The potentialities of the regressive-progressive method: thinking the town, thinking history

Abstract

Taking into account that Henri Lefebvre's regressive-progressive method was exposed for the first time in two articles dealing with the social reality of the urban world, the aim of this paper is to analyze, in the light of the Paulistano example of the end of the 19th century, the theoretical-methodological potentialities of the instrument to reflect on the historicity of an urban context. From the theoretical point of view, the method allows for a wider understanding of how the temporalities connected to the traditional and to the modern do not meet, and how this contributes to the urbanization dynamics that engulfed towns such as São Paulo in the last quarter of the 19th century. This is due, in methodological terms, to the fact that the Lefebvrian perspective, in the context of São Paulo, leads to the systematization of the historical documentation that emphasizes the co-existence, in time, of historically contradicting representations on the daily life taking place on the streets in the midst of a historical process in course.