To Form to the Counter-Form: One Lefebvrian Contribution to the Understanding of the Urban Morphologies

Abstract

With the purpose to discuss some of the contributions brought by the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre to the study of urban forms, this theoretical essay turns towards the concreteness of the space in their mental and social existence, and seeks to extract what is called here counter form, understood in this work as the impossible-possible in Lefebvre, virtuality not yet performed, but underlying at practical reality. Along the way, two major sets of concepts introduced by the author are appropriate to understand the form —the immediately form and the morphology of ways of life— as the element that allows the reproduction of social relations. The articulation between the triads form-function-structure and perceived-conceived-lived, the two sets of concepts worked here from the French author, is what leads to find, in the absence of contemporary urban, the presence that allows the possibilities.