Politics, embodiment, everyday life: Lefebvre and spaces of organizing

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In 1986, Henri Lefebvre and the French architects Serge Renaudie and Pierre Guilbaud submitted a proposal for the International Competition for the New Belgrade Urban Structure Improvement, held by the City of Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia. The call had asked for designs to improve ‘the unfinished plan of the central zone and the enlargement of the modern city’ (Blagojevic´, 2009: 120). The proposal, however, began by rejecting the assumptions of definitive design and detailed planning. ‘We can only rejoice’, Lefebvre and the architects stated, ‘that Novi Beograd is unfinished’ (Renaudie et al., 2009: 6). To continue the ‘neo-rationalist’ types of organizing the city and its zoning would fail; ‘the resistance of the population … expresses an important loss of the “organizational message” ’ (p. 8). To adopt an eclectic ‘post-modern historicism’ would not work either, provoking merely endless disagreement on the epoch and styles best adaptable to the present. ‘As with every dynamic organization’, the authors wrote, ‘cities are fluid and mobile and any attempt to stop them in order to analyse and represent them risks killing them’ (p. 11).
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationOrganisational Space and Beyond : The Significance of Henri Lefebvre for Organisation Studies
EditorsVarda Wasserman, Karen Dale, Sytze F. Kingma
Number of pages19
Place of PublicationLondon
PublisherRoutledge Taylor & Francis Group
Publication date2018
Pages27-45
ISBN (Print)9781138236400
ISBN (Electronic)9781315302430
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2018