The planetary urbanization of non-work

Andy Merrifield

City, 2013, vol. 17, issue 1, 20-36

Abstract: This paper extends an earlier discussion on 'The Politics of the Encounter and the Urbanization of the World’ ( City 16 (3): 269--283). There, I outlined what a politics of the encounter is and might constitute, how it can be seen as a reframed politics of the urban and how it depends on a certain constituency coming together. With the development of urban society (as Lefebvre outlines it), the possibility for sustained and continued encounters between people will grow. But these encounters can be both affirmative attractions (like Occupy) and negative repulsions (like riots). In this present paper, Lefebvre's argument is taken a step further, because, he thinks, there's something else 'immanent’ in urban society: a propensity to create 'post-work’ conditions. This provocative thesis is voiced in an overlooked book called La pensée marxiste et la ville (1972). A shift from cities to urban society is, for Lefebvre, correspondingly a shift from the world of steady work to informal work, or at least to 'post-salaried’ work; and this in the developed as well as developing countries. What Lefebvre says about the city--urban dialectic chimes with what Fredric Jameson recently said about Marx's manufacture--modern industry dialectic: that the passage from the former to the latter necessarily results in the formation of unemployment. We can paraphrase Jameson to express Lefebvre's own thesis, a thesis I want to explore in more detail in what follows: unemployment is structurally inseparable from the dynamic of urbanization and its expansion on a planetary scale, which constitutes the very nature of capitalism as such. The paper is extracted from a book, The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization , due to appear with the University of Georgia Press in April 2013.

Date: 2013
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DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2012.754176

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