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Narrating the Organic City: A Lefebvrian Approach to City Planning, the Novel, and Urban Theory in Spain

2009; Eastern Michigan University; Volume: 39; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jnt.0.0034

1549-0815

Benjamín Fraser,

Urban Planning and Governance

Narrating the Organic CityA Lefebvrian Approach to City Planning, the Novel, and Urban Theory in Spain1 Benjamin Fraser (bio) "A living creature has slowly secreted a structure; take this living creature in isolation, separate it from the form it has given itself according to the law of its species, and you are left with something soft, slimy and shapeless; what can it possibly have in common with this delicate structure, its ridges, its grooves, its symmetries, its every detail revealing smaller, more delicate details as you examine it more closely? But it is precisely this link, between the animal and its shell, that one must try to understand… . This community has shaped its shell, building and rebuilding it, modifying it again and again according to its needs." —Henri Lefebvre, "Notes on the New Town (April 1960)," Introduction to Modernity Of the many questions posed by the self-proclaimed "Marxist philosopher" Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991), few have proved to be as pertinent as his inquiries into the nature of city life.2 Referencing Lefebvre is now perhaps de rigueur in the studies of city life and of space more broadly conceived. His work, written in French and totaling more than sixty books, forms an intensely political project that reconciles Karl Marx's superb [End Page 369] critique of capital with attention directed to both spatiality and the practices of everyday life. One of his more epic contributions is the multi-volume Critique of Everyday Life (1947, 1961, 1981), to which the posthumously published work Rhythmanalysis (1992) provides a fitting conclusion. Nevertheless, he is perhaps most well known in the Anglophone world for his 1974 work The Production of Space (translated into English in 1991), which has already influenced a generation of scholars, geographers and literary critics.3 This essay invokes the Lefebvrian tradition to look at the narrative treatment of the city found, not merely in novels, but also in works of city planning and contemporary urban theory. Specifically, it is motivated to contextualize the nascence of modern urban planning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a largely metaphorical mode of thinking whereby the city is conceived as a living organism. Whereas the advent of modern urban planning saw fit to use the organic metaphor as a way to subject the city to a clinical paradigm, mid-late twentieth-century writers have used this same metaphor as a way of contesting the reduction of city life to a formula through its exploration in novelistic works and urban theories. Remaining partial to my own area of expertise (Spanish Cultural Studies), I want to sketch out how this metaphor operates in different ways across three different case studies. These studies will focus on, in turn, the city planning of Ildefons Cerdà, the novels of Luis Martín-Santos and Belén Gopegui (Tiempo de silencio and La escalas de los mapas), and the recent urban theories of Lefebvrian critic Manuel Delgado Ruiz. In each of these cases—city planning, novelistic discourse, and urban theories—the metaphorical portrayal of the city as a living organism constitutes a fundamental part of the author's narrative, and in each case the use of this metaphor is directed toward a certain end. Nineteenth-century urban reform in Spain, for example, employed the metaphor to bring life to its otherwise overly rational understanding of the city as a planar surface. The noted Catalán urban planner and theorist Cerdà (1815–1876), just as Baron Haussmann in second-regime Paris, envisioned the city as a flat spatial plane composed of isolated objects that could be skillfully unified through the planner's designs. In the case of Cerdà, as in the case of Haussmann, the organic metaphor provided organized city planning with a convenient rationale for their decision to see the city in simplistic terms— purely as an agglomeration of streets and buildings. Strangely enough, the [End Page 370] idea that the city was akin to a human body was employed conceptually to do away with people themselves, as planners envisioned the city as a large-scale abstractly geometrical problem. This process runs counter to Lefebvre's insistence that the urban be seen on a continuum midway...