This leads to nothing, thus a doubleconclusion. Firstly, the history of philosophical thought can and must reclaim itself from itsrelation with the city (the condition and content of this thought). It is a way of putting thishistory into perspective. Secondly, this articulation figures in the problematic of philosophy andthe city (knowledge, the formulation of the urban problematic, a notion of this context, a strategyto envisage). Philosophical concepts are not operative and yet they situate the city and the urban— and the whole of society — as a totality, over and above analytical fragmentations. What isproclaimed here of philosophy and its history could equally be asserted for art and its history

One knows that Marx neither refuted nor refused the essential Hegelian affirmation: Philoso-phy achieves itself. The philosopher no longer has a right to independence vis-a-vis social prac-tice. Philosophy inserts itself into it. There is indeed a simultaneous becoming-philosophy ofthe world and a becoming-world of philosophy, and therefore a tendency towards wholeness(knowledge and acknowledgement of non-separation). And yet Marx thrusts Hegelianism aside.History does not achieve itself. Wholeness is not reached, nor are contradictions resolved. Itis not by and in the State, with bureaucracy as social support, that philosophy can be realized.The proletariat has this historic mission: only it can put an end to separations (alienations). Itsmission has a double facet: to destroy bourgeois society by building another society — abolishphilosophical speculation and abstraction, the alienating contemplation and systematization, toaccomplish the philosophical project of the human being. It is from industry, from industrial pro-duction, from its relation with productive forces and labour, not from a moral or philosophicaljudgement, that the working class gets its possibilities. One must tum this world upside down:the meeting of the rational and the real will happen in another society.

To the organization of the city itself can be linked the primordial whole of urban form and itscontent, of philosophical form and its meaning: a privileged centre, the core of a political space,the seat of the logos governed by the logos before which citizens are ‘equal’, the regions anddistributions of space having a rationality justified before the logos (for it and by it).The logos of the Greek city cannot be separated from the philosophical logos. The oeuvre of thecity continues and is focused in the work of philosophers, who gather opinions and viewpoints,various oeuvres, and think them simultaneously and collect differences into a totality: urbanplaces in the cosmos, times and rhythms of the city and that of the world (and inversely). It istherefore only for a superficial historicity that philosophy brings to language and concept urbanlife, that of the city. In truth, the city as emergence, language, meditation comes to theoreticallight by means of the philosopher and philosophy

Philosophy is thus born from the city, with its division of labour and multiple modalities. Itbecomes itself a specialized activity in its own right. But it does not become fragmentary, forotherwise it would blend with science and the sciences, themselves in a process of emerging.just as philosophy refuses to engage in the opinions of craftsmen, soldiers and politicians, it re-futes the reasons and arguments of specialists. It has totality as fundamental interest for its ownsake, which is recovered or created by the system, that is, the oneness of thought and being, ofdiscourse and act, of nature and contemplation, of the world (or the cosmos) and human real-ity. This does not exclude but includes meditation on differences (between Being and thought,between what comes from nature and what comes from the city, etc.).

Thesocial division of labour between town and country corresponds to the separation between mate-rial and intellectual labour, and consequently, between the natural and the spiritual

The city links its elements associated withthe form of the communal property (‘common private property’, or ‘privatized appropriation’)of the active citizens, who are in opposition to the slaves. This form of association constitutes ademocracy, the elements, of which are strictly hierarchical and submitted to the demands of theoneness of the city itself. It is the democracy of non-freedom (Marx). During the course of thehistory of the antique city, private property pure and simple (of money, land and slaves) hardens,concentrates, without abolishing the rights of the city over its territory.

Let us leave aside questions posed by the oriental city, the Asiatic mode of production, ‘townand country’ relations in this mode of production, and lastly the formation of ideologies (philoso-phies) on this base. Only the Greek and Roman antique city from which are derived societies andcivilizations known as ‘Western’ will be considered.

The purpose is not to present a philosophy of the city, but on the contrary, to refute suchan approach by giving back to the whole of philosophy its place in history: that of a project ofsynthesis and totality which philosophy as such cannot accomplish. After which the analyticalwill be examined, that is, the ways fragmentary sciences have highlighted or partitioned urbanreality. The rejection of the synthetic propositions of these specialized, fragmentary, and par-ticular sciences will enable us — to pose better — in political terms — the problem of synthesis.During the course of this progress one will find again features and problems which will reap-pear more dearly. In particular, the opposition between use value (the city and urban life) andexchange value (spaces bought and sold, the consumption of products, goods, places and signs)will be highlighted

One can therefore identify the following

How to impose order in this chaotic confusion? It is in this way that organizational rational-ism poses its problem. This is not a normal disorder. How can it be established as norm andnormality? This is unconceivable. This disorder is unhealthy. The physician of modern societysee himself as the physician of a sick social space. Finality? The cure? It is coherence.

Within this perspective critical analysis can distinguish three periods (which do not exactlycorrespond to the distinctions previously made in three acts of the drama of the city).First period. Industry and the process of industrialization assault and ravage pre-existing urbanreality, destroying it through practice and ideology, to the point of extirpating it from reality andconsciousness. Led by a class strategy, industrialization acts as a negative force over urban reality:the urban social is denied by the industrial economic.Second period (in part juxtaposed to the first). Urbanization spreads and urban society be-comes general. Urban reality, in and by its own destruction makes itself acknowledged as socio-economic reality. One discovers that the whole society is liable to fall apart if it lacks the cityand centrality: an essential means for the planned organization of production and consumptionhas disappeared.Third period. One finds or reinvents urban reality, but not without suffering from its destructionin practice or in thinking. One attempts to restitute centrality. Would this suggest that classstrategy has disappeared? This is not certain. It has changed. To the old centralities, to thedecomposition of centres, it substitutes the centre of decision-making.

Hence the surprising results of surveys. More than 80 percent of French people aspire to be owner-occupiers of a house, while a strong majority alsodeclare themselves to be ‘satisfied’ with social housing estates

But housing does not necessarily become a public service. It surfaces into socialconsciousness as a right. It is acknowledged in fact by the indignation raised by dramatic casesand by the discontent engendered by the crisis. Yet it is not formally or practically acknowl-edged except as an appendix to the ‘rights of man’.

A de-urbanized, yet dependent periphery is established around the city. Effectively, these newsuburban dwellers are still urban even though they are unaware of it and believe themselves tobe close to nature, to the sun and to greenery. One could call it a de-urbanizing and de-urbanizedurbanization to emphasize the paradox.

Little by little social consciousness ceased to refer to production and to focus oneveryday life and consumption

It is thus that ‘mortals inhabit while they save the earth, whilethey wait for the gods ... while they conduct their lives in preservation and use’. Thus speaksthe poet and philosopher Heidegger of the concept to inhabit. Outside philosophy and poetrythe same things have been said sociologically in prose

The ‘progressive’ bourgeoisie taking charge of economic growth,endowed with ideological instruments suited to rational growth, moves towards democracy andreplaces oppression by exploitation, this class as such no longer creates — it replaces the oeuvre,by the product.

The urban core has not given wayto a new and well-defined ‘reality’, as the village allowed the city to be born. And yet its reignseems to be ending

It survives because of this double role: as place of consumption andconsumption of place.

At the same time, there and even elsewhere, urbanconcentrations become gigantic: populations are heaped together reaching worrying densities(in surface and housing units). Again at the same time many old urban cores are deteriorating orexploding. People move to distant residential or productive peripheries. Offices replace housingin urban centres. Sometimes (in the United States) these centres are abandoned to the ‘poor’ andbecome ghettos for the underprivileged. Sometimes on the contrary, the most affluent peopleretain their strong positions at the heart of the city (around Central Park in New York, the Maraisin Paris)

We have before us a double process or more precisely, a process with two aspects: industrializa-tion and urbanization, growth and development, economic production and social life. The two‘aspects’ of this inseparable process have a unity, and yet it is a conflictual process. Historicallythere is a violent clash between urban reality and industrial reality. As for the complexity of theprocess, it reveals itself more and more difficult to grasp, given that industrialization does notonly produce firms (workers and leaders of private enterprises), but various offices — banking,financial, technical and political.

Emerging industry tends to establish itself outside cities. Not that it is an absolute law. No lawcan be totally general and absolute. This setting up of industrial enterprises, at first sporadic anddispersed, depended on multiple local regional and national circumstances. For example, printingseems to have been able in an urban context to go from a craft to the private enterprise stage. Itwas, otherwise for the textile industry, for mining, for metallurgy. The new industry establishesitself near energy sources (rivers, woods then charcoal), means of transport (rivers and canals,then railways), raw materials (minerals), pools of labour power (peasant crahmen, weavers andblacksmiths already providing skilled labour)

Which brings forth arguments to back up a thesis: city and urban realityare related to use value. Exchange value and the generalization of commodities by industrializationtend to destroy it by subordinating the city and urban reality which are refuges of use value, theorigins of a virtual predominance and revalorization of use.

This city is itself ‘oeuvre’, a feature which contrasts with the irreversibletendency towards money and commerce, towards exchange and products.

There was the oriental city (linked to the Asiatic mode of production),

To present and give an account of the ‘urban problematic’, the point of departure must be theprocess of industrialization. Beyond any doubt this process has been the dynamic of transfor-mations in society for the last century and a half. If one distinguishes between the inductor andthe induced, one can say that the process of industrialization is inductive and that one can countamong the induced, problems related to growth and planning, questions concerning the city andthe development of the urban reality, without omitting the growing importance of leisure ac-tivities and questions related in ‘culture’

Thislittle book does not only propose to critically analyse thoughts and activities related to urbanism.It’s aim is to allow its problems to enter into consciousness and political policies

This work will take an offensive form (that some will perhaps find offending). Why?Because conceivably each reader will already have in mind a set of ideas systematized or in theprocess of being systematized. Conceivably, each reader is looking for a ‘system’ or has foundhis ‘system’. The System is fashionable, as much in thought as in terminologies and language.Now all systems tend to close off reflection, to block off horizon. This work wants to break upsystems, not to substitute another system, bur to open up through thought and action towardspossibilities by showing the horizon and the road. Against a form of reflection which tends to-wards formalism, a thought which tends towards an opening leads the struggle

Frederic Nietzsche