The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Claremont Road Situation
As the carrot of material affluence, the promise of fulfillment, is dangled in
front of workers’ eyes, they seem prepared to surrender more and more of
themselves to alienated drudgery. And as alienation deepens, so the search for
wholeness in the form of commodities becomes ever more fervent. More and
more areas of life become reified, and the possibility of authentic pleasure becomes
more and more remote. There is little choice but to conform to the demands
of the workplace in order to pay for spectacular pleasures.
We can thus speculate that Lefebvre and the situationists might
have interpreted the building of an urban motorway, such as that resisted at
Claremont Road, somewhat differently. What Lefebvre may have seen primarily
as an outcome of a supposedly rational division of social space into
functional parts, the situationists would probably have understood as an
attempt to speed up the circulation of commodities—a deepening of the
alienating spectacle. Undoubtedly they would have agreed that the motorway
was symptomatic of the culture of separation, and therefore implicated
in capitalism’s hold over society.
But where they were really on common ground was in their advocacy
of certain tactics to undercut capitalism’s power. Both Lefebvre and the
situationists argued that the key step was to begin living a richer, less alienated,
more participatory culture—what Lefebvre described as a “new romanticism.”
9 This was a mental nomadism that denied the separation of
knowledge, experience, and imagination into distinct intellectual categories,
a new exploratory consciousness that would revel in the human potential
for emotional intensity. Through a fusion of art into everyday life,
people should rediscover their ability to control their own lives. And this
was also a spatial issue. For although they tended to disguise it under abstract
theorizations, both Lefebvre and the situationists shared the belief
that capitalism’s objectification of space had destroyed the places in which
such a way of being might otherwise naturally occur. Space had come to be
seen as an absolute, as no more than a mappable field of geometrical coordinates
all equally emptied of human content. They might have argued over
whether the change derived from the desire to rationally “know” space or
from its commodification into equally exchangeable plots; but Lefebvre and
the situationists agreed that in the fight against capitalism, place had to be
reasserted over space. That this was their guiding purpose needs to be
stressed, if only because it is so often overlooked. Lefebvre’s “science of
space” was intended as a fundamental challenge to the conventional knowledge
of space. 10 He adopted terminology that would overwrite the scientific
conceptions he opposed, presumably with the intention of removing them
from social discourse. Otherwise he might have described his project with
greater sincerity as the “science of place” or the “culture of space.” His aim