To see things properly, it is not enough simply to look. People who look at life - purely as witnesses, spectators - are not rare; and one of the str… - Henri Lefebvre

Only a vast inventory of the elements of our culture - in other words of our consciousness of life - will enable us to see clearly.

Pressure from below must therefore also confront the state in its role as organiser of space, as the power that controls urbanization, the construction of buildings and spatial planning in general. The state defends class interests while simultaneously setting itself above society as a whole, and its ability to intervene in space can and must be turned back against it, by grass-roots opposition, in the form of counter-plans and counter-projects designed to thwart strategies, plans and programmes imposed from above.

'Change life! 'Change society!' These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space. … new social relationships call for a new space, and vice versa.