In his book »The Urban Revolution« (1970), the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre reconstructs the history of the urbanization process, which is shaped by three spatio-temporal »continents«: the rural, the industrial and the urban. These are all fields of power and conflict that represent specific manners of thought, action and life. These epochs not only mark a historical sequence, but also a spatial juxtaposition; they can overlap and interlock. The dynamics of the bourgeois revolution thus resulted from conflicting layers of eras and mentalities – from capitalism and pre-industrial production, from castes and classes, from inherited legitimacy and acquired property. The aristocracy still set the tone, but the bourgeois was already the truly active subject. The axis of social production and reproduction was already determined by the relation between labour and capital. Today, in the same way, the countries of Asia, Latin America and Africa are simultaneously passing through an agricultural, an industrial and an urban era. Lefebvre sees »industrialization« and »urbanization« as forming a dialectic unity: the industrialization of society always also means its urbanization. Industrial dynamics lead to a concentration of labour and means of production - that is, to the formation of conglomerations -, while industrialization also brings about the consolidation of an urban infrastructure. This process can be clearly seen in the People’s Republic of China. This country has not only grown into the »workbench« of the world economy, but is also going through a period of unbelievably rapid urbanization.
On Lefebvre’s space-time axis, the city at first resembles an island surrounded by an ocean of land. Then there comes a precarious balance in which both worlds confront each other on an equal footing. As capitalism prevails, the city increasingly gains the upper hand. Finally, it bursts its bounds and consumes the remnants of rural existence. Even though the city no longer represents a specific manner of production and life once society is completely urbanized, it does not lose its specific function of centrality; indeed, it is re-established as a centre of control and decision-making. Lefebvre attributes this new quality of centrality among other things to the spread of modern information technologies. Flows of data and knowledge from all over the world can be condensed and processed at one point; simultaneity becomes more intensive. This process means that urban centres are increasingly given the task of driving forward the intellectualization of productive labour. In Lefebvre’s view, this leads to a transformation of the city-country contrast. The main opposition is now to be sought within the phenomenon of urbanization: »between the centrality of power and other forms of centrality, between the ›wealth-power‹ centre and the peripheries, between integration and segregation«.
The production of unequal spaces
The phenomenon of globalization is often equated space losing its meaning. According to this point of view, geographical locations can barely be told apart and no longer serve as primary reference points of identity and everyday life for many people. The system of the global society consists solely of communication that transcends any territoriality.
However deterritorialized capital may appear, its global reproduction can only take place because it moves within the international spatial matrix of labour processes and exploitation. The process of capital accumulation and the forms of regulation associated with it always articulate themselves in territorial guises. In its worldwide search for surplus profits, capital relies on labour markets that are spatially segmented and qualitatively different. One fundamental characteristic of capital is that it is always producing and bolstering new regional inequalities and unequal relationships. This means that, on the one hand, capital endeavours to remove spatial obstacles to its circulation – a procedure Karl Marx called »the destruction of space by time«. However, on the other, this urge to continually accelerate the circulation of capital also needs the »production of space« (Henri Lefebvre). For goods and merchandise can circulate only when a material infrastructure has been established. Spatial organization is thus a necessary prerequisite for overcoming space. But such investments mean that capital is bound up for long periods of time in urban structures. And as this structural environment is relatively immovable, it sooner or later comes into conflict with the dynamics of technological innovations and changed strategies of economic value creation. Capitalism produces a geographic landscape that for a time corresponds to the respective model of development before destroying it once more in the next cycle. The organization of new territorial divisions of labour or the opening up of dynamic regions are possible solutions for absorbing surplus capital and surplus labour, particularly in the case of big economic crises, of which there have been many in the last two hundred years. Redirecting capital flows leaves behind traces of destruction in the traditional spatial structures in the form of abandoned factories, ghost buildings and depopulated urban districts. At the same time, the aim of this restructuring is to prepare the way for the next period of growth with a new spatial matrix of the division of labour.
The Fordian process of accumulation led to a mosaic of zones that embraced the entire space as a centre-periphery structure, both within national societies and at an international level. Since the eighties, however, the Fordian mosaic has been increasingly replaced by networks whose centres are more closely connected with each other than with their direct surroundings. This is an »archipelago« economy with productive poles of growth and the simultaneous marginalization of the spaces in between. It is interesting that the structures of socio-spatial inequality are repeated at all territorial levels – local, regional, national, global: centres and peripheries interpenetrate one another, while the »submerged« regions between the archipelagos are increasingly severed off. They thus cease to be peripheries in the conventional sense, as no complementary relationships exist to other spaces.
Versions of periphery
The sociologist Niklas Luhmann is of the view that the centre-periphery structure results from the differentiation of centres. »It is at home in the centre, so to speak. For this reason, the centre, with its acquisitions and differentiations, depends on this form of differentiation more than the periphery.« Although the modern social system is designed for the »inclusion of the entire population, »to the surprise of all people of good will«, there is nonetheless exclusion. Anyone who dares a visit to the favelas in large South American cities, says Luhmann, can attest to the fact that all explanatory models fail. He sees there what he believes is an existence reduced to mere physicality, one that is »indifferent to bourgeois values – order, cleanliness and self-presentation included«. »Physical violence, sexuality, the satisfaction of physical urges are given free rein (that is, without regard to symbolic codes), and this prevents communication based on complex assumptions«. As Luhmann is only concerned with the distinction between inclusion and exclusion with respect to the »order of communication«, the decisive question arises for him of »whether an individual’s participation is called relevant or non-relevant. In one case, something depends on how s/he acts and reacts; in the other, nothing does.« From this central perspective, the slum inhabitants seem »non-relevant« and thus do not fit into the communication context of global society. In his examination of inequality, Lebfevre refers to regional differences, but they are interpreted only as »slow development«: in his opinion, the semantics of »modernization/modernity« makes it possible to represent »the regions of global society as more or less modernized«. Basically, Luhmann works with simple assumptions of modernization theories defining heterogeneity and dissimultaneity solely as deviations from a social development conceived in evolutionary terms that started in western Europe.
In a certain regard, the Russian cultural semiotician Yuri Lotman takes up the opposite stance. He sees the periphery not only as a place of exclusion, but also as a place of resistance from which emerges creative potential. In his view, the centre generates normative descriptions that are then extended to cover the entire culture. Because the local discourses of the periphery do not match the norm of the centre, they are considered as non-existent or non-compatible from its point of view. However, owing to the fact that it subordinates itself to the norms it itself produces, the centre is immobile. For this reason, it can no longer be the source of any innovative impetus. The periphery, on the other hand, produces new ideas and texts that break with the norms of the centre and are creative in an aesthetic regard. From time to time, certain artistic expressions coming from the periphery are therefore seen as being more interesting than those of the centre. In the end, the exchange leads to the revolutionary, peripheral trend moving at some stage into the normalizing centre. Lotman feels that this recognition of the former periphery is at first of advantage; after all, the goal of every aesthetic endeavour is to emerge from a state of marginalization. On the other hand, this process amounts in the end to a taming of the formerly »wild« peripheral phenomena. They lose the sheen of the avant-garde, are infected by the static nature of the centre, and are finally replaced by a new peripheral trend. The problem with Lotman’s theory is his assessment of the phenomenon of the periphery from an aesthetic, productivistic point of view that in the final analysis sees the loss of a marginal status as a hindrance to creativity. The socio-spatial and political effects of a longstanding exclusion are ignored.
Provinciality and centrality
The term »province« is an extremely enigmatic phenomenon. In vernacular speech, the associations tend to be rather pejorative in nature: either having to do with boredom and social isolation or used as the expression of oppressive political and social conditions. A bastion of dullness that makes even city dwellers who move there provincial bumpkins in the long run. Carl Améry highlights this circumstance with a little story: a civil servant from the Austrian capital, Vienna, who has ended up in Linz describes his own development to an old friend as follows: »In the first year – you think you’re dying. In the second year – you start getting a bit dopey. And in the third – well, in the third you’ve simply become a Linzer.«
Of course, one can’t stop at such preconceptions; after all, the province also embodies the structural inequality of spaces. In the pre-industrial period, »province« was still mainly limited to the contrast in some points between the capital and the plain countryside. The various regions were still relatively similar to one another. Apart from a few centres of trade and commerce, the existing differences resulted from agricultural and topographical conditions. But the inequalities took on completely different dimensions when industrialization came along. The differences were no longer just here and there: whole regions were taken up by the dynamics of the capitalist, consumerist economy; the differences and gaps between the various regions began to deepen. The province changed from being an almost self-contained small society limited to the regional market to a territorial formation that was dependent on the national and international market in a variety of ways. Fordism then brought with it a comprehensive normalization and homogenization of society. This method of regulation was fundamentally geared to a quantitative increase in the production volume and a spatial expansion of industrial structures. On the assumption that the national territory as a whole represented the decisive geographical unit, a basic framework of »central locations« was to produce steady growth and get rid of existing socio-spatial disparities. The aim was to achieve a »uniformity of living standards« and a balanced welfare situation throughout society. Urban developers tried to create a homogeneous space that overarched the functional separations of work, dwelling and transport. »The result of this standardization and integration,« wrote the social psychologist Peter Brückner towards the end of the seventies, »is a new form of ›reality‹, i.e. normality, which only registers the particular, the qualitative ›other‹ as deviant. (…) Anything special disappears in the shadows.« The difference between the superimposed layers is levelled out: urban and transport systems, education, manners and modes of perception are modernized and brought into line.
Does this mean that the »provincial« and dissimultaneity also vanish? Henri Lefebvre feels that the complete urbanization of society should not be equated with a homogenization of the social space, since the city is re-created as a decision-making centre. Its logic implies the simultaneity of everything that can be condensed at one point. On the one hand, the productivity of centrality consists in the way it brings together different elements of the society and allows them to interreact. This can lead to the creation of something new and surprising. On the other hand, however, access to this social resource is controlled by the authorities, which limits urban-based productivity. At the same time, says Lefebvre, the dynamics of the present process of urbanization derives its vitality from the contrast between centralization and diffusion: »Every point can become a focal point, a privileged location where everything converges. This means that every urban space carries within it this possible-impossible, its own negation. Thus, every urban space was, is and will be concentric and poly-(multi-)centric.« So centrality would seem to be virtually omnipresent in urbanized society. A situation that also applies in reverse to »provinciality«. A »globalized« intellectual can be completely blind and ignorant with regard to the conditions of the local – this would make her/him nothing other than an »urban bumpkin«.
Translated by Timothy Jones