promoted through capitalism, <strong>and</strong> that was increasingly<br />

made concrete through its projection onto the built environment<br />

through functional modernist planning. Many of these concerns are partic-

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