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Article

Henri Lefebvre: Debates andcontroversies1

Stefan Kipfer

York University, Canada

Parastou Saberi


Thorben Wieditz


Abstract

Aided with French and German scholarship, this paper takes stock of Henri Lefebvres relevance in con-temporary English-speaking urban research on social movements, postcolonial situations, the state, scale,gender, urban political ecology, regulation, and the right to the city. What becomes clear from this surveyis that Lefebvres capacity to contribute to cutting-edge urban research requires a selective translation of hiswork. While the modalities of translating Lefebvre vary depending on the subject matter, transfiguringLefebvre for today is most plausible when taking into account the dialectical nature of his urbanism and theopen-ended and integral character of his marxism.

Keywords

dialectical urbanism, Henri Lefebvre, marxism, radical geography, urban research

I Introduction

In Paris today, one could come across various

faces of Henri Lefebvre. The most recent re-

edition of his texts (the 1957 call for a revolu-

tionary romanticism) reminded one of the

Lefebvre who, shortly before his formal break

with the PCF, helped reformulate passionate

revolutionary sensibilities in left politics of the

postwar era (Lefebvre, 2011). In turn, a group

of politicians, planners, and architects close to

theFront de Gauche (an electoral alliance that

includes the Communist Party of France)

brought a social democratic Lefebvre to the

Presidential election campaign of 2012, one

whose right to the city is said to translate into

redistributive policies against segregation and

for affordable housing, transit, and other public

services (Appel Collectif, 2012). While the first

Lefebvre is likely to inspire those intellectuals,

squatters, and anti-gentrification activists whoinsist on the poetic and anarchist streaks in his

marxism (Garnier, 2010; Lowy, 2008), the

second rendition speaks to those in the

Corresponding author:

Stefan Kipfer, York University, 4700 Keele Street,

Toronto M3J 1P3, Canada

Email: [email protected]

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governmental left, notably those active in the

reform currents in Communist municipalities

who, in alliance with people close to the World

Social Forum and the Brazilian Workers Party,

resurrected the right to the city in the interna-

tional context of the alter-globalization move-

ment. Neither of these faces of Lefebvre will

convince those on the French left (including

some with a past in structuralist urban sociol-

ogy) for whom Lefebvre remains taboo because

of his lack of investigative rigour and political

predictability. As in several other contexts,

including Brazil, German-speaking Europe, and

Anglo-America, we can see that Lefebvres

image in France today is politically and theore-

tically variegated. In this production of a plural-ity of French Lefebvres, it is impossible to

ignore the exercise of a certain North American

influence, which belongs to a broader trend of

repatriating French theory from the New World

back to the Continent, as evident from a recent

wave of translations of David Harveys impor-

tant works into French.

Against this backdrop, our paper intends to

make a modest contribution to Lefebvre scho-

larship by taking selective stock of recentLefebvre-inspired debates in the English lan-

guage. We do not assume that there is only one

plausible Lefebvre; or, for that matter, that

Lefebvre represents a panacea for strategy, the-

ory, and research. The fact that today there are

multiple Lefebvres floating about is due partly

to the circuitous character of Lefebvres work,

and partly to the current conditions of interpre-

tations which are characterized by deep political

uncertainties compounded by an enduring post-

modern eclecticism. In the spirit of openness,

we will provide here a survey of current

Lefebvre-inspired debates in the Anglophone

world, with due attention to key French and

German contributions. We do so, of course,

from our own perspective. As we will explain

in the first two sections, we insist that using

Lefebvre effectively and plausibly presupposes

sustained efforts to reflect upon the historical

context and overall orientation of Lefebvres

own work before deploying his concepts and

insights. Translating modifying, even trans-

forming Lefebvres work is inevitable and

desirable but requires care and reflexivity.

II Philosophy, politics, everyday life

By the late 1990s, Anglo-American scholarship

had virtually headlocked Lefebvre between two

antagonistic poles: political economy and

cultural studies. This is no longer the case.

A number of critical contributions (Capitalism

Nature Socialism, 2002; Elden, 2004; Kofman

and Lebas, 1996; Roberts, 2006; Ross, 1995;

Schmid, 2005) have pointed out that, once onesituates Lefebvrean insights within their politi-

cal and philosophical context, treating him only

as a general inspiration for a more rigorous

marxist geographical political economy

(Harvey, 1973, 1989a, 1989b, 2006), or absorb-

ing him into the postmodern version of the lin-

guistic and cultural turn in social theory (Soja,

1989, 1996, 1999) is limiting and, particularly

in the second case, misleading (Kouvelakis,

2008). As a result of these insights, it is nowpossible to identify a third wave of Lefebvre

scholarship (Goonewardena et al., 2008). In this

mould, supposedly postmodern problems

(language, identity, the body, subjectivity, cul-

ture) can be tackled by drawing on the material-

ist, marxist, and dialectical theoretical strands

coming together in Lefebvre. From this angle,

Lefebvre appears as a representative of a hetero-

dox and open-ended, passionately engaged and

politically charged form of marxism. Consid-

erations of alienation, dialectics, and totality

remain essential for his empirical and political

projects to explore the possibilities inherent in

everyday life (Lefebvre, 1988, 1991a, 2002,

2008, 2009a; Lefebvre and Guterman, 1999).

This is also true for Lefebvres writings on urba-

nization and space, which recast his critique of

everyday life (Merrifield, 2002; Ross, 1997,

2008). Without recognizing the links between

2 Progress in Human Geography



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Lefebvres urban contributions and his other

political and philosophical concerns, excavating

the former remains a geographical conceit

(Lebas, 2003: 70).

Lefebvres urban and geographical writings

are thus shaped not only by revolutionary politi-

cal engagements (anti-colonial agitation in the

mid-1920s, Communist party politics from 1928

to 1958, the anti-fascist Resistance during the

Second World War, the New Left and May

1968, a return to the PCF in the 1980s). They are

also infused with his philosophical encounters,

above all those with Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, and

Heidegger (Elden, 2004; Schmid, 2005, 2008).

The relationship between these figures is a source

of typically productive tension in Lefebvre.Lefebvres most important contribution to the

cartography of French critical thought (Keuche-

yan, 2010) was his early argument (most devel-

oped in Dialectical Materialism, 2009b) about

the various transformations of Hegel in Marxs

work. This argument yielded an open-ended con-

ception of dialectics and totality, which helped

define, through a reworked notion of alienation,

Lefebvres lifelong concern with a critique of

everyday life, and allowed him, ultimately, tobridge old and new forms of left theory.

Nietzsche and Heidegger mattered in various

aspects of Lefebvres work, including his

endeavour to counter rationalist aversions to

lived experience, and the metaphilosophical

critique of philosophy that this entailed (Elden,

2004; Lefebvre, 1997; Merrifield, 2006;

Schmid, 2005). However, this theoretical inte-

gration of Heidegger and Nietzsche with Marx

and Hegel was fraught with deep problems, par-

ticularly in light of recent scholarship on those

two authors (Faye, 2009; Waite, 2008). These

interpretive problems also shed some serious

doubt about postmodern interpretations of

Lefebvres work. In Kanishka Goonewardenas

words:

Lefebvres spirited opposition to the theoretical anti-

humanism [of structuralism and poststructuralism]

championed by Althusser, Michel Foucault and

Jacques Derrida, with whom he shared several inter-

ests including ideology, power and language

renders the impressionable Anglo-American sketch

of him as a postmodern student of space philologi-

cally unsustainable. It also calls into question thecoherence of his own selective appropriations of Hei-

degger and Nietzsche, whose more rigorous readers

place these thinkers firmly within an anti-humanist

problematic, to which he was resolutely opposed.

Lefebvre for one unlike Derrida or Foucault

seems not to have received Heideggers famous Let-

ter on Humanism. (Goonewardena, 2011: 4546)

Neither structuralist nor deconstructive versions

of anti-humanism can withstand the new

non-liberal, dialectical humanist commitmentto dis-alienating life in all its aspects which one

finds throughout Lefebvres openly marxist

work.

Urban questions are not mere empirical

extensions or local derivations of Lefebvres

broader political and theoretical perspective.

They helped shape his theoretical development.

As ukasz Stanek (2011) has demonstrated with

great care, Lefebvres long-standing involve-

ment in detailed empirical research (both rural

and urban) represented a veritable labour pro-cess through which Lefebvre forged the major

concepts in his theories of urbanization, space,

and state. His interest in considerations of archi-

tecture and urban planning did thus not shrink

his work to that of a specialist limited by

state-bound professional preoccupations. In

fact, Lefebvres most important contribution to

social theory may lie in his ultimate decision

(developed in the Urban Revolution) to place

the urban in the middle of an open-ended socialtotality, as a level of reality in a mediating rela-

tionship to everyday life and state-bound and

global social institutions. Lefebvres urban

considerations play a constitutive, non-

reductive role in the social order even as they

refer back to lived experience and the state

(Goonewardena, 2005; Kipfer, 2009). This

insight is of profound political importance for

Kipfer et al. 3



5/21

Lefebvre, for whom social struggle never

ceased to be a decisive reference point in urban

research (Martins, 1982). In Goonewardenas

sharp formulation, the upshot of Lefebvres

placement of the urban in the heart of radical

theory is that there can be no socialist revolu-

tion without an urban revolution, no urban rev-

olution without a socialist revolution, and

neither without a revolution in everyday life

(Goonewardena, 2011: 60).

Given the place of the urban in Lefebvres

philosophy and politics, it is no surprise that his

understanding of the urban and space is infused

with time and history. His work does in fact jus-

tify arguments for a spatial turn of social theory

(Soja, 1989), but this turn should not beconceived in ontological terms. As Lefebvre

(1991b: 96) has it, time may have been pro-

moted to the level of ontology of the philoso-

pher, but it has been murdered by society.

Since the production of abstract space is itself

implicated in this death of time (its reduction

to a linear succession of instants), it is impera-

tive that space be de-reified in the same way

Marx proposed to do for the commodity: by

treating spatial form not only as a powerfulsocial force but also as a product of necessa-

rily temporal processes, strategies, and proj-

ects. In turn, Lefebvre suggests that

contradictions of space in the late 20th century

those between abstract and differential space

are simultaneously tensions between the linear

and cyclical temporalities which inhere in

everyday life. As students of Lefebvres

(2004) rhythmanalytic approach to everyday

life have pointed out (Edensor, 2010; Gardiner,

2000; Highmore, 2005; Loftus, 2012), the

insight about the intimate relationship between

time and space is crucial to grasp his relevance

for research on the body (less as effect and more

as producer of time/space) and the contradictory

rhythms that shape political ecologies in our

urbanizing world. In this view, socialism

appears as a fundamental transformation of

neocolonial capitalisms time-space, not as a

redistributive and socially more just reorienta-

tion of otherwise unchanged forces and

relations of production.

Today, the anti-productivist leanings that

inhere in Lefebvres conception of time, space,

and everyday life appear at first sight to be of

obvious importance given the socio-ecological

state of the planet. But this the planetary

importance of Lefebvres work is one of the

thorniest questions in Lefebvre scholarship, one

that should be approached with a great deal of

caution (Kipfer et al., 2008). While Lefebvres

work in the 1970s and 1980s strove towards a

genuinely multipolar conception of knowledge

production and political struggle, the European

focus of his intellectual endeavours and livedexperiences prevented him from realizing his

own ambitions. Today, of course, the planetary

pertinence of Lefebvre is not contingent only on

his work but also on ongoing social processes

and political struggles. Accelerated urbaniza-

tion in the global South, the disintegration of

state socialism, and the contradictions of

Euro-American imperialism have contributed

to a situation where Lefebvrean insights are

taken in fresh directions in such places as Braziland Hong Kong (on the latter, see Ng et al.,

2010; Tang et al., 2012). Our own paper, itself

squarely situated in Euro-American debates,

will only be able to point to the fact that

Lefebvres ultimate fate for truly global analy-

ses will be determined by developments beyond

the North Atlantic.

III Dialectical urbanism: the urban

as form, level and mediationLefebvres dialectical approach to the urban

question (1970a, 1972, 1996, 2003) differs from

other marxist formulations about the city. It

foregrounds the role of everyday life, state, and

political action in centre-periphery relationships

rather than the role of collective consumption in

social reproduction (as in Castells, 1977) or the

role of switching crises of accumulation in the




6/21

political economy of the built environment (as

in Harvey). Much less concerned with projects

to isolate the objective determinants of the city

and urbanization than Castells and Harvey,

Henri Lefebvre identifies the urban with the

sociospatial form of centrality. This is a tricky

affair. For, as form, the urban is dialectically

tied to its content. The urban can be considered

an intermediate level (M) which mediates the

social totality as a whole. The urban is related

to the level of the large social order (G) (the

state and state-bound knowledge, the capitalist

world economy), on the one hand, and the con-

tradictory level of everyday life (P), the daily

rounds of lived experience, on the other.

Caught between macro and micro levels ofreality, the urban as form is not an independent

cause of particular ways of life (as Louis Wirth

and the Chicago scholars had it). Rather, it is a

social space produced by three-dimensional

(material, ideological-institutional, and ima-

ginary-affective) processes (Lefebvre,

1991b). The urban as centrality is thus not eas-

ily identifiable. Not reducible to physical mar-

kers (density, particular characteristics of the

built environment), it must live throughsocial practice. Of particular importance in this

regard are those practices which link social dif-

ferences either to produce economic surplus

and concentrate power or to create more fleet-

ing nodes of oppositional or alternative prac-

tice. Practices of centrality are sometimes

linked to physical forms in reasonably stable

ways. This is the case, for example, when eco-

nomic power is concentrated in downtown

financial districts or airport complexes. Some-

times, centrality remains momentary, however.

General strikes or semi-autonomous popular

festivals can create dense forms of subaltern

life or counter-power which leave few physical

traces.

The urban is particularly difficult to capture

in modern capitalist times. Over the last 250

years, urbanization the expansion of the

built environment, the functional integration

of formerly distinct social spaces, the industria-

lization of agriculture has led to the implosion

and explosion of historic cities, becoming

worldwide in the process (Lefebvre, 2003). In

this context, Lefebvres notion of urban revolu-

tion has a double meaning. Urbanization

implies the death of the city. By city,

Lefebvre refers here to the pre-capitalist

European city of the Middle Ages and the

Renaissance: a physically demarcated, often

walled spatial form with central (military, polit-

ical, commercial, religious) functions and forms

of social, political, and economic life that are

qualitativelydistinct from the countryside. The

death of the city does not necessarilyrefer to the

destruction of the physical environment. Itdescribes the process by which the forms of

centrality and difference characteristic of the

historic city implode in the process of capital-

ist and neocapitalist urbanization. Due to

Haussmannization and functionalism, the urban

experience is thus characterized less and less by

the chaotic heterogeneity, cosmopolitanism,

and vibrant street life of the historic city or the

19th century metropolitan core but by dis-

persed, functionally disaggregated, andpolitico-economically administered forms of

life. In turn, Lefebvre expects that the death of

the historic city opens up the possibility of per-

ipheralized social groups to claim the right to

the city (Lefebvre, 1996). In this second sense,

the city refers to the possible: the product of a

revolutionary claim to the social surplus and

political power, which is articulated through

struggles forspatialcentrality.

Lefebvres notion of the right to the city,

although not rooted in 19th-century metropoli-

tan street life as in Marshall Berman (1982), is

also indebted at least residually to historical

forms: the cities of the Italian Renaissance or

the festivality of rural southern France. There

is no doubt that Lefebvres history of the city/

urbanization (in the Urban Revolution andThe

Right to the City), which is recast shortly there-

after in his history of space (in The Production

Kipfer et al. 5



7/21

of Space), is modeled on the West European

experience. Lefebvres urbanism is not theoreti-

cally dependent on these historical views of the

urban good life, however (Harvey, 2011: 40;

Stanek, 2011: 170). It can be extricated from the

latter precisely because of his dialectical char-

acter. His revolutionary romanticism

(Lefebvre, 1971a, 1995) suggests that the past

cannot be restored in its lost organic unity; for-

merly rural versions of festivality, for example,

are transposed in form and thus take on a differ-

ent meaning in revolutionary urban moments

such as the Commune and 1968. Claiming the

right to the city is thus not about restoring his-

torical forms of the city (the street, organic

town life) or magnifying aspects of really exist-ing urban life (heterogeneity). It is about assert-

ing revolutionary perspectives on urban society

that emerge out of struggles in social spaces

where the city may never have existed: moder-

nist company towns and the campuses, facto-

ries, and high-rises of French Fordism. One

could say that the implosion of the (histori-

cal) city under conditions of urbanization

(urban revolution I) is both obstacle and pre-

condition for claims to the city as a newform of centrality in a postcapitalist society

(urban revolution II).

The right to the city doubles as the right to

difference. The lattertermmay lead one to sus-

pect that Lefebvre formulates a view of city life

reminiscent of liberal views of diversity (where

the good life is expressed by the individual(ist)

penchant for tolerance or the group practice of

multicultural co-presence) or in postmodern

views of hybridity (where individual or group

differences are in a permanent state of uncer-

tainty, flux, and playful renegotiation). But

Lefebvres concept of difference is not the

same as the liberal-pluralist diversity or the

postcolonial hybridity as one can find them

in Sandercock (2003) or Sojas (1996) third

space, for example. For him, difference is

transformational-dialectical, not affirmative

or deconstructive. The central clue for this

insight is Lefebvres (1970b, 2008) distinction

between minimal and maximal difference.

This distinction makes it clear that while cen-

trality is always built on processes linking and

concentrating social differences, these pro-

cesses can take qualitatively distinct forms.

Minimal or induced difference refers to man-

ifestations of difference typical of our current

social order. It denotes the actually existing

ensemble of differences that, however articu-

lated, must remain confined by the fragmented

alienations of private property, individualism,

the administered commodity form, the abstracted

linguistic sign, racism, and the patriarchal fam-

ily. Maximal or produced difference, however,

refers to the possibility of non-alienated formsof individuality and plurality in a postcapitalist,

creatively self-determined urban society. Calls

for the right to the city (spatial and social-

political centrality) and associated experiences

of comradeship and festivity can potentially

function as prisms through which the minimal

differences of particular segregated groups are

transformed into demands for maximal differ-

ence. In his analysis of the Commune in 1871

(Lefebvre, 1965) and May 1968 (Lefebvre,1969), Lefebvre suggests that the destruction

of the city (and thus also the production of

urban space as a patchwork of segregated, thus

homogenized, spaces) can be the starting point

for a dynamic where demands for centrality

(spatial and sociopolitical) are linked to

demands for maximal difference. May 1968

can thus be read as a dialectic of centre and

periphery that emerges out of a (sub)urban

revolt against the forms of segregation-

homogenization of the postwar metropolis

(Luscher, 1984).

IV Debating Lefebvre today

How can Lefebvres work (and his dialectical

urbanism) help us make sense of the contempo-

rary world? His manifold insights provide many

promising starting points to understand some of




8/21

the harsh realities of our urbanizing world order

and the unexpected openings these realities may

harbour for the future. Yet, for this purpose,

Lefebvres analyses, which often remain incon-

clusive, need to be translated: de- and recontex-

tualized. In the following, we do this by tracing

Lefebvres presence in debates on social move-

ments, colonialism, postcolonial conditions, the

state, scale, regulation, urban political ecology,

gender, sexuality, and the right to the city. As

we will see, actualizing Lefebvre sometimes

requires reading Lefebvres work against him-

self. For example, Lefebvres quest for a genu-

inely global and multipolar form of critical

knowledge can only be realized with the help

of other, counter-colonial and feminist insights.

1 Urban social movements

Henri Lefebvre is not usually listed as a contri-

butor to the study of collective action. Yet for

Lefebvre social struggle was, next to everyday

life, the key starting point in concept formation

and theory building. A number of his terms

(colonization, difference) can adequately

be described as struggle concepts insofar thatthey emerged as problems in periods of intense

political mobilization. It is difficult to imagine

Lefebvres urban turn without his analyses of

the Commune and May 1968. Social struggle

thus represents a subjective entry point to

Lefebvres thinking about urbanization, city,

and space. In this regard, Lefebvre took the road

opposite from the structuralist Manuel Castells

and the neoclassical marxist David Harvey, for

whom social movements are much more deter-

mined by broader forces than determining

agents in historical change. As we will see

below, Lefebvres emphasis on the unpre-

dictable and uncertain role of social struggle

in the creation of events, moments, and new

knowledge has yielded crucial analyses of

territorial conflict as an active force in the

contestation and reorientation of historical

capitalism.

Substantially, Lefebvre sees the urban aspect

of social movements not so much in a theoreti-

cally circumscribed field or location: collec-

tive consumption (Castells, 1977, 1978), urban

culture (Castells, 1983), place-specific identity

(Castells, 1997), the structured coherence of

urban space (Harvey, 1989a), or land and its use

values (Logan and Molotch, 1987). He sees

collective action through the prism of spatial

relations, notably the hierarchical relations

between central and peripheral spaces at various

scales, including in metropolitan regions.

Within this context, Lefebvre is particularly

interested in how a plurality of unevenly devel-

oped and spatially disarticulated points of strug-

gle may be brought into a process of mutualtransformation. Lefebvres reluctance to reify

actually existing particularities of struggle is

of the utmost importance to come to terms with

the high degrees of sociospatial segmentation

that shape todays landscape of urban politics.

As we will see in the conclusion, this will be

especially important in contemporary debates

about the right to the city.

2 Colonialism and postcolonial situations

Henri Lefebvre has not figured large in the wave

of research on postcolonial conditions that has

swept through critical geography and urban

sociology. This is not surprising given that

Lefebvres historical and philosophical refer-

ence points were squarely European. Nonethe-

less, researchers have deployed his concepts to

analyze colonial and postcolonial conditions.

Manu Goswami (2004) has brilliantly demon-

strated how Lefebvres theories of state and

space can help us understand how India has

been produced as a social space through a his-

torical dialectic of colonization, decolonization,

and post-independence development. In this

endeavour, Goswami has been joined by Judith

Whitehead, whose study of dispossession in the

Narmada Valley shows that Lefebvres notion

of abstract space is vital to grasp how colonial

Kipfer et al. 7



9/21

and developmentalist strategies of disposses-

sing forest dwellers in Gujarat have been nor-

malized by the rise to the fore of a scientific

regime of accumulation that conceives space

as an empty, malleable grid to be improved

(Whitehead, 2010: 20).

Lefebvres usefulness to grasp dynamics of

space production in a colonial or neocolonial

context hinges, in part, on his sensitivity to con-

siderations of land (as well as labour and capi-

tal) in capitalist development (Coronil, 2000;

Hart, 2006) and his nuanced conception of the

countryside. Lefebvre did not grasp the urban

revolution in the linear terms of modernization

theory (as a transition from rural to urban) but

as a conflictual, uneven, and qualitative rela-tionship between historical city and historical

countryside. Researchers have thus been able

to point to the uses of Lefebvres work on the

Pyrenees, modernist company town planning,

and abstract space to understand the master-

planned, counter-revolutionary Rural City proj-

ect in Chiapas (Wilson, 2011), strategies of

slum clearance and military urbicide (Kipfer

and Goonewardena, 2007), and mobilizations

of colonized peoples, for example in Israelsoccupied territories (Yiftachel, 2009). In this

respect, Lefebvre remains of particular rele-

vance to grasp the imperial as well as capitalist

dimensions of urbanization and depeasantiza-

tion in the global South (Mendieta, 2008).

Lefebvre himself repeatedly used the term

colonization, first as a metaphor to understand

how everyday life in metropolitan countries is

dominated in postcolonial conditions (in the

second phase of the critique of everyday life

in the early 1960s) (Lefebvre, 2002), and, sec-

ond, as a concept to grasp the role of the state

in organizing hierarchical relations between

dominant (central) and dominated (peripheral)

social spaces (in his writings on the state in the

late 1970s) (Lefebvre, 1978). Lefebvre discov-

ered this second, conceptual meaning of colo-

nization first in the late 1960s by observing

urban struggles (of immigrant workers in

France, shanty dwellers in Latin America,

African Americans in the USA) around the

period of 1968 and second through a subse-

quent engagement with the marxist theories of

imperialism of Lenin, Luxemburg and Amin

(Lefebvre, 1969, 1972, 2003). As a result,

Lefebvre saw these various movements in a

more explicitly anti-imperial and anti-colonial

light, interpreting them as examples of a world-

wide urbanization of revolutionary politics

aimed at creating a multipolar world (Kipfer

and Goonewardena, forthcoming).

To deploy Lefebvres colonization to

understand the imperial heartland in postcolo-

nial times requires considerable care. The con-

cept of colonization as a state strategy ofterritorial organization is limited by the fact that

Lefebvre did not pay adequate attention to the

specificities of the colonial relation, which, as

we know from counter-colonial traditions, was

characterized by a peculiar, racialized combina-

tion of economic super-exploitation, territorial

domination, and everyday humiliation. Once

complemented by counter-colonial insights

about the geographies of historical (de)coloni-

zation (those of Frantz Fanon, for example)(Hart, 2006; Kipfer, 2007; Ross, 1995), how-

ever, the notion of colonization can be used

productively to think about how colonial lega-

cies are reproduced, modified, and recreated in

todays urban worlds. It can be deployed, for

example, to make comparative sense of such

state-led redevelopment strategies as public

housing demolition in the global North (Kipfer

and Goonewardena, forthcoming; Kipfer and

Petrunia, 2009). Such a reworked notion of

colonization has distinct advantages com-

pared both to macro-political economies of

imperialism (as in Harvey, 2003, and Smith,

2005), which tend not to pay much attention to

the finer dynamics of territorial conflicts

beneath and across nation states, and to those

approaches, including postcolonialism, which

argue that in todays world order, deterritoria-

lizing forces (networks, flows, and hybridities)




10/21

have made a focus on territorial polarization

obsolete (Hardt and Negri, 2000; for critiques,

see Hallward, 2001; Sparke, 2001). Coloniza-

tion helps us understand the role of urban stra-

tegies in instituting and questioning imperial

and neocolonial forms of world order.

3 The state

Next to his engagement with matters colonial

and imperial, Lefebvres four volumes on the

state assembled under the title De lEtat

(1968, 1976a, 1976b, 1977, 1978) conclude his

lifelong critique of the state and state-like

knowledge (savoir) as a form of alienation

(Brenner and Elden, 2009a; Schmidt, 1990;Wex, 1999). Like his contemporary Nicos Pou-

lantzas, Lefebvre treats the state as an institu-

tional condensation of social power, but he

also emphasizes the presence of the state

(state-like thinking and symbolism) in everyday

life. On this basis, Lefebvre develops the notion

of the state mode of production (SMP) to scru-

tinize the productivist logics of mid-20th-

century state forms (Stalinism, fascism, Social

Democracy) (Lefebvre, 1977). In capitalistcontexts, he focuses on the changing role of

states in promoting, financing, subsidizing,

and regulating capitalism and the class com-

promises that sustained it in West Europe. To

the productivism of the SMP, Lefebvre coun-

terposes a new left notion of radical democ-

racy: the withering away of the state in

practices of self-management (autogestion).

Lefebvres critique of state productivism is

highly relevant for contemporary analyses of

neoliberalism and its productivist critics

(Brenner, 2008).

Lefebvres discussion of the state also repre-

sents an important reformulation of his theory of

the production of space. On the one hand,

Lefebvre underlines how the state plays a cen-

tral role in the production of abstract homoge-

neous, fragmented, and hierarchical space,

and, thus, the survival of capitalism. On the

other hand, Lefebvre makes it clear that states

are themselves spatialized, and this in a variety

of possible ways. As Neil Brenner (2004) and

Manu Goswami (2004) have pointed out for

West Europe and India, Lefebvre allows us to

understand state-space in its comparative spe-

cificities without the pitfalls of methodological

nationalism so characteristic of much state

theory and (neo)realist international relations

theory. As a consequence, territory including

the territorial hierarchies Lefebvre calls colo-

nial appears as similarly produced(Brenner

and Elden, 2009b). Despite its centrality to the

definitions of modern state, territory has

remained undertheorized (Agnew, 1994; Elden,

2009, 2010; Lussault, 2007; Painter, 2010). AsNeil Brenner and Stuart Elden (2009b: 367)

suggest, Lefebvres analysis allows us to think

territory, space, and state together, and thus to

examine the historically and geographically

specific political forms of the co-production of

space and territory (state space as territory)

through the dialectics of their perceived, con-

ceived, and lived dimensions. This approach

avoids the logical conflation of territory and ter-

ritoriality (Cox, 2002; Raffestin, 1980) or thepresupposition of territory as a pregiven,

bounded region (Weber, 1968), or bounded

space (Delany, 2005; Giddens, 1981; Storey,

2001). While the social weight of state territori-

ality can help naturalize state intervention

(Brenner and Elden, 2009b: 372373), it is ulti-

mately subject to conflict, contestation, and his-

torical malleability.

Today, when many have construed the rela-

tionship between states and globalization as a

zero-sum-game (more globalization equals less

state), and have called for disaggregating the

state and the border in order to conceptualize the

various sites and modes of bordering, an

emphasis on the production of state space is

imperative. First, it allows one to see how states

remain central agents in globalized contexts,

albeit in restructured and partly rescaled

fashion. As illustrated most recently by the

Kipfer et al. 9



11/21

bloodless coups detats in Italy and Greece to

restore market confidence in the Euro zone

(Kouvelakis, 2011), authoritarian state inter-

vention is essential to manage and institute the

chaotic social forces of the contemporary world

order, leading to new conflicts and crises.

Rather than a national response to global

dynamics, state intervention has itself become

transnational. Second, a critical analysis of the

production of state space allows one to recog-

nize the centrality of territory in geopolitics

today, the shifts from previous imperial and

colonial eras notwithstanding. In contrast to the

naive, post-Cold War borderless world dis-

courses, the contemporary war on terror has

forced us to ponder how best to examine thecharacteristics and spatial scales of borders

(Johnson et al., 2011). Lefebvres approach to

space and territory helps us comprehend the

specific forms of neocolonial space produced

by multiscalar state-strategies, notably those

oriented towards reconfiguring the geopolitical

architecture of the planet with projects of mili-

tarization and securitization.

4 Scale

Given the contemporary transnational rescaling

of states, it is no surprise that Lefebvre has

loomed large in debates about scale, either with

direct reference to Lefebvres work or indir-

ectly, via David Harveys geographical political

economy. While some theorize scale on the

assumption that Lefebvre had very little to say

about scale (Marston and Smith, 2001), others

have insightfully suggested that Henri

Lefebvres discussion of scale ( echelle), which

one can find in his work on the state, lends itself

to a critique of scalar presuppositions (Brenner,

2000). Just as space more generally, scale is not a

pregiven hierarchical frame of social action but a

historically contingent product of social pro-

cesses. In response to Brenner, some have

insisted, on specifically feminist grounds, that

Lefebvre-influenced scale debates should pay

much more attention to spatial scales, such as the

household or the human body (Marston, 2000;

Marston and Smith, 2001), while others have

argued that a focus on scale ( echelle) should not

displace Lefebvres persistent interest in levels

(niveaux) (Goonewardena, 2005; Kipfer, 2009).

As we have seen, Lefebvre understood the

urban as an intermediate level of totality (M),

which mediates the general, macro level (G)

of the far order (the state, capital, empire) and

the near order, the contradictory level of

everyday life (P). All of these levels can be

scaled, of course, but they are not synonymous

with scale. The urban is not reducible to metro-

politan regions, for example. In fact, Lefebvres

notion of the urban as level allowed him to con-ceptualize the relationship between urbaniza-

tion and the urban (fleeting form of centrality)

in multiscalar, tendentially worldwide terms.

On this basis, some have gone as far as to sug-

gest that the urban represents the veritable epis-

teme of our time (Prigge, 1995). Most

importantly, the urban understood as level of

social reality ties urban analysis systematically

back to matters of everyday life, which, in turn,

is of paramount significance for considerationsof class, gender, race, and sexuality as lived,

bodily experience at level P everyday life. In

this light, the importance of scale as a particular

result of the production of space must be relati-

vized. On this point, the relativity of scale in

relationship to other spatial forms such as

territory and network, there is now an implicit

consensus in the literature (Jessop et al., 2008;

Schmid, 2003).

5 Gender and sexuality

If the scale debates are any indication, Lefebvre

was as little a feminist or queer theorist of gen-

der and sexuality as he was a theorist of colonial

history. In fact, Lefebvre had a basic tendency

to describe women and men in essentialist terms

or deploy gendered or heternormative imagery

to describe the world (Blum and Nast, 1996).




12/21

This has not stopped a number of feminists and

theorists of sexuality, heternormative or other-

wise, making good use of Lefebvres work,

however. For instance, Kristin Ross (1995) has

examined the gendered relationships between

domestic and late colonial culture in urban

France. Mary McLeod (1997) has excavated

Lefebvres relevance for feminist conceptions

of ordinary architecture, and Doreen Massey

(1994) has stressed the benefits of bringing

Lefebvre in touch with feminist debates about

economic geography and radical democracy.

More recently, Lefebvres work has been redir-

ected to show how the geographies of sex work

are best considered as produced conceived,

lived, and perceived social spaces (Hubbardand Sanders (2003), and, more generally, how

the gendered and sexualized production of

space is a profoundly corporeal affair (Friedman

and van Ingen, 2011).

What makes Lefebvres work amenable to

critical analyses of gender and sexuality, despite

itself? In his critiques of everyday life, Lefebvre

consistently emphasized the degree to which the

institution of everyday life has taken place dis-

proportionately on the backs of women, whocarried the burden of privatized consumption

work under that very postwar capitalism which,

in advertising campaigns and womens maga-

zines, promised women new levels of economic

autonomy, affective fulfillment, and sexual lib-

eration. His research on architecture and urban

planning projects was persistent in its critique

of reproductive and nuclear conceptions of

family life that undergirded the bungalow dis-

tricts and apartment superblocks he analyzed

(Lefebvre, 1970a; Stanek, 2011). In The Pro-

duction of SpaceandDe lEtat, Lefebvre again

took up the critique of the gendered family

units of postwar urbanism, where he empha-

sized the masculinist (phallocentric) aspects

of abstract space and noted the particular role

of men in enforcing hierarchical territorial

forms. What are the most promising avenues

of taking Lefebvre into a feminist direction? His

work resists Lacanian perspectives on gender

and heteronormativity (Blum and Nast, 1996;

Gregory, 1995; Pile, 1996). As Frigga Haug

(2003) underscored, Lefebvre is theoretically

much closer to the materialist feminist and

anti-racist marxist approaches to everyday life

developed by Dorothy Smith (1987) and

Himani Bannerji (1995).

6 Urban political ecology

Lefebvre has rightly been criticized for deploy-

ing problematic and contradictory notions of

nature (Loftus, 2012; Smith, 2004; but see

Schmidt, 1972). Two things are clear, how-

ever. Lefebvres critique of everyday life reso-nates strongly with eco-socialist sensibilities

(Ajzenberg et al., 2011: 7173). Throughout

his life, Lefebvre shared a commitment to a

form of lived and self-managed socialism

which remained incompatible with the quanti-

tative and productivist leanings of state social-

ism and statist social democracy. In this light,

some have gone as far as suggesting that

Lefebvres work pushes one to consider the pos-

sibility of an ecological mode of production(Ajzenberg, 2011). Also, Lefebvres urban and

spatial writings at least gesture towards a non-

dualist perspective on nature. While his view

of nature as a mere material support for the pro-

duction of space is problematic, his argument

about the transformation of nature in the urbani-

zation process helps us show how natural forces

are not a mere shrinking backdrop in the modern

world. Key for Lefebvre is the process through

which first nature is transfigured into second

nature: urban nature (Schmid, 2005: 250252).

This process is dialectical, not linear. In urbani-

zation, first nature is not dead, but transposed,

recycled, and reinvented. Despite the weight

of abstract space, urban life remains fraught

with deep tensions between cyclical and linear

rhythms.

For Lefebvre, the transformation of first into

second nature (a key theme in critical marxism

Kipfer et al. 11



13/21

since Lukacs) thus takes place through the

urban revolution: the institution of capitalism

through the uneven imperial and sociospa-

tially differentiated process of urbanization.

This insight has been important for the forma-

tion of urban political ecology as a now well-

known research field (Keil, 2003; Kipfer et al.,

1996; Swyngedouw, 1996). For all its limita-

tions, Lefebvres urban understanding of second

nature and the contradictory rhythms that shape

it makes it difficult to uphold the dualistic

conceptions of nature and society which one can

find in environmentalist anti-urbanism and

technocratic or managerial urbanism alike. The

globalization of urban natures, of which ecolo-

gical imperialism is a key feature, means thatwe cannot abstract ecological questions from

urban contexts or consider urban questions

without reference to ecological processes.

Urban space represents a socio-ecological land-

scape, which at once incorporates and disguises

societal relationships with nature (Heynen et al.,

2006). The political upshot of all this is clear: a

radical reconstruction of the planet for purposes

of ecological sustainability and environmental

justice today must take place through a pro-found reorganization of urban life (Davis,

2010). As Alex Loftus (2012) argues forcefully,

the possibilities for such a reorganization can be

found as fragments in the here and now, in sen-

suous daily practices and creative collective

interventions.

7 Regulation

Most neomarxist theories of regulation have

remained blind to urban questions. Lefebvre has

been important, however, for attempting to

urbanize regulation theory. This seems

counter-intuitive given the distance between

French regulationists, the self-proclaimed rebel

sons of Althusser (Lipietz, 1987), and Lefebvre,

the most articulate contemporary critic of struc-

turalism (Ross, 1995: 176). The best-known

regulationists in France Alain Lipietz, Robert

Boyer, Hugues Bertrand, Michel Aglietta, Jaque

Mistral were polytechnicians, working at pre-

cisely those institutions that planned the Fordist

modernization of capitalism, such as theInstitut

national de la statistique et des etudes

economiques (INSEE), the Centre d etude des

revenues et de co uts (CERC), and the Centre

d etudes prospectives d economie math ema-

tique appliqu ees a la planification (CEPRE-

MAP) (Dosse, 1997; Scherrer, 2005; Vidal,

2000). Regulation theory emerged from within

the very institutions that promoted the territoria-

lization of the bureaucratic society of con-

trolled consumption with the help of Saint-

Simonian technocracy and the disciplinary

social sciences, which were set up with muchUS support to stop the progress of Marxism

(Ross, 1995). When they abandoned marxism

altogether (Husson, 2008), major French regula-

tionists in a sense returned to their roots in post-

war technocracy.

Lefebvres (1971c) uncompromising critique

of structuralism as a movement complicit with

postwar capitalism because of its emphasis on

synchrony (over diachrony), reproduction (over

contradiction, struggle, and the dialectic), andscience/theory (over everyday life and embo-

died knowledge) thus holds to a significant

extent for regulationists. It is thus plausible in

one sense to mobilize Lefebvre to drum up argu-

ments in British autonomist political marxism

against neo-Poulantzian state and regulation

theory (Charnock, 2010). This manoeuvre over-

looks two crucial issues, however. First,

Lefebvres analysis of everyday life in the sur-

vival of capitalism asked the same question as

the early regulationists did: how can capitalism

survive despite its own conflictual and crisis-

prone character? Lefebvre shared this concern

with the regulationists even though his approach

differed from them emphasizing transduction

over reproduction, dialectical over formalistic

method. Second, Lefebvresmarxisme anarchi-

sant was sympathetic to but not synonymous

with autonomism (or anarchism). His hatred




14/21

for the state (Merrifield, 2009: 947) and his

commitment to generalized self-management

and the primacy of struggle in change did not

lead him to consider the state as a force strictly

external to radical politics. Precisely because of

his grasp of the state-like as a social form with a

presence in everyday life, he did not shy away

from pursuing reform projects in-and-against

the state (Lefebvre, 1971b; Renaudie et al.,

2009; Stanek, 2011: 246).

Given these (limited) points of contact

between regulationist and Lefebvrean concerns,

Christian Schmids (1996, 2003) attempt at

urbanizing regulation theory makes eminent

sense. Connecting Lefebvre to DuPasquier and

Marcos original insight (1991), Schmid madean intervention in German-speaking regulation

theory, which had remained marxist and con-

cerned with social struggle more and longer

than its French and English counterparts. He

suggests that the analysis of the territoriality

of social processes leads directly to the core

of the regulation approach (Schmid, 1996:

239; 2003). The modalities of organizing the

territorial relation (rapport territorial) tell us

how capitalist development is regulated inurban terms. Defined by conflicts over the use

and the structure of hierarchically organized

social spaces, the territorial relation mediates

social relations more broadly speaking. Mul-

tidimensional in nature (material, cultural-

symbolic, and institutional-ideological), the

regulation of the territorial relation involves

struggle over various issues: the environment,

infrastructure, architecture and city building,

land use, the planning of spatial relations,

and definitions of urbanity. Schmids particu-

lar concern has been with the dialectic of

struggle at the heart of territorial relations.

While emerging from and tied to the contra-

dictions and vagaries of everyday life, strug-

gles over territory may give rise to relatively

durable territorial compromises: alliances or

modalities of action shared by political forces

in and around the state. This rejoins

Lefebvres insight that the extended state is

instrument, site, and product of hegemony

(Kipfer, 2008).

V Conclusion: politics and the rightto the city?

The right to the city and the right to difference . . .

are not natural or juridical rights but the legitimizing

theorization of multiple and contradictory social

practices. (Martins, 1982: 184)

In Anglo-America but not only there

Lefebvre is now taken in various directions.

This trend is welcome to the extent that it

enriches theory, research, and strategy whileproposing often much-needed critiques and cor-

rectives of Lefebvres work. It is also Lefebv-

rean in the sense of being open to a plurality

of struggles and theoretical currents. We have

also suggested, however, that in contemporary

debates, sustained points of contact should be

maintained to Lefebvres open, integral, and

differential marxism and the dialectical urban-

ism that helped shape it. Without such contact

to the form and content of Lefebvres work andlife, one risks sinking the metaphorical ship on

which Lefebvrean insights travel to new shores

(to speak in Edward Saids terms). Today, this

risk of translating Lefebvre arbitrarily and

superficially is evident in debates about the

right to the city. While empirically rich and

refreshingly informed by political struggles,

these debates have also given rise to opposite

interpretations of the same phenomena, most

glaringly with respect to evaluating American

housing policy (compare Duke, 2009, and Jones

and Popke, 2010).

Informed by 1968 (in France and else-

where), Lefebvre coined the notion of the right

to the city as a demand for a transformed and

renewed right to urban life (1996: 158). This

revolutionary demand links a quest for the

social surplus (and the political rupture neces-

sary to appropriate it) with a sociospatial

Kipfer et al. 13



15/21

struggle against segregation that produces new

forms of spatial centrality. In the 1970s and

1980s, urban activists, architects, and planners

in France (including Lefebvre himself) took

up fragments of Lefebvres revolutionary

urbanism to inject French urban life with forms

of centrality, festivality, and participation

(J-P Lefebvre, 2008). Lefebvrean terminology

thus reappeared in the discursive arsenal of the

French state, for example in the Banlieues

1989 projects, the formation of a Ministry of

Urban Affairs and the Loi dorientation pour

la ville of 1991, the best-known of the initia-

tives that responded to the history of riot and

revolt after 1979 (Costes, 2009; Dikec, 2007).

Typical for Lefebvres institutional travels isRoland Castro, an architect, public intellectual,

and policy advisor (and former student of

Lefebvre) who has made a career of shrinking

the right to the city to a more manageable right

to urbanity, a right that can be operationalized

by architects and planners to introduce mea-

sures of urbanistic centrality, morphological

diversity, and social mixity into Frances post-

war suburbs in order to reinvent urban civiliza-

tion and fend off the threat of barbarismemanating from social exclusion, segregation,

and the pre-political revolts of racialized

youth (Castro, 1994, 2007). Lefebvrean traces

thus reappear in the distinctly counter-revolu-

tionary round of urban transformations brought

about by contemporary urban strategies to

destructure working-class, (sub)proletarian, and

immigrant social spaces (Garnier, 2010; Khiari,

2008).

Today, state-bound renderings of the right to

the city can be found not only in France but also

in the corridors of municipalities and states

(notably in Brazil), the United Nations

(UN-Habitat and UNESCO), and a n ebuleuse

of NGOs and conferences (Habitat International

Coalition, The World Urban Forum). The insti-

tutional proliferation of Lefebvres clarion call

testifies to the fact that the right to the city has

emerged as a demand by an impressive array of

movements, from housing and slum-dweller

activists in Brazil, squatter and alternative mili-

eus in German-speaking Europe, to anti-

gentrification movements in the USA and the

activist networks coming together at the Social

Forum of the Americas and the World Social

Forum (Fernandes, 2007; Mayer, 2009; Merri-

field, 2006; Samara, 2007). This explosion of

right to the city discourses has spilled over into

lively academic debate (City, 2009; Rue Des-

cartes, 2009). Spurred on by urban struggles,

intellectuals have revisited Lefebvres revolu-

tionary concerns with surplus appropriation

(Harvey, 2008, 2011) or reformulated the right

to the city as a question resonating with strug-

gles about: public space (Mitchell, 2003); anti-racist politics (McCann, 1999; Tyner, 2007);

migrant rights, citizenship, and multicultural-

ism (Carpio et al., 2011; Gilbert and Dikec,

2008; Goonewardena and Kipfer, 2005); racia-

lized strategies of privatizing education inte-

grated in gentrification politics (Lipman,

2011); and other issues Edward Soja (2010) has

recently summarized under the rubric spatial

justice.

If this proliferation of debate, institutional andacademic, is salutary, there is a danger that the

right to the city becomes fixed in state-

centred ways: operationalized in pragmatic-

empiricist fashion and translated, for purposes

of legal reform or policy evaluation, as a concrete

legal right to habitate or participate in con-

crete physical spaces called the city (Butler,

2009; Duke, 2009; Fernandes, 2007; Purcell,

2003). Such operationalizations not only lose

sight of the fact that the implementation of col-

lective rights (to housing, participatory deci-

sion-making), as desirable as they are in our

hyperliberal times, cannot resolve the contradic-

tion between citizen and bourgeois which,

Marx reminds us, defines the capitalist state.

They also miss the central point of the right to

the city, which, far from an isolated legal right

to particular physical spaces, was meant to high-

light the strategic importance of the urban in




16/21

social struggle (Uitermark, 2004), a usually fleet-

ing, not physically fixed, form of spatial and

social centrality produced in a convergence of

radical or revolutionary politics. Turning the

right to the city into sectoral rights may be use-

ful to translate concrete movement demands into

tangible reforms, but if such tactical moves come

at the expense of a broad, transformational per-

spective, they may become cases of misplaced

concreteness. Once narrowed to particular

reforms only, they become akin to earlier proj-

ects of reducing autogestion (which Lefebvre

understood as a generalized process of trans-

forming all aspects of life before, during and after

a revolutionary rupture) to a project of injecting

homeopathic doses of group work and co-determination into workplace management

methods in late Fordist and state-socialist con-

texts (Rose, 1978).

Lefebvres right to the city is difficult to pin

down because it was a claim to something that

no longer exists and, indeed, never existed: the

historic city (Harvey, 2011: 42). Bemoaning

this lack of concreteness, some now suggest

abandoning the right to the city in favour of a

more indistinct, de-territorialized and de-differentiated, conception of politics as a spon-

taneous encounter of horizontally networked

subjects (everybuddy) (Merrifield, 2011,

2012). By extrapolating from real, but particu-

lar currents in the Euro-American indignados

and occupy movements of 2011, this post-

Lefebvrean libertarianism misreads the global

political conjuncture (Davis, 2011). The mobili-

zations in Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, Greece, and

the USA teach us at least three things of rele-

vance for our purposes. They produced forms

of spatiopolitical centrality by appropriating

lAvenue Habib Bourgiba and Tahrir, Puerta del

Sol, Syntagma, and Liberty Squares. They did

so on the basis of a convergence of multiple,

socially differentiated and spatially uneven

political forces, many of which at the periphery

of capitals horizontal space of flows (Rous-

seau, 2011). The dynamic of the Tunisian

revolution, for example, was driven by the

struggles in the mining and agricultural districts

in the countrys peripheralized centre before

claiming the coastal cities of Sousse, Sfax, and

Tunis. Together, the revolts and revolutions of

2011 underscore Mendietas (2008: 151) point

that, from a truly global perspective on capitalist

and imperial dynamics of urbanization, the

demand of the right to the city has become as

urgent, if not more, than when Lefebvre pro-

claimed it in 1968. To make sense of this typi-

cally implicit demand in a neo-Lefebvrean spirit

requires that one pays special attention to how it

is situated within the uneven landscapes and

segmented rhythms of social struggle.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any

funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-

for-profit sectors.

Note

1. This paper is an expanded, revised, and updated version

of Stefan Kipfer, Parastou Saberi, and Thorben Wie-

ditz, Henri Lefebvre, in Frank Eckardt (ed.), Hand-

buch Stadtsoziologie (Wiesbaden: Verlag fur

Sozialwissenschaften, 2012). Thanks to Kanishka Goo-

newardena and the anonymous reviewers for advice and

critique.

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