from Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space (1974) · 30 November 06 by Ray Crowley
Chapter 6, XIX
“Innumerable groups, some ephemeral, some more durable, have sought to invent a ‘new life’ – usually a communal one. With their trials and errors, successes and failures, such communal experiments have so many denigratiors and champions that we can get a fairly clear picture of them. Among the obstacles that they must have run into and the reasons for their failure when it occurs must certainly be numbered by the absence of an appropriated space, the inability to invent new forms.
[...]
In the end, the invention of a space of enjoyment necessarily implies going through a phase of elitism. The elites of today avoid or reject quantitative models of consumption and homogenizing trends. At the same time, though they cultivate the appearance of differences, these elites are in fact indistinguishable from one another. The ‘masses’ meanwhile, among whom genuine differences exist, and who at the deepest (unconscious) level seek difference, continue to espouse the quantitative and the homogeneous. The obvious reason for this is that the masses must survive before they can live.
[...]
There should be therefore be no cause for surprise when a space-related issue spurs collaboration between very different kinds of people, between those who ‘react’ and those who ‘rebel’. Such coalitions around some particular counter-project, promoting a counter-space in opposition to the one embodied in the strategies of power, occur all over the world.”
Current Reading List from Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space (1974)