The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

from the body to the globe and, temporally, from the ephemeral and the
briefest moment to the longer time of the generation, cycles of life and
death, and beyond. Architecture is part of the flow of space and time, part
of the interproduction of space, time, and social being.
The Human Subject
Things, Flows, Filters, Tactics
What, then, of social being? It is also in the human subject—in the body,
in the psychoanalytic and in the social and cultural constructions of age,
class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality—that the production of time and
space (and hence of architecture and the city) must be sought.
Lefebvre sees different forms of social construction as central to
the production of space—principally in terms of class, but also of gender,
ethnicity, sexuality, family relations, and age. It is precisely these characteristics
that abstract space tends to erase; therefore, the revolutionary
project must be directed toward restoring them. These are the social
constructions that differential space preserves and emphasizes, ensuring
that the right to the city is not the right to buildings or even public
space but rather the right to be different, the right not to be classified
forcibly into categories determined by homogenizing powers. Against
Gilles Deleuze, Lefebvre formulates difference not as something based
on originality, individualism, and particularity but as that which
emerges from struggle, the conceptual, and the lived. 25
Central to Lefebvre’s thinking on this matter is the human body,
as site not just of cultural endeavor but also of self-appropriation and
adaptation. The body is particularly useful for thinking about the triad
of the perceived, conceived, and lived: spatial practices (perceived)
presuppose the use of body, hands, sensory organs, and gestures—the
practical bases of the perception of the outside world; representations
of space (conceived) include representations of the body, derived from
scientific and anatomical knowledge, and relations with nature; and
spaces of representation (lived experience) include bodies imbued with
culture and symbolism. It is thus the body that helps render the triad
concrete, not purely abstract. It is the body that unites cyclical and linear
time, need and desire, gestures and manipulations of tools; it is the
body that preserves difference within repetition and is, therefore, the
source of innovation out of repetition. This is a recovery of the body
abandoned within Western philosophy, a living body that is at once subject
and object. 26
This body is practical and fleshy. Contemplating space with the
whole body and all senses, not just with the eyes and intellect, allows
more awareness of conflicts and so of a space that is Other. This is a body