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1 Dialectical materialism and participatory housing
In this first chapter we will explore and contextualise the premise that the anarchist development practice of John F.C. Turner can be compared to the (post)Marxist theory of Henri Lefebvre. However, the thematic observations of this comparison first require the explication and appropriation of various theoretical concepts that will form the basis for the trajectories of more exploratory chapters later.
At first glance Turner and Lefebvre are perhaps an unlikely pairing to discuss. Their works have each defined paradigmatic shifts in their respective fields – Lefebvre’s social and spatial appropriation of Marxist theory, and Turner’s apparent anarchist principles of development practice – yet they are known to have no contingent spatial, theoretical, or historical relationship.1
The intention of pursuing this apparently unreasonable comparison is to generate a framework of interdisciplinary analysis as a critical lens through which to reveal, interrogate, and contest key moments of intersection between the discourses of Lefebvre and Turner. In doing so this analysis validates the underlying premise that development practices may reflect many of the positive socio-spatial characteristics advocated and aspired towards in Western spatial discourse; albeit in subtle and unexpected ways.
This trajectory of analysis is not simple or straightforward. It first requires some leg work. Our analysis begins with a grounding of Lefebvre’s spatial contextualisation of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ methodology of dialectical materialism (Fischer, 1973, p. 87). Subsequently, Lefebvre’s conception of ‘space as a social product’ (1991, p. 26) is observed as inherently founded upon the framework of dialectical materialism and the relational processes that produce space (Lefebvre, 2009, pp. 303–305). The principle of space as socially, relationally, and materially produced provides the underlying theoretical foundation upon which our wider research trajectory is built, namely: a critical comparative analysis of the theoretical and practical articulations of dialectic and relational social space as a process and practice.
Turner’s discourse remains an explicitly practical and spatial investigation of the social and economic benefits of participatory methodologies and user choice in urban and informal housing (Turner, 1976, p. 153). The apparent anarchist or libertarian principles that appear to drive his practices are never made explicit in his discourse, and only appear in observation, praise, and critiques of his work from secondary sources. Eschewing these prevailing pigeonholings of his work, our analysis will observe how his observations and engagement with alternative housing models in the informal settlements of Peru and the wider Global South can be interpreted as a unique practical contestation of a dialectical and material approach to development. Turner neatly summarised this agenda and agency in his ground-breaking articulations of ‘housing as a verb’ (1972a). The explicit practicality of his discourse affords us the opportunity to contest a comparison to Lefebvre, and in so doing, to reveal the inherent material and dialectic foundation of Turner’s critique of formal housing and his subsequent counter-propositions for participatory socio-spatial development.
In the context of Turner’s discourse on urban mass housing and informal settlements this chapter also looks to intersect theoretical contestations of ‘the city’ as a site of critical interdisciplinary comparison in critical Western spatial theory (Harvey, 2003). In the context of Lefebvre’s The Survival of Capitalism (1976) (and in contrast to predominant structural and political conflations of alterity and illegality (Fernández-Maldonado, 2007, p. 5)), informal settlements and economies of absence can be interpreted as a global urban condition. Thus, upon returning to our comparison of theoretical and practical conceptions of space, Lefebvre’s articulation of the inherent contradictions of capitalism and subsequent contesting of ‘the reproduction of the social relations of production’ (1976, p. 17) provides a further intersection with informal urban settlements as articulations of alternative differential spaces and values (1991, p. 52, 1976, p. 115).
This theoretical articulation of positive yet alternative spatial relations can thus be drawn into critical comparison with Turner’s advocacy for housing and development as a progressive and intergenerational process and social practice (1986, pp. 10–12). In contrast to prevailing presumptions of inevitable models of growth, capitalism, and their accompanying political ideologies (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 190), the alternative values, practices, and social relations of informal settlements exist as practicable and socially sustainable examples of the positive implications of heterogeneity and autonomy as a socio-spatial condition (Ingham, 1993; Turner, 1976, pp. 21–23). Thus, if we as architects and spatial agents aspire towards a similar critical advocacy for space as that of Lefebvre, then what can we learn from Turner’s (apparently anarchistic) practices and their approach to people and place? And how can these observations, drawn from such different contexts – historical, geographical, social, political, and economical – help us to reframe and re-imagine space and architecture?
Turner’s advocacy for housing models based upon networks, autonomy, and heteronomy provides further points of intersection to Lefebvre through a comparison with his advocacy for a spatial politics of autogestion and self-management. Whilst Lefebvre’s autogestion offers a positive spatial contextualisation of the Marxist concept of self-management (2009, p. 14, 1976, p. 40), it equally raises and recognises the dangerous ability of late capitalism to consume and re-appropriate such objects and identities of transgression through co-option and reification (Harvey, 2010, p. 233). When placed in such critical comparison with Lefebvre’s theoretical advocacy for autogestion, Turner’s practical examples of networked, heteronomous, and alternative development practice are interpreted not as mere aberrations and anomalies of backwards societies (Merrifield, 2006, p. 122). Instead they are here contested as inherently positive realisations of socially produced space, and as a socially and economically logical, contingent, and valid model of grass-roots self-management: a practical and concrete spatial realisation of autogestion?
Subsequently a foundational point of origin for this research trajectory is observed in Turner’s contestation of the implications of the central issue of ‘Who decides?’ (1976, p. 11). Within this simple, eloquent, and critical examination of political authority and hierarchy Turner offers a first connection between the broader spatial, political, and cultural implications of this interdisciplinary comparison. The contestations of hegemony, identity, and values in our later chapters are here contested with Turner’s simple observations of the authority and control in the decision making of informal space and their alternative social relations. This simple observation offers a critical lens and framework with which to question and contest the social and political implications of local and global development (Shields, 1999, p. 183), and perhaps to begin to question the limitations of a polarity of state capitalist and socialist ideologies.
In the context of these comparisons, Turner’s work can be read anew as a post-structural (and ‘Lefebvrian’) reinterpretation of development practice and a provocative contestation of difference versus authority, hierarchy versus grass-roots democracy, hegemony versus participation.
Similarly, the intersection of Turner’s practices and the principles of dialectical materialism provides a renewed practical agency to Lefebvre’s theoretical discourse. In the context of this comparison, participatory and progressive development in informal space can begin to be recognised as a concrete realisation of Lefebvre’s articulation of spatial practices: of the notion of social, political, and spatial change as being driven by a dialectical process and explicitly informed and implicated by the concrete material reality of its socio-political context (Goonewardena et al., 2008, p. 100).
A brief introduction to dialectical logic
In order to contest the premise of an interdisciplinary comparison between Turner and Lefebvre it is first necessary to provide a foundational contextualisation of dialectic reasoning. Lefebvre’s critique of society and space is based upon a theoretical lineage back to Marx and to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.2 This trajectory of thought itself relies upon the translation of abstract philosophy into a form and methodology that engages with material and social reality. Marx’s material and economic re-contextualisation of Hegel’s abstract logic is intrinsic to Lefebvre’s discourse and is of vital importance to our research premise to directly connect and learn from the comparison of theoretical and practical engagements with space (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 190; Shields, 1999, p. 155). For Lefebvre the dialectic needed to be grounded in the material reality of space, and thus our premise is to ground this theoretical methodology of dialectical materialism against Turner’s realisations of participatory housing development in 1960s Peru.
In essence Hegel argues that ideas3 are in constant conflict with each other and the result of these conflicts are new ideas. This process in turn leads to new conceptions and new conflicts and so on. This is Hegel’s dialectic logic. Much like the classical articulation of dialectics,4 Hegel’s approach contests that whilst ‘everything’ is composed of contradictions and opposing forces, they are also all part of a continual process of change and evolution (Fichte, 2000; Henrich et al., 2005). Hegel builds upon Fichte, who translated the negativity of Kant’s logic of contradictions into a dialectic model. His appropriation of Fichte generates the process structure of thesis–antithesis–synthesis, and in so doing, Hegel is widely acknowledged as providing the bridge between Kant and Hegel (Shields, 1999, p. 11; Stepelevich, 2008).
Crucially, this thesis–antithesis–synthesis process is not repetitive, but iterative. Change was therefore a continuous dynamical process and helical not circular (Hegel, 2010, p. 46). The implication of Hegel’s logic is its inherently positive identification of contradiction, mediation, and negotiation as a process that led towards synthesis.5 Politically contextualised by Marx and later and spatially contextualised by Lefebvre, the premise of a positive dialectical approach to space is intrinsic to our reseach.
For clarity we must define a theoretical baseline for the study of the practical and material implications of the concept of dialectical materialism. In this case we shall begin with Engels’ discourse on industrial Manchester published in 1844 (Engels, 1844; Engels and Marx, 1975), and Marx’s first political and economic works that emerge at this key point in history.6 Here a critical intersection emerges between Hegel’s dialectical logic and the discourse of Marx, who appropriates and re-tools dialectics for use as an analytical method to contest the socio-political and economic conditions of the nineteenth century (2013, pp. 15–16). Yet at first Marx was dismissive of Hegel’s abstract and inherently negative articulation of dialectic logic, specifically contesting the philosophical abstraction and internalised contradiction of the dialectical model as defined abstract–negative–concrete.7 Lefebvre’s treatise on the dialectic similarly contests the same sense of injustice at these structural abstractions and their persistence a century later:
Hegel was not content merely to deepen the content and make it explicit in order to attain the form, he reduced it to thought, by claiming to grasp it ‘totally’ and exhaust it. He insists on the rigorously and definitively determinate form which the content acquires in Hegelianism. All the determinations must be linked together in order to become intelligible. As far as Hegel is concerned, these connections are not discovered gradually, obtained by an experimental method; they are fixed.
(cited in Shields, 1999, p. 51)
In contrast to the absoluteness and fixity of abstract thought, Marx and Engels would together provide a paradigmatic contribution to the dialectics of philosophy, sociology, and economics, through their observations and critiques of the implications of the industrial revolution for the common man (Engels and Marx, 1975, pp. 295–296). Their accompanying critique of Hegel reflects a collective outrage at what they perceived to be the abstract isolation in which Hegelian philosophy existed. Hegel’s derivation of a form of pure abstract philosophy was for them an ‘esoteric history of the abstract mind – alien to living men – whose elect is the philosopher and whose organ is philosophy’ (cited in Lefebvre, 1968a, p. 79).
This critique of Hegel’s dialectic method came to define and give critical validity and purpose to Marx and Engels’ struggle to grasp and engage in the relational and material context of space (Fischer, 1973, p. 152). It is insightful here to note how the comparisons explored in our research resonate with these innovative critiques of political and economic realities as interdependent with material and social contexts.8 Thus years after rejecting Hegelianism, Marx describes salvaging the process of dialectic reasoning as a kernel of logic that he described as ‘the only valid element in the whole of existing logic’, by standing Hegel on his head (cited in Lefebvre, 1968a, p. 84).
The dialectic method, worked out first of all in an idealist form, as being the activity of the mind becoming conscious of the content and of the historical Becoming, and now worked out again, starting from economic determinations, loses its abstract, idealist form, but it does not pass away. On the contrary, it becomes more coherent by being united with a more elaborate materialism.
(Lefebvre, 1968a, p. 84)
In reaction to the social inequality observed in industrial Manchester, the UK, and industrial Europe, Marx and Engels appropriated Hegel’s dialectic process and contextualised it within a concrete and materialist field of discourse (Fischer, 1973, p. 81). In contrast to the abstraction and internal negativity of Hegel’s logic, this critical analysis would place the relationships between things, people, and place at the crux of a logical engagement with the social, economic, and political contestation of the inequalities of industrialisation (Lefebvre, 1968a, p. 98). Marx’s historical materialism utilises the dynamic of idealism (of Hegel’s interpretation of history as trajectory towards reason and hence freedom) and the conditioning stated by materialism (as an interpretation of Ludwig Feuerbach)9 and fuses them to reveal something new: the proposition that we are conditioned by our environment, but we can intervene to change these conditions that affect us precisely because time unfolds in a socio-material and historical evolution (Lefebvre, 1968a, pp. 120–121).
Change is possible (whether it be positive or negative) simply because the world is not abstract, but materially conditioned. Whilst this in itself might not seem controversial, Marx realised that if every idea, practice, and social relation is constantly changing then no condition is natural, inevitable, or fixed – they are made. In the context of Marx’s observations of social inequality and the political ideology of the mid nineteenth century, dialectic logic was re-purposed to contest not merely Hegel’s abstract philosophy, but the material and economic reality of industrialisation itself.
The intersection of historical materialism and dialectic logic became Marx’s method of exposition. It formed a new way of seeing, valuing, and contesting the material reality of spatial content (Fischer, 1973, p. 157). Consequently the first thing to look at in understanding how a society works is to look at the things – products, housing, social relations – it produces, and how (and ultimately why) they are produced (Fischer, 1973, p. 53).
Whilst the discussion above is by necessity a somewhat expedient exploration of the origins of dialectical materialism, its significance to Lefebvre’s discourse (Elden, 2004, p. 33) and the premise of our wider research cannot be overestimated. It has been important to explicate the material and social foundations of Marx’s logic before proceeding with the critical comparisons of purposefully practical (Turner and Hamdi) and theor...
