The Right to the City

is true that the town and country separation and contradiction (which envelops without reducing to itself the opposition of the two terms) is part of the social division of labour, it must be acknowledged that this division is neither overcome nor mastered. Far from it. No more than the separation of nature and society, and that of the material and the intellectual (spiritual). Overcoming this today cannot not take place from the opposition between urban fabric and centrality. It presupposes the invention of new urban forms. As far as industrial countries are concerned, one can conceive polycentric cities, differentiated and renovated centralities, even mobile centralities (cultural ones for example). The critique of planning as ideology can be about such and such a conception of centrality (for example, the distinction between the urban and the centres of information and decision-making). Neither traditional city (separated from the countryside to better dominate it), nor the Megalopolis without form or fabric, without woof or warp, would be the guiding idea. The disappearance of centrality is neither called for theoretically nor practically. The only question that can be asked is this one: ‘What social and political forms, what theory will one entrust with the realization on the ground of a renovated centrality and fabric, freed from their degradations?’