TY - CHAP

T1 - Politics, embodiment, everyday life

T2 - Lefebvre and spaces of organizing

AU - Beyes, Timon

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - 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).

AB - 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).

KW - Sociology

KW - Cultural studies

U2 - 10.4324/9781315302430

DO - 10.4324/9781315302430

M3 - Contributions to collected editions/anthologies

SN - 9781138236400

SP - 27

EP - 45

BT - Organisational Space and Beyond

A2 - Wasserman, Varda

A2 - Dale, Karen

A2 - Kingma, Sytze F.

PB - Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

CY - London

ER -