Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

U r b a n i t y
“I would’ve liked to have taught in Moscow,” he admitted in 1988.
But each time he tried, “they always denied it me.”) 13 He journeyed
to Italy, adored Venice and Florence; he traveled throughout North
America and South America, went to New York (with Norbert
Guterman) and Los Angeles, to Montreal and Toronto; he lectured
in Mexico City and Santiago; in San Paulo, Rio, and Brasilia; in
Caracas and Buenos Aires. In Africa, he knew Algiers and Tunis,
Casablanca and Dakar. He toured around Iran and China, discovered
Tehran and Shanghai and Beijing; went to Japan and Tokyo
and onward on to Australia and Sydney.
In 1983 to 1984, at the invitation of literary critic Fredric
Jameson, Lefebvre spent a semester in the History of Consciousness
Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and deepened
his fascination—and disgust—with West Coast–style urbanization.
“It’s extremely difficult to give an answer to the question of
which city one likes and dislikes,” he once owned up, “for detestable
cities are intriguing. Take Los Angeles. For a European it’s
appalling and unlivable. You can’t get around without a car and
you pay exorbitant sums to park it. … What fascinates and disgusts
me are the streets of luxury shops with superb windows but
which you can’t enter into. … These streets are empty. And not
far from there, you have a street, a neighborhood, where 200,000
Salvadorian immigrants are exploited to death in cellars and lofts.”
Yet there is “singing and dancing,” he says, “something stupendous
and fascinating. You are and yet you’re not in a city, stretching
for 150 kilometers, with twelve million inhabitants. Such wealth!
Such poverty!” At the same time, “you feel that the Hispanics have
a counterculture, and they make the society, the music, painting
(the murals they’ve created are beautiful).” 14 Lefebvre took numerous
trips to Los Angeles. One time, he and Jameson (who was
then working on his Bonaventure Hotel/Postmodernism article),
together with UCLA geographer–planner Ed Soja, did a downtown
tour. “He was fascinated,” recalled Soja, “particularly by the
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