Implosion-Explosion Dialectic
Implosion-Explosion Dialectic
Definition
The implosion-explosion dialectic is Henri Lefebvre's formula for the half-century dynamic of urban society's spread: "For half a century now, urban society has been seen as having spread in an implosion-explosion dialectic (Lefebvre, 2003)" (Keil 2015, p. 592). Lefebvre defines it: "'The tremendous concentration (of people, activities, wealth, goods, objects, instruments, means and thought) of urban reality and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjunct fragments (peripheries, suburbs, vacation homes, satellite towns) into space'" (The Urban Revolution, 2003, p. 14, quoted in Keil 2015, p. 592). The implosion is the tremendous concentration in the urban reality; the explosion is the projection of disjunct fragments into space; the dialectic is that both proceed together.
Keil's critical uptake makes the concept the suburbanism cluster's process-theory: "In much of the literature on suburbia, these fragments have been treated as mere products (not producers), derivative (of central processes), and perhaps even disjointed from one another" — the correction is that "In reality, these fragments are linked (and governed) through the modalities of state action…, capital accumulation… and private authoritarian suburban ways of life" (p. 592). Lefebvre's own dating of the explosion: "the moment that the historic city exploded into peripheries, suburbs – like what happened in Paris, and in all sorts of places, Los Angeles, San Francisco, wild extensions of the city" (Lefebvre and Ross 2015, quoted p. 592). The concept is the theoretical engine of the planetary urbanization literature (Brenner's Implosions/Explosions, 2014, is in the article's reference orbit) and of planetary-suburbanization: generalized suburbanization is the explosion's process-name.
This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Keil ingest; deepened at the Soja ingest. Lefebvre's The Urban Revolution (2003) and the Brenner Implosions/Explosions volume await their own treatment (see log).
The Soja register (2000). Soja gives the dialectic its postmetropolitan formulation: "Still another way of describing the postmetropolitan transition is as a simultaneous implosion and explosion in the scale of cities, an extraordinarily far-reaching turning of cityspace both inside-out and outside-in at the same time. At one level today, the entire world is rapidly becoming urbanized… At another level, every individual urban center, from the largest to the smallest, seems increasingly to contain the entire world within it, creating the most culturally heterogeneous cityspaces the world has ever seen" (Soja 2000, p. 152). The inside-out is the Exopolis ("the urbanization of the suburbs and the rise of the Outer City"); the outside-in is "a globalization of the Inner City that brings all the world's peripheries into the center, drawing in what was once considered 'elsewhere'" (p. 250) — the dialectic concretized as "the core and the periphery entwined together in the same time and place" (p. 254). Where Lefebvre dates the explosion's onset (the historic city exploding into peripheries), Soja's is the dialectic's full-grown condition — and its crisis form: "Suddenly, everywhere is Pomona" (p. 401). See exopolis, postmetropolis.
Key Thinkers
- Henri Lefebvre — the concept's author: The Urban Revolution (2003; French original 1970), the implosion-explosion dialectic, the end of city-centred urbanism
- Roger Keil — the concept's suburban uptake: the fragments as producers not products, governed through the three modalities (2015); "Extended urbanization, 'disjunct fragments' and global suburbanisms" (2017)
- David Harvey — the spatial-fix dialectic the implosion-explosion belongs to in this wiki's political-economy cluster
- Neil Brenner (not yet paged — see log) — the planetary-urbanization heir: Implosions/Explosions (ed., Jovis 2014), carrying Ajl, Angelo & Wachsmuth, Goonewardena and Sevilla-Buitrago
Related Concepts
- planetary-suburbanization — the process-claim the dialectic grounds
- suburbanism — the lived way of life of the explosion's fragments
- zwischenstadt — the descriptive name for the exploded condition
- polycentrality — the multi-focus form of the exploded region ("megalopolis," Gottmann)
- neoliberal-metropolis — the current regime of the dialectic's regulation
- urbanism — the discipline whose object the dialectic rescales
Source Support
Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
- Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden (Keil 2015) — the concept's founding source: the conclusion's Lefebvre quotation (p. 592); the fragments as producers not products (p. 592); Quinby's "spatiotemporal ecology of the postmetropolis" echo (pp. 591–592)
- Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the full-grown register: the inside-out/outside-in dialectic (p. 152), the Exopolis synthesis ("the city turned inside-out… the city turned outside-in," p. 250), the downtown "distillation of contrasts and extremes… the core and the periphery entwined together in the same time and place" (p. 254), and the crisis form ("Suddenly, everywhere is Pomona," p. 401).
Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.
Open Questions
- Are the "numerous, disjunct fragments" (peripheries, suburbs, vacation homes, satellite towns) producers in Keil's corrective reading — and what does a fragment's production look like as an agent rather than an effect?
- Lefebvre critiqued the Situationists' "Unitary Urbanism" as city-centred when he dated the explosion of the historic city (Lefebvre and Ross, quoted p. 592) — does the dialectic therefore also correct this wiki's Situationist cluster (unitary urbanism, the dérive) as city-centred?
- If the dialectic is "implosion-explosion," where is the concentration legible in the explosion — the condominium towers along the waterfront drawing on "the spatially expansive existence" of airports, warehouses and intermodal rail yards (Keil and Young, cited p. 586)?
