A város mint konkrét utópia: Henri Lefebvre városelméleti munkássága a spekulatív designelmélet kontextusában
The city as a concrete utopia: Henri Lefebvre's urban theory in the context of speculative design theory

Summary/Abstract: “It is not possible to restore the old city, it is only possible to create a new city, on new foundations, on a different scale, under different circumstances, in a different society,” states Henri Lefebvre in his essay “The Right to the City,” originally published in 1967 and now available in Hungarian. (2023, 119) The influential text is a frequent point of reference for civil society organizations and activist groups struggling with homelessness, housing, and other social problems related to urban life, who view the French philosopher’s work as a manifesto for the right to a dignified urban life. While this approach is undoubtedly correct, Lefebvre’s text also has another, somewhat anachronistically speculative, reading: for Lefebvre, the right to the city means the right to a fully urbanized society; the right to belong to a completely new, future society that will follow industrial society. In other words, the right to the city can be interpreted as the right to the future: the possibility for the individual to remain part of society after its complete urbanization. What kind of urbanized society does Lefebvre envision in his texts written in the 1960s and 1970s? What architectural visions can be drawn in parallel with this? And how relevant is all this today, more than half a century later? In my study, starting from these questions, I try to give a speculative reading of Lefebvre's writings on urbanization (1991, 2003, 2023), incorporating them into the speculative architectural discourse.

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