2.
book-ish territory
a manual of library tactics
According to Henri Lefebvre, urban needs include access to a host of intangible necessities, including information, imagination, and play.
The ability of the individual to claim agency is integral to one's right to urban life. Henri Lefebve's "Right to the City" defines urban needs: It is a matter of the need for creative activity, for work (not just products and material consumer goods); of the needs for information, for symbolism, for imagination, for play. [...] Are not needs for designated places, places of simultaneity and encounter places where exchange does not pass into exchange value, commerce, and profit - are these not specific urban needs? Is there not also the need for a time for such encounters, such exchanges?4 This perspective assumes that the urbanite has a high degree of agency. The architect Adriaan Geuze similarly discusses the issue of urban authorship in terms of spectators and actors, calling for space that “transforms anonymity into exhibitionism, spectators into actors.”5 He calls upon architects to allow the users of space to occupy and use their environment in inventive and individual ways. This requires one to re-conceptualize the role of the architect. Rather than dictate how space 4 City,” Kofman 1996),
Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the In Writings on Cities, trans. Eleonore (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 428.
5 Adriaan Geuze, “Accelerating Darwin,” In Architectural Positions: Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere, ed Tom Avermaete, Klaske Havik, and Hans Teerds (Amsterdam: Sun Publishers, 2009), 108.