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1 CHAPTER ONE The Final Frontier Planetary Urbanization Thus the heavenly spheres that encompassed the world and held it together did not disappear at once in a mighty explosion; the world-bubble grew and swelled before bursting and merging with the space that surrounded it. Alexandre Koyré If we cannot produce a new theory, and I agree it is not easy, we can at least find new words. . . . If we find new words we can hope to produce a framework of understanding. Without a framework, any means of instrumentality are futile. Rem Koolhaas I. Perspective and Prospective Near the beginning of the “Perspective ou prospective?” chapter of Le droit à la ville, the Marxist urban studies godfather, Henri Lefebvre, alludes to the godfather of science fiction, Isaac Asimov. The comment is barely a paragraph long and Lefebvre doesn’t elaborate. Yet even in its brevity Lefebvre’s remark is intriguing, and it has intrigued me for a while now. In this opening chapter, I want to begin to develop what Lefebvre means here, at least what I think he might mean. Specifically, I want to use him for framing the theoretical and political dilemmas that confront progressives in our age of planetary urbanization . For in “Perspective ou prospective,” Lefebvre projects the urban trajectory of his day—1967, the centenary of Marx’s Capital—22,500 years into the future, into the sci-fi imaginary of Asimov’s magisterial Foundation series. The drama focuses on the giant planet-city Trantor with its 40 billion inhabitants, a thoroughly urbanized society of dazzling administrative and technological complexity, dominating a vast galaxy. From outer space at nighttime, Asimov says, Trantor looks like a “giant conglomeration of fire-flies, caught in mid-motion and still forever.”1 “Trantor ’s deserts and its fertile areas were engulfed,” he says, “and made into 2 • chapter one warrens of humanity, administrative jungles, computerized elaborations, vast storehouses of food and replacement parts. Its mountain ranges were beaten down; its chasms filled in. The city’s endless corridors burrowed under the continental shelves and the oceans were turned into huge underground aquacultural cisterns.”2 Canopied under a ceiling of millions of steel domes, like a colossal iceberg, nine-tenths of Trantor’s social life takes place underground in climate-controlled air and light, with programmed downpours. Nobody any longer recognizes day from night, whether the sun shone or not, and after a while few care. The countryside is but a fuzzy memory of ancient hearsay; only the Imperial Palace and Trantor’s Streeling University have real green space. Newcomers would tell you that the air seemed thicker in Trantor, the gravity that much greater, its sheer immensity unnerving. Asimov gives us a brilliant vision of urbanization gone to the max, a veritable utopia-cum-dystopia. In mentioning Asimov under so suggestive a rubric as “perspective/prospective,” Lefebvre already recognized in the late 1960s the seeds of Trantor in our urban midst. With Asimov, he’s seemingly calling for us to open out our perspective on thinking about urban life, daring us to open it out onto the largest remit possible, to grasp the totality of capitalist urbanization wholesale and whole-scale, to live with that startling immensity, to make it our own. In so doing we might then be able to think more clearly about politics—about prospective, progressive politics under planetary urbanization. Lefebvre wants us to know that such a modus operandi is nothing other than transduction, his method of launching the here and now into a future becoming , into a here tomorrow—and the day after tomorrow (as Nietzsche might have said).3 What kind of take on present reality can open up future reality and help us glimpse it as it moves onward, forward? By the time Lefebvre had published La révolution urbaine (1970), he began hinting at this new reality: not a sci-fi reality but something already here, now: “The complete urbanization of society,” he says, in his opener to The Urban Revolution.4 He’s being ironic, of course, but only slightly. Because, he adds, “This hypothesis implies a definition: ‘urban society’ is a society that results from a process of complete urbanization. Today, it’s virtual, tomorrow it will be real.”5 The progression/ periodization is evident: we should no longer talk of cities as such, Lefebvre said in Le droit à la ville, urban society is more appropriate; yet in La révolution urbaine , he began thinking that we shouldn’t even be...

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