As part of my graduate seminar in Urban Geography, we tried to work through Henri Lefebvre's
The Urban Revolution last night. There were large parts of the book that I found alternately frustrating, opaque, and disorganized, but our discussion did help me realize some of the aspects of Lefebvre's work that I found inspiring and energizing. One of them - and the point I took a photograph of above - had to do with the general problem that writers and thinkers like Lefebvre take on: How do we transform the conditions in which we live even though we're stuck in them? Part of Lefebvre's work involves this impulse to step outside, to identify a new path to a new horizon - and to use that work (partly analytical, partly imaginative) to leverage change in the present. If Lefebvre's work is guided by this desire to argue that the world
should be different, the opening task of the book is to develop a different way of understanding the conditions in which we live. Just because that place doesn't yet exist - and this is why u-topia is so interesting for him - isn't an obstacle to our theorizing of it.
I submitted a grant application the other day for a new project thinking about memory-work. During the course of our work last night, I realized that there's a considerable degree of overlap between Lefebvre's question and what I'm starting to think through with the memory project: How do people engage in memory-work in order to make a world differently? In other words, even though the vocabulary and practices of memory seem to always take us back to the idea of the 'nation,' this project is interested in looking for forms of memory that don't map neatly onto the nation.
In any event: It's a cool, dry March morning. The snow has largely melted - it will return, of course, but there's the sense that the seasons are beginning to tip ever so slowly into the careening greens of spring.
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