“The urban revolution”

The multifaceted sociospatial transformations Henri Lefebvre described as the “urban revolution” must be viewed as an essential precondition for the emergence of a specialized world city network. Urban society is gestating in and through the “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.” The expression “urban society” meets a theoretical need. It is more than simply a literary or pedagogical device, or even the expression of some form of acquired knowledge; it is an elaboration, a search, a conceptual formulation. The urban phenomenon has had a profound effect on the methods of production: productive forces, relationships of production, and the contradictions between them. The theory of complexification…