They studied the encoding of the normal and the “deviant” in modern societies, focusing above all on the function of the hospital and mental asylum, but also on the roles of schools, factories, working life, and so on. With this they initiate an analysis of modernity that would have many successors.

Here a decisive influence is the “schizo-analysis” of desire developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their work on “capitalism and schizophrenia” (L'Anti-Oedipe, 1972), as well as discussions with Michel Foucault, whose research into power and its spatial manifestations — the spatial forms of discipline, control, and surveillance — was fundamentally influenced by discussions within CERFI. This also provides another view of the influence of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari on architecture, which in the last decade, especially in the U.S., has been seen as a more or less apolitical design theory. At the center of CERFI’s discussions the question of revolution persists, the question of sexuality, desire, and the possibility of a radical change of our living conditions — with or against Marxist theory, which was, as it were, being exploded from within.

In their respective contributions, Anne Querrien and François Fourquet, both of whom were central members in CERFI at different points in the group’s development, discuss the general intellectual milieu in which CERFI was formed, along with the political environment and academic climate of the times, especially in light of the changes initiated by the French government in the aftermath of May 68.

In his contribution, Sven-Olov Wallenstein situates CERFI’s work in relation to Foucault, but also in relation to Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on the “production of space” (la production de l’espace) and the debates within urban sociology in France in the early seventies.

Helena Mattsson discusses the relation between psychoanalysis and the city, and, on the basis of Freud’s case study of “Little Hans,” develops analytical models from L'Anti-Oedipe: a schizo-analysis of the city and of urban space shows them to be places where desire circulates; the suggestion is that the “machine” assembled by little Hans still has many surprises in store for us.

Meike Schalk’s contribution focuses on CERFI’s concrete proposals for the development of new hospitals –“the urban mental hospital” – and she traces the influence of the group on French research in architectural theory and urban sociology.

Brian Manning Delaney’s angle is more philosophical in the strict sense, and in his critical reading he questions the use of Nietzsche’s term “genealogy” that permeates these debates.

The two concluding texts are excerpts from the discussions held within CERFI in 1972–73, which can be found in their entirety in the group’s journal, Recherches, no. 13. Here we can see old terminologies and theories breaking up step by step, and the way in which questions of capital, the city, desire, and production generate, at a quick pace, new and complex positions. The inconclusive character of these debates need not be pointed out; nor that we, thirty years later, still find ourselves caught up in the problems being delineated here, still without definite answers.

We would like to thank the Institut Français, Stockholm, and The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, for their generous financial support, and IMEC, Paris, for granting us access to archive material.

Helena Mattsson, Meike Schalk, Sven-Olov Wallenstein