Conclusion
Many urban theorists and planners of the postwar period have held forth on how the city, suburb, town, and country should look. Likewise, a proliferation of neologisms and prefixes–fringe, edge, ex-urban, boomburg, Californication, Manhattanization, smart/mega/shrinking cities, and so on–has attempted to grapple with these environmental shifts, to coerce their unstable forms into stable linguistic signifiers. Henri Lefebvre's take in The Urban Revolution stands apart for its more perspicacious view of such 'sprawl.' Rather than insisting on discrete boundaries for contemporary spatial forms, he argues that mankind has become thoroughly urbanized, not just in its architectural developments but in the totality of its culture:
The urban fabric grows, extends its borders, corrodes the residue of agrarian life. This expression, 'urban fabric,' does not narrowly define the built world of cities but all manifestations of the city over the country. In this sense, a vacation home, a highway, a supermarket in the countryside are all part of the urban fabric. Of varying density, thickness, and activity, the only regions untouched by it are those that are stagnant or dying, those that are given over to 'nature.'
Writing in 1970, Lefebvre's perspective on the dawning of global urbanization anticipates the flood of urban theory devoted to the spatial and economic confluences of postindustrial society from the past several decades. Its sense of possibility and pitfalls constitutes a more radical account than the abiding fear of rampant suburbanization, which often holds up traditional urban density as a bastion of cultural reserve. Bechtle's paintings are obviously less polemical than Lefebvre's writings, but share the impulse of documenting 'problematic' overlaps and turning to lived experience as an untapped repository of spatial meaning. His works place audiences in the midst of environmental friction zones to observe pivotal markers of the shifting spatial everyday, revealing how familiar places are not simply confined by the cloning impulse of the suburban-esque, but rather informed by fluidities often unrecognized.