Stuart Elden: In your authored book, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of

Theory, you convincingly demonstrate that Lefebvres work on space and urban questions should be seen as much an
engagement with planners, urban developers and architects, as with philosophers and theorists. Could you say
something about that project, and how it led you to look at archival materials as much as Lefebvres published works and
those of his academic interlocutors?

ukasz Stanek: My interest in Lefebvres theory goes back to an empirical case: Nowa Huta, a new town constructed
by the Polish socialist regime since the late 1940s close to Krakw. I was a student of architecture in Krakw in the early
2000s, and I was very intrigued by Nowa Huta, both because of its excellent urban plan and because of the fact that the
development of this city was dependent on its mass media representations. In fact, since the beginnings of Nowa Huta
and long after its inclusion into the administrative unity of Krakw, its development was defined by a logic of catching
up with its mass media image as the young, airy, modern, humane, green, wealthy, atheist, socialist city. Yet after the
end of socialism in 1989, this image of Nowa Huta clashed with an opposite one: that of the city of retired workers and
unemployed youth, with crumbling infrastructure and an ecological catastrophe.
In the 1990s, these competing images were vividly discussed in the mass media and had an impact on the production of
space in Nowa Huta, and the practices of architecture. While trying to make sense of these processes, I came across
Lefebvres theory, which I thought to be a good starting point for investigating Nowa Huta because of Lefebvres
strategic decision to theorize social space as a relationship between various practices of space production.
They include the practices of representing space which are interrelated to other practices, but not derived from them.
Specifically, for my Nowa Huta research this meant that I was not so much interested in confirming or refuting
representations of the city, but rather I investigated specific conjunctures in which representations of space became
operative; for example as arguments in municipal investment policies, as conceptual frames for architectural
competitions; as operative design concepts, but also as media of everyday experiences of urban spaces.

This led me to the study on Lefebvres own engagement with empirical research, in the studies in urban and rural
sociology which he carried out and supervised from the 1940s to the 1980s, commissioned by a number of French
planning and cultural institutions. Such studies as Lhabitat pavillonnaire(1966), together with Lefebvres theoretical
books, in particularThe Right to the City (1968), had a major impact on French architectural culture in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. I was looking at these debates as a part of Lefebvres exchanges with French and international architects of
various generations, from modernists like Georges-Henri Pingusson, to postmodern architects and critics like Ricardo
Bofill and Bernard Huet; from architects like Fernand Poullion, who combined the sensitivity of the modern movement
with an attention to traditional urban typologies, to avant-garde artists, like the situationists or Constant Nieuwenhuys.

But I have maintained my interest in the empirical potential of Lefebvres theory which will be in the focus of the
forthcoming book Urban Revolution Now, co-edited by kos Moravnszky and Christian Schmid. This book stems from
two conferences which we organized and it maps current processes of planetary urbanization by means of a
number of specific analyses of urban conditions around the globe by developing and, sometimes challenging,
Lefebvres concepts.
SE: In this research, as you recount in the closing pages of Henri Lefebvre on Space, you discovered a manuscript of an
unpublished work, Vers une architecture de la jouissance, dating from 1973, written immediately before The
Production of Space. Your introduction plays with Jan Potockis storyThe Manuscript found in Saragossa. Where did you
discover this text, and what is the story of why Lefebvre never published it?

Lefebvre with his daughter Armelle and Mario Gaviria, courtesy of Mario Gaviria and the Graham Foundation.

S: When I was working on Henri Lefebvre on Space, I tried to interview as many friends, collaborators and students of
Lefebvre as I could, also those outside Paris, who tend to be off the radar of scholarship. I was particularly interested
in Spain because of Lefebvres strong connections with this country stemming from his childhood at the foot of the
Pyrenees, and his intense contacts with Spanish architects such as Ricardo Bofill, and planners, like Mario Gaviria. In
2008 I went to Barcelona to interview Bofill about the project City in Space, which Lefebvre advised him on in the late
1960s, and to Zaragoza, to see Mario Gaviria. Since his work in the late 1960s, Gaviria belongs to the most important
contributors to urban sociology and spatial planning in Spain, he was a pioneer of sustainable planning in Spain and an
ecological activist. (When I visited him last time, he was packing for an antinuclear protest). He studied in Strasbourg
with Lefebvre in the early 1960s, and he gathered Lefebvres papers on rural and urban questions into the anthology Du
rural lurbain (1970), a key book in Lefebvres work on space production. He became a close friend of Lefebvre
and he was instrumental in the translation of Lefebvres texts into Spanish, including The Right to the City, and he invited
Lefebvre to Madrid, where he was studying modernist housing estates. This research was probably the first application
of Lefebvres work to urban research outside France, with all challenges which such transfers involvewhich I can
appreciate because of my Nowa Huta research. He speaks in more detail on his contacts with Lefebvre in this interview,
which Ive recorded last year.
Gaviria was particularly interested in the question of tourist urbanization of Spain where, he thought, something new
was emerging. With these interests in view, in 1972 Gaviria invited Lefebvre to write a book about Architecture of
pleasure within a research projects funded by the March foundation of the March Bank of Mallorca. I am very interested
in this status of commissioned research, which was shared by Lefebvres own studies, because it shows a new
relationship between critical intellectuals, including Marxist intellectuals, and the self-critical system of governance and
economy that was about to emerge in Western Europe since the 1960s. In contrast to Manfredo Tafuri, the most
influential Marxist architectural critic at that time, who was never tired of pointing out at the dangers of
recuperation of a progressive project by its ideological opponents, Lefebvre addressed these processes of
normalization of critique from within particular research projects, often hijacking them according to his own
interest.
Unfortunately for Gaviria, this was also what Lefebvre did with the commission on Spain. It was supposed to be focused
on the new tourist towns such as Benidorm and Torremolinos, and to reflect upon the Alhambra and the Generalife

gardensbut the text became something entirely different. Lefebvre changed the title of the book to Vers une
architecture de la jouissance (which, after long debates, we decided to translate as Toward an Architecture of
Enjoyment) and the book reflects his then-current work on the overarching theory of space production. Several ideas of
the book, in particular about architecture, were included in a condensed form to The Production of Space. Also,
Gavirias concept of tourist neo-colonization of southern Europe by the North can be found in The Production
of Space as well. I understand from Gaviria that Lefebvre transferred the rights to the manuscript to him, but Gaviria did
not include the manuscript in the documents submitted to the commissioner because he thought that it was not specific
enough.
In any case, during our conversations in Zaragoza, Gaviria said that the manuscript should be still there in his library in
Cortes, a small village on the border between Navarra and Aragon, where his family owned a house. We went there the
next day: the house was an impressive mansion located at the main square next to the village church, with rooms
growing since the 17th century around anazulejo staircase. The library was in the basement and it had been recently
flooded, so the books to the level of approximately 1 meter were destroyed and became dried-up papier-mch
briquettes. So the big question was not only if the manuscript was there, but also if it was above or below the 1 meter
level. After a few hours Mario found it lying just above this level, and allowed me to make a Xerox copy in the nearby
shop.

SE: Thats a remarkable story. This text was translated by Robert Bonnono, and is coming out shortly with University of
Minnesota Press (you can read a preview in Artforum). This is the first publication in any language. I know from firsthand experience that rights to Lefebvres work can be complicated, and there are so many books untranslated. So how
were you able to secure the rights to translate this, and, second, convince UMP to publish this, rather than any number
of alternative texts that Lefebvre chose to publish? Do you think we will see the French text published at some point?
S: Technically, the book is a research report, and it was Mario Gaviria who acquired the rights to this text, so the
agreement was signed with him. The Spanish translation is planned for this year, and I hope that the French publication
will follow. Such publication would extend the rather restricted focus on Lefebvre in France today, which by and large is
historical and relates to the institutionalization of the recherche urbaine and intersections between French politics and
urban question around May 68 and after.
The book will complement UMPs particularly strong list in architecture, developed in the last years by Pieter Martin into
one of the most interesting lists in the United States. This publication responds to the centrality of Lefebvres writings in
Anglo-American architectural culture since the 1990s. Importantly, it was the concept of the everyday rather than of
space that was first introduced by architectural critics like Mary McLeod, because it allowed her and others to target the
neo-avant-garde and the sequence of heroic gestures emulating the avant-gardes of the 1920s and their definition of
architecture as space. Then-recently translated Critique of Everyday Life inspired architectural writers in the US and
the UK (Margaret Crawford, Iain Borden, Jane Rendell) to speculate about an architecture more attentive to peoples
everyday environments. Before long, other Lefebvres concepts became pertinent for the debate, including
rhythmanalysis, right to the city, complete urbanization and, yes, the production of space. The latter taking on a
meaning which is very far from modernism and allows rethinking architecture as a part of an assemblage of multifaceted
and heterogeneous practices of space productionthe book Spatial Agency which closely follows Lefebvres concepts
could be a recent example. The fact that these concepts are more often than not inchoate and hardly prt--penser is
their strength rather than their weakness, because, in this way, they need to be specified, developed, questioned, and
criticized from within each given case study; this helps architectural research to become more empirical, hands on,
historically and geographically specific and interdisciplinary.

Poster of the conference Urban Research and Architecture: Beyond Henri Lefebvre (Zurich, November 24-26, 2009).
Design by Jack Henrie Fisher.

SE: Can I ask you to develop that a bit more? As youve said, this is a text written in the early 1970s, for a quite specific
commission. How do you think this text will be read today, both as a text by Lefebvre and a text on architecture? In
Anglophone debates, Lefebvres The Production of Space is often not well-situated in relation to his other works. We
obviously need to see it as the theoretical culmination of several years of work on urban and, crucially, rural
questions. Your book on Lefebvre provides a great deal more detail on Lefebvres engagements with more
practical spatial questions. But now we have architecture alongside the extensive discussion of planning, transport
and infrastructure in his urban writings. So, aside from your very helpful introduction, and of course own your book, what
else might be needed to situate and make most profitable use of this work?
S: The book is not a blueprint and only somebody who has no clue about Lefebvres work could expect that he would
give us a manual of urban design. I think that the merit of publishing Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment for
architectural debates is twofold. First, this book advances our understanding of the landscape of architectural culture
after 1968, in particular the Marxist one. With this book we can better grasp the differences in the projects of particular
thinkers who shaped this discussion, including Tafuri, Lefebvre, and the re-discovered Walter Benjamin, but also their
shared ground. To contrast Lefebvre and Tafuri has become almost a habit since Frederic Jamesons essay
Architecture and the Critique of Ideology (1984) where he put Tafuri and Lefebvre into an imaginary polemics
a polemics which actually took place and was recorded in minutes. There is no doubt that there are major
differences between them, and I have pointed out at one of them before. The publication ofToward an
Architecture of Enjoyment, which begins with a very clear opposition to Tafuri even if his name is not
mentioned, will bring the actual voice of Lefebvre to this discussion, rather than extrapolating it from his more
general statements.

Henri Lefebvre in front of the petrochemical factory in Mourenx. Courtesy of Het Internationaal Filosofen Project and the
Graham Foundation.

Yet at the same time I am convinced that Lefebvres work allows advancing some unfinished projects in Marxist
architectural theory, including those of Tafuri and of Benjamin. This pertains to Tafuris postulate of
architectural history as a part of the global history of labour. Lefebvres discussion of architecture within the
social division of labour and his work on planetary urbanization, and hence on architectural labour in a
transnational perspective, seem to me indispensable for Tafuris project. I also find particularly important
Lefebvres stress on the collective dimension of architecture which includes him speculating on the use-economy as
opposed to the exchange-economy and on the collective pedagogy of space, but also his comments on collective
modes of experience and imagination. If architecture is the medium for collective experience, as Benjamin argued,
Lefebvres writings help us to understand how the collective is fashioned in and by this experience, creating
conditions not only of a reflexive discovery of an urban solitude, but also of a possibility of aggregation. This
collective dimension of architecture is surprisingly missing from more recent accounts on Marxism and architecture.
Which brings me to my second point: this book being an intervention into architectural discourse and practice today. I
dont think that to use some of his militant concepts we need always to go back to their original meaningthe more
since his own books are contextual, situated, and polemical, an aspect which is often lost in translation. But what is
found in translation is the possibility to use these concepts in response to specific conjectures here and now. The
concept of the right to the city is a case in point: it was introduced by Lefebvre within specific discussions
about the crisis of the French post-war welfare state. But when used today in urban activism it can take the
form of a claim for urban everyday life as a universal aspiration or, rather, it translates into specific demands
concerning social infrastructures. It can become a violent call for participation in the shaping of the urban
environment which interrupts the consensual discourse of the city elites, or an conduit for legalizing collective
entitlements concerning social, spatial, and environmental justice. At the same time, the theory of space
production offers a solid framework for a critical analysis from which such postulates as the one of the right to
the city can be formulated.
SE: That raises a very interesting question about how we work with theorists today, in any range of disciplines, but
especially geography, architecture, and urban studies given what were discussing. Youll know of course that Society
and Space recently translated Lefebvres short, late essay Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis. How do you think
Lefebvres work is useful today in thinking about global or planetary urbanisation?

Poster of the conference Rethinking Theory, Space and Production: Henri Lefebvre Today (Delft, November 11-13,
2008). Design by Jayme Yen.

S: Let me respond to this by a reference to my own experience of working with these concepts. As you know, I am
working since 2009 on a research project focused on distribution of architectural labour from socialist countries to
countries outside Europe during the Cold War. What this project addresses is the process of modern architecture
becoming world-wide after the Second World War. I think that Lefebvres concept of mondialisation is much more
useful for this task than that of globalisation, so I prefer to speak about mondialisation of modern architecture rather than
about its globalisation. In your comments on Lefebvres Dissolving City and in previous texts on Kostas Axelos you
have usefully shown that in the work of many French writers, in particular of Lefebvre, mondialisation cannot be
simply translated asglobalisation. Rather, it means the emergence of a world-wide experience, the arrival of
the world as a dimension of practice, which is dependent on often competing ways of becoming worldly, and
alternative visions of the world as a whole. These antagonistic, plural imaginations and conceptualizations of
the world contribute to alternative ways of practicing the world, the world becoming true in practice. This
practice of world-making comes back to Alfred Sauvys concept of the First, Second, and Third Worlds which were
not simply understood as bounded spaces, let alone some kind of competition with first, second, and third prize, but
rather various alternatives of development with the Third World coined as an affirmative concept. While such French
author like, recently, Jean-Luc Nancy, opposed mondialisation to globalisation in the sense of Americanization,
for Lefebvre globalisation is to be seen as just one, among many, possibilities of mondialisation.
This is very useful framework for my research: not because it answers any questions but rather because it
helps formulating good ones. For example, one of the sites which I am looking at is Ghana under president Kwame
Nkrumah (196066), where a small number of available, foreign-educated Ghanaian professionals worked together with
international architects: British, US-American, West German, French, Italian, but also Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish,
Yugoslav, Soviet and Chinese. What comes to the fore in the archives in Accra and the interviews with Ghanaians and
foreign actors who participated in this moment and who are still around, is that their work cannot be restricted to bilateral
trade agreements, or to a projection of bi-polar logics of the Cold War. Rather, the networks by which post-independence
Accra was produced belonged to and promoted competing visions of global cooperation and solidarity. These networks
included US-based Bretton-Woods institutions, development aid of the British Commonwealth, technical
assistance programs within the vision of socialist internationalism, the collaboration within the Non-Aligned
Movement, but also Nkrumahs own Pan-African project. This dynamic, I want to argue, is what defined the
processes of mondialisation of modern architecture in Ghana and, more generally, the processes in the course
of which modern architecture has become the world-wide dispositif of planetary urbanization. The emergence
of modern architecture as a global phenomenon was developed from within such antagonistic global networks
in a number of places which I am looking at in this research, including Iraq after Kassems coup dtat in 1958
and later under Saddam Hussein; independent Algeria, in particular under the Boumedienne regime; Syria after
1956; Afghanistan between 1953 and 1973 when the Afghan government was accepting aid from both sides of
the Iron Curtain; but also a number of countries in the Gulf in the 1980s, where architects and construction
firms from Bulgaria, Poland, and Yugoslavia were responsible for many among the first skyscrapers of Kuwait,
Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

SE: You mentioned the debates you had about the translation of the term jouissance in a previous answer, and in his
translators note, and your own introduction, Bonnono and you discuss some of the nuances of Lefebvres use of the
term. Your eventual decision was enjoyment, even though the term is fairly well-known in Anglophone debates. I
thought it was interesting that Lefebvre had deliberated on the title of Vers une architecture du plaisir, of pleasure, but
chose jouissance instead. Jouissance has come to be closely associated with Jacques Lacan and some feminist
writings; plaisir somewhat later with Michel Foucault. Roland Barthes contrasts the two in some of his texts. Why do you
think Lefebvre made this choice? Could you explain your thinking in choosing enjoyment?

Constant Nieuwenhuys, New BabylonYellow Sector (1958)

S: In my introduction I use the term not translated, since, as you say, the term is familiar for English language readers,
at least those interested in theory. But it was clear to me from the beginning that it needs to be translated in the book
and, above all, in the title, because putting jouissance in the title would make the book appear restricted to a specialist
audience, which was hardly the case with any of Lefebvres book, however grounded in philosophical minutiae they
might have been. Yes,jouissance has Lacanian connotations and Lefebvre acknowledged them, just as he referred
several times in his books to Barthes and his distinction between texte de jouissance and texte de plaisir. In Lefebvres
use of jouissance reverberates his interest in German philosophy of the 19th century and, as Christian Schmid pointed
out in his book Stadt, Raum, und Gesellschaft, Lefebvres jouissance might not be translatable into English, but can be
very well translated into German, as Genuss. Yet I believe that in Lefebvres text the term is not a technical one, in the
way, for example, concrete abstraction is in The Production of Space. In the course of the text, jouissance is tactically
distinguished from other concepts, such as joie, plaisir, volupt, but throughout the book it is strategically used to
connote excess, transgression, rupture with the logics of the situation and the dominant system of differences.
I want to argue that the overarching target of Lefebvre in Vers une architecture de la jouissance was asceticism,
which he saw in bourgeois morality, capitalist accumulation, modernist aesthetics, structuralist epistemology,
bureaucratic governance, and the political imaginary of the communist Left. Joiussance offers an alternative
conceptual framework, focused on non-work more than on productivism, on excess rather than on
accumulation, on gift rather than on exchange. In terms of space, this can relate to the excess of meaning of
monuments or places, which are never fully controlled by its producers; or to the space produced by the body
and its rhythms, and the book is one of the first texts where Lefebvre sketches the project of rhythmanalysis.
But jouissance also refers to appropriation of space, an excess of use. Among the meanings of jouissance in

French is the legal meaning of an usufruct, the right to benefit from, to use, and to enjoy something which belongs to
somebody else or is held in common ownership, as long as it is not damaged or destroyed. In this sense, Lefebvre
opposes enjoyment and consumption. If consumption means the destruction of the object used, and hence the
destruction of its use value, enjoyment means the enhancement of the use value of what is used, for example of urban
space. In this sense it resembles the economy of a luxurious artifact where the previous uses, users, and the grafts and
scars they left are valorized.

Ricardo Bofill and Taller de Arquitectura, La ciudad en el espacio (1970), http://www.ricardobofill.com

SE: I wonder if you think there are further Lefebvre texts in the archives? Over a decade ago, in 2002, Rmi Hess
published Lefebvres Mthodologie des sciences, which was written in the 1940s as a part of the Trait de materialisme
dialectique series, following the Logique formelle, logique dialectiquevolume, but was censored by the French
Communist Party and the print-run destroyed. In Hesss biography of Lefebvre from 1988, there is a book of Lefebvres
entitled La dcouverte et le secret listed as forthcoming, but which has never been published. So, are there other
manuscripts you are aware of, and what chances we might see some of those, or his lecture courses published?

Les communauts paysannes pyrnennes (origines, dveloppement, dclin). tude de sociologie historique.
Bibliothque de Gographie, Sorbonne.

S: The first text I think about is Lefebvres thesis at the Sorbonne defended in 1954. It has two volumes, one called
Les communauts paysannes pyrnennes (origines, dveloppement, dclin). tude de sociologie historique and the
second volume is Une rpublique pastorale. La valle du Campan. Organisation, vie et historie dune communaut
pyrnenne. Both can be consulted in the Geographical Library of the Sorbonne at the rue Saint-Jacques in Paris. Only
parts of this work entered Lefebvres book La valle de Campan: tude de sociologie rurale published in 1963. I believe

that there is a lot to learn from this study which was based on a thorough archival research and participatory
observation. In retrospect, it can be seen as a study of the production of landscape in the course of everyday
practices and the use and negotiations of commons, such as pastures, forests, pathways.
Then, there is a large number of texts which were included to research reports of which only one or two copies are held
in archives in Paris. In particular the research report of the seminar Les besoins fonctionnels de lhomme of which
several volumes exist with lectures, research studies, and minutes of discussion that took place between 1968 and
1970. They contain Lefebvres short interventions about sexuality and the city, space and ideology, and so on.
Also, there are records of the seminar Architecture et sciences sociales in Port Grimaud in 1972, where Lefebvre and
Tafuri met and they contain both lectures of individual participants and minutes of their discussions. Finally,
there is a large group of Lefebvres texts that were published in ephemeral journals, catalogues of exhibitions, and
hence are very difficult to access, even in Paris. I value some of them a lot, including the essay Espace architectural,
espace urbain published in a catalogue of an architectural exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 1981, or texts which
come as close as possible for Lefebvre to architectural criticism, published in the journal of Soddat (Socit anonyme
dconomie mixte dquipement et damnagement du territoire) responsible for the construction of numerous public
buildings in the Parisian region. The bibliographic data of all these texts can be found in Henri Lefebvre on Space, the
published ones in the bibliography, the manuscripts and research reports in the footnotes. If some of these texts would
be joined by a selection of what was published in Du rural lurbain, one could think about a publication of a volume
similar to your and Neil Brenners State, Space, World, but focused on architecture and the city.
But of course there are also other books which would be worth translating, in particular La pense marxiste et la
ville, which I consider to be one of Lefebvres best books, showing him as an attentive and creative reader of Marx
and Engels. As you know, publishers are interested in this and some of Lefebvres other works, and hopefully they will
be able to publish them.
SE: Thank you ukasz for these fascinating answers, and for your work in making Toward an Architecture of
Enjoyment available. We will look forward to your future projects.