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Ludic City [II]

‘Splash in every puddle of the city’ Yoko-Ono

Lefebvre’s discussion of everyday life and urbanism centers around the contraddiction between use value (everyday life and the city) and exchange value (modern industrial production) and the dialectical tension between them. He draws on Marx’s analysis of the commodity to explain the implications of capitalist reorganization of everyday life and social practices ((Q. Stevens, The Ludic City, 2007 Routledge)).

Leisure is ‘the critique of everyday life from within: the critique which the everyday makes of itself, the critique of the real by the possible and of one aspect of life by another’ (Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, Vol 1, 1971).

This is the revolutionary aspect of the ‘play’ as arbitrary practices of the everyday: the ability to overtake structures and to discover new needs and forms of sociability. I am not thinking of the category of ‘play’ as kids’ fun, only. As I try to make clear in my photoblog, that can be structured and istitutionalized too (especially if surrounded by the concerns on Health and Safety, today another wording for Moral Panics). What I am more likely referring to is the concept of disruption, anarchic lack of moral order, and partial perception of own identity in the urban environment. In other words, in the cities…

‘the confrontation of different cultural traditions tends to expose their arbitrariness practically, through first-hand experience, in the very heart of everyday order, of the possibility of doing the same things differently, or, no less important, of doing something different at the same time’ (P.Bourdieu 1977:233)

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Ludic City

‘Urbanism makes alienation tangible’ Vaneigem //1996

Where are the mysterious and the subjunctive, the profane and the sacred, the magic and the ritual, the diabolic and the mystical gone? The everyday practice of the modern metropolis has transformed the ‘play into toil, curiosity into fetishism, reciprocity into tyranny, spontaneity into drugery’ (Gilloch 1996 about W. Benjamin).

‘Children are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpentry. In waste production they recognize the face that the world of things turns directly and solely to them. In using these things they do not so much imitate the works of adults as bring together, in the artifact produced in play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive relationship’ (W. Benjamin. ‘Construction Site’ in ‘One-Way Street’)

‘The most beautiful cities were those where festivals were not planned in advance, but there was a space where they could unfold’ H. Lefebvre

One important aspect of ‘play’ is therefore the possibility of the unexpected, the unfamiliar and unhomely, what Lefebvre called the ‘social oeuvre’. ‘Dense spaces and heterogeneous populations can make a significant contribution to social development only where there are chance encounters, social mixing, exploration of the unfamiliar and risk’ ((Q. Stevens: The Ludic City, Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces, 2007: 8, Routledge)) . I added the emphasis to highlight my next point, which is also the point of departures from Stevens analysis: ‘While most of productive work and social reproduction occur in carefully framed settings, play thrives on the density and diversity of people and experiences to be found in urban public space’ (ibidem, my emphasis again). According to Stevens then, probably on the wave of early Lefebvre’s writing on urban public space (1970s), there is:

  • a striking division between public and private;
  • the private is istitutionalised and structured while the public is rather free and subject to change by the people in it;
  • people themselves do not seem to be affected by this division and are two-folded actors.
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