Although it is widely considered a foundational book in contemporary thinking about the city, The Urban Revolution has never been translated into English—until now. This first English edition, deftly translated by Robert Bononno, makes available to a broad audience Lefebvre’s sophisticated insights into the urban dimensions of modern life.Lefebvre begins with the premise that the total urbanization of society is an inevitable process that demands of its critics new interpretive and perceptual approaches that recognize the urban as a complex field of inquiry. Dismissive of cold, modernist visions of the city, particularly those embodied by rationalist architects and urban planners like Le Corbusier, Lefebvre instead articulates the lived experiences of individual inhabitants of the city. In contrast to the ideology of urbanism and its reliance on commodification and bureaucratization—the capitalist logic of market and state—Lefebvre conceives of an urban utopia characterized by self-determination, individual creativity, and authentic social relationships.A brilliantly conceived and theoretically rigorous investigation into the realities and possibilities of urban space, The Urban Revolution remains an essential analysis of and guide to the nature of the city.Henri Lefebvre (d. 1991) was one of the most significant European thinkers of the twentieth century. His many books include The Production of Space (1991), Everyday Life in the Modern World (1994), Introduction to Modernity (1995), and Writings on Cities (1995).Robert Bononno is a full-time translator who lives in New York. His recent translations include The Singular Objects of Architecture by Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel (Minnesota, 2002) and Cyberculture by Pierre Lévy (Minnesota, 2001).

    This collection of essays is written for the general reader and features articles without footnotes. The subject matter ranges from disquisitions on ordinary houses, yards, farms, and farmsteads to notes on ecology and from the impact of automobile use, mobile homes, shopping centers, and rural and urban planning to philosophical arguments about the meaning of human space and arguments for and against preservation.

    The story of its community, administered by Rome, Byzantium, Arabs, Crusades, and Turks, reflects the vicissitudes of Mesopotamian history.

    He came to know it intimately and was welcomed by its residents, who are Italian, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Negro. Suttles contends that the residents of a slum neighborhood have a set of standards for behavior that take precedence over the more widely held "moral standards" of "straight" society. These standards arise out of the specific experience of each locality, are peculiar to it, and largely determine how the neighborhood people act. One of the tasks of urban sociology, according to Suttles, is to explore why and how slum communities provide their inhabitants with these local norms. The Social Order of the Slum is the record of such an exploration, and it defines theoretical principles and concepts that will aid in subsequent research.

    This pioneering work in African American history begins with the earliest experiences of blacks in the United States and offers an in-depth account of slavery, post-Civil War urban life, the place of religion in African American life, political activism, and the changing occupational and economic status of blacks.

    But it acquires a far broader interest because of the critical method which it applies to one of the key periods and centers in the history of architecture and urbanism. The discussion includes a broad summary of the urban policies and building programs of the popes as well as an analytic history of the artistic culture of Rome as documented by the theoretical writings and architectural publications of the period. Against this historical background the basic formal principles and compositional methods of the Baroque are verified through critical and technical analyses of the monuments themselves. In this way the author is able to define those great themes which held the attention of the artistic world in the complex period known as Baroque: "the themes of infinity, of the relativity of perceptions, of the popular and vernacular artistic expression and the communicative force of art, of history conceived as a continual development, of technology as a factor of independence and autonomous authority for the arts, and the theme of nature interpreted as a dynamic process."The three great masters Bernini, Borromini, and Cortona are treated in individual chapters. The dynamic eruption of creative energy manifest in the works of these architects, whose contributions comprised the revolutionary use of light, the unification of all the arts, and above all the ability, on both the architectonic and urban scales, to operate directly on space, is here analyzed with penetrating perspective. But the lesser architects who worked contemporaneously with the masters are also fully discussed. Architects of the generation following that of the masters, such as Carlo Rainaldi and Carlo Fontana, are studied critically in light of the rich legacy to which they fell heir and which they seriously undermined through their essentially regressive and conservative positions.An integral part of the author's analyses are the many fascinating detailed photographs, in great part executed by the author himself. The illustrative-analytical material is still further enriched by drawings inserted in the text or contained in the drawing appendix.