Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith with an afterword by David Harvey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
I’ve been working on Lefebvre’s theorisation of space off and on for about 8 years now, and in that time quite a bit has changed in terms of how The Production of Spaceis understood, or engaged with, in the Anglo-American academy. I thought others, who maybe want to look at The Production of Space for the first time, or are reading it now, or have just read it, might be interested in a few of these developments, and so might be interested in some secondary interpretations of Lefebvre’s The Production of Space.
First of all though, I think it is well worth thinking through how The Production of Space, and particularly Lefebvre’s critique of ‘abstract’ space, relates to that other project of his, The Critique of Everyday Life (now translated and published in 3 vols by Verso). I can’t think of a single piece of work that makes that link more explicit than the short essay ‘Notes on a New Town’, in Introduction to Modernity, trans. by John Moore (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 116–26. I would read that (which on its own can seem a little cliché) alongside Lefebvre, ‘The Specific Categories’, The Critique of Everyday Life, Volume Two, trans. by John Moore, intr. by Michel Trebitsch (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 180–275. I think reading across those three texts should begin to show how bound up The Production of Space is with The Critique of Everyday Life. As an added extra, I personally found Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, trans. by John Sturrock (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969) [I think there are new editions available now from an American publisher] absolutely invaluable for making sense of Lefebvre’s move from Marx to ‘everyday life’.
So: recommendations for secondary readings of Lefebvre. There are now some excellent introductions to Lefebvre, from the comprehensive to the technical, and I’m going to recommend just two, that I think really illuminate the nature of Lefebvre’s project (obviously Lefebvre, being pretty anti-dogmatic himself, probably requires an ‘open’ reading, so these two do indicate my own preferences):
John Roberts, Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary praxis and the fate of cultural studies (London: Pluto Press, 2006).
This is a brilliant introduction to the whole field of ‘everyday’ life, and its development in critical European thought through the twentieth century. Roberts is particularly good at picking out the distinctions between the Marxist project (of Walter Benjamin, Lefebvre and others such as the Situationists), Martin Heidegger’s project (and the early Georg Lukács), and Michel de Certeau’s project. This is done in a very careful way, demonstrating the relationships between various conceptualisations of the everyday, and their political consequences. It is really helpful for anyone trying to make sense of Lefebvre’s statements on ‘abstract’ reasoning, the social ‘totality’, and ‘moments’. I’ve found that, even within very highly regarded interpretations of Lefebvre, these kinds of concepts are often understood through the lens of de Certeau, very much distorting Lefebvre’s project (nothing wrong with that, but it does have consequences for how you understand what is possible and what is not using Lefebvre’s concept of the production of space). Do read it if you are serious about making sense of Lefebvre.
p.s. He also demonstrates the importance of Sigmund Freud’s work, particularly The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which is massively over-looked in a lot of work in ‘everyday life’ cultural/urban studies.
Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, Christian Schmid (eds), Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre (London: Routledge, 2008).
This is a collection of essays that explicitly attempts to re-orientate the interpretation and use of Lefebvre’s intellectual project away from the kind presented by Ed Soja inPostmodern Geographies, and Thirdspace. I say explicit, because if you read the introduction you’ll come across some very fiery language aimed at Soja, which I’m not so sure is necessary. Maybe it is just a style of presentation, but I suspect not.
There are problems with the book: there are typos, and there is what I assume to be poor translation, but nothing that affects the sense and meaning of the works.
It is a fairly extensive collection—16 essays in all, ranging from exegesis, through contextual analysis, to critical and propositional papers. I think it gives a good sense of where work derived from Lefebvre is at, and where there are still some very big holes.
It’s my understanding that Christian Schmid is one of the more renowned exponents of Lefebvre in the German speaking world, and I think that his essay ‘Henry Lefebvre’s Theory of the Production of Space: towards a three-dimensional dialectic’ is well worth reading as an introduction to The Production of Space. Again, he is (like Stuart Elden, another major contributor to the interpretation of Lefebvre) quite caustic toward earlier exponents of Lefebvre, such as Soja and Rob Shields, but if you get past that, you can get some very good insights. Personally, the best account I have come across of the meaning of ‘abstract’ space in The Production of Space, and particularly how that relates to Lefebvre’s interpretation of developments in architecture, comes in Lukasz Stanek, ‘Space as Concrete Abstraction: Hegel, Marx, and modern urbanism in Henri Lefebvre’. It really is a very careful exposition of Lefebvre’s theoretical development and well worth examining—especially if you have come to a dead-end in Lefebvre regarding modern architecture.
The other essays in the book range through Lefebvre’s work (on everyday life, on urbanism, on the production of space, on the state, and on rhythmanalysis), on the whole, reintegrating that work into a wider Marxist project—discussing Gramsci, Benjamin, Debord, Jameson, and even Althusser (who’d of thought that were possible), and their relation to Lefebvre.
The conclusion, written by the editors, produces some nice analyses of the then current events in Paris, as the banlieu reignited in 2005, and is worth a peak.
Now: to the big holes. I’ve chosen to recommend these works because I think they illuminate some of the theoretical foundations for Lefebvre’s work on the production of space, and his critique of everyday life. What they don’t do, is really push Lefebvre on to new areas of insight or interpretation (in the way that Iain Borden did, when he engaged with Soja and Lefebvre in Skateboarding, Space and the City), or test/challenge Lefebvre through new empirical or theoretical work. I understand that the conferences being developed by Schmid and Stanek are precisely intended to develop that, and if any of you are developing some new work out of Lefebvre, it would be well worth your while attending that conference in November.
