Baustelle Commune

“To this day, the Commune remains the only attempt at revolutionary urbanism,” writes Henri Lefebvre, while around him, at the universities of Strasbourg and Nanterre, the events of 1968 are brewing. In his examination of the Paris Commune of 1871, Lefebvre discovers the revolutionary potential of urban societies. The theme of the “city” becomes the focus of his attention. He becomes fascinated by early forms of civil society self-organization and describes the significance of socio-spatial contradictions for the emergence of revolutionary movements.
The book La proclamation de la Commune, published in 1965, bears the marks of these multifaceted upheavals: thematically, stylistically, and down to the smallest linguistic detail, it resembles a quarry-like collection of fragments.
Baustelle Commune: Henri Lefebvre and the Urban Revolution of 1871 makes ten selected sections of this text—in which revolutionary and urban theory intertwine—available in German for the first time. Lefebvre’s approach is contextualized within the framework of his entire body of work and is accompanied by essays on the historical background, the conceptual framework of the festival, and the author’s heterogeneous writing style. Photographs of present-day Paris link visual-political debates on the Commune of 1871 with contemporary approaches to urban issues.

With photographs by Jan Lemitz and a foreword by Ulrike Haß.

The publication Baustelle Commune emerged from the “Lefebvre Workshop,” which the editors organized as part of Place Internationale at the FFT Düsseldorf.