Pro metropolis, against metropolis

a lefebvrian perspective of the urban counter revolution

Abstract

Starting from a fundamental contradiction, which is also present in Henri Lefebvre’s work – town-country – this article aims to draw a radical critique to the metropolis, characterizing it as the urban counter-revolution. The method applied here mobilizes critically part of Lefebvre’s work and illuminates the urban problematic by its antithesis, precisely to point it as an obstacle to the urban, based on the assumption that the hypothesis held within Lefebvre’s work, the total urbanization, contains a fundamental contribution to the search of emancipated, differential and autonomous relations in the worldwide city everydayness. Through the notions of the dialectic between forms and contents, continuity and discontinuity, and the triad homogeneity-fragmentation-hierarchization, the analysis of the urban fabric expansion and the instrumentalization of space highlights, as a result, the metropolization as an increasing detachment from the lefebvrian urban, (im)possible virtuality of the big cities become