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The theory of social space in the work of Henri Lefebvre.
Abstract
An outline is given of Lefebvre's early works, concentrating upon his theory of social space. Social space is interpreted in a broad and often non-geographical sense, culminating in the view that social space cannot be understood outside of a general theory for social totality - and this is based on the original source of all phenomena - conflict.-K.A.Cowlard
... That is why space can be read as a medium of struggle. Today, more than ever, space is dominated by the capitalist structure: social space is distributed according to class and the political economy of space is based on the idea of scarcity (Martins, 1982). In giving dominance to space, Lefebvre has reduced the importance of time: "With the advent of modernity, time has vanished from social space" (Lefevbre, 1991, 95). ...
The aim of this paper is to rethink the narratives surrounding Czech (post)socialist Do-It-Yourself material culture (DIY) and to explore how it has become a medium for symbolic expression in urban and rural spaces after the (post)socialist transformation. Employing theoretical frameworks of material culture (Miller, 1998; Sennett, 2008), this paper argues that Czech (post)socialist DIY material culture should be conceptualised as "vernacular art", an art which harbours and triggers memories of the (socialist) past as well as reflects wider contemporary social relationships, the exchange of materials and ideas and the political-economic milieu. Artefacts as vernacular art represent social, cultural and political dis/continuities in urban and rural spaces brought about by the (post)social-ist transformation, which can also act as symbolic manifestations in the sense of the Lefebvre's social production of space and time (Lefebvre, 1991). Based on my research, vernacular art made by handy/wo/men is a multi-layered concept, which manifests time, space, creative and affective dimensions. Simultaneously, it is a micro-spatial practice driven by authority and autonomy that reshapes urban/rural spaces.
... Marx, tarım ve sanayi üretimindeki iş bölümünün bir ifadesi olarak kent ve ülke ikiliği kavramını ve ulusal ekonominin işleyişinde manüel ve zihinsel çalışmalarda entelektüel bölünmeyi kullanır (Martins, 1982). Marx'a göre devlet kurumlarının karmaşıklığı üretimin çelişkili yapısından kaynaklanır. ...
In order to make sense of critical urban theories that have an important place in urban studies today, it is undeniable that Karl Marx, whose thoughts were needed to be read again, from the 19th century to the 21st century, whose need to be read again. The attempt to use the idea of Marx, which echo in a wide range from economy to politics, from sociology to philosophy, to take the meaning of the modern world, is among the dominant intellectual movements of the 21st century. As a trend that emerged as a reaction to social inequality and injustice, Marxism continues to take place as a parameter in studies based on critical urban theory. The reconciliation points of Marx neo marxist and modern Marxist theorists and the areas in which they differ are very important. In this study, it is aimed to make an analysis on the basic concepts of Karl Marx in order to make sense of the ground studies, in which the contribution of classical Marxist theory to critical urban theory debates based on neo-Marxist approach can be evaluated.
... V Lefebvrově terminologii to znamená, že vztahy mezi jednotlivými prvky jeho triády jsou vyoseny ve prospěch reprezentací prostoru. Jinými slovy lze říci, že žitá, popřípadě materiální zkušenost s prostorem je v současné městské kapitalistické společnosti nahrazována abstraktním pojetím sociálního prostoru [Martins 1982;Marrifield 2000: 175]. Ten je pojímán jako homogenní, fragmentalizovaný a hierarchizovaný a jeho hlavním účelem je jeho směna, tedy aby byl dobře dělitelný, měřitelný, počitatelný a v konečném důsledku obchodovatelný. ...
... Geographers and sociologists have long used Lefebvre's theory to make sense of everyday life in urban modernity, organizational space, social practices, and embodied ritual (see, e.g., Gottdiener, 1993;Martins, 1982;Simonsen, 2005;Stewart, 1995). However, one of Lefebvre's most urgent arguments was against disciplinary silos that parceled up the study of space. ...
This paper points to the importance of studying the intersection of public policy debates, spatial practice, and land use by applying Henri Lefebvre's spatial trialectic in a critique of the ongoing debate over hydraulic fracturing in western Pennsylvania. In this case study, the oil and gas industry appropriates established environmental justice discourses to assert that (1) fracking is clean and environmentally responsible, (2) it will help sustain local families and communities for many generations to come, and (3) fracking locally results in scalar, global benefit. Furthermore, the industry employs ad-hominum attacks and debunking strategies to frame anti-fracking activists as impractical alarmists. Through this rhetorical representation of space, the industry defines the process and associated values of fracking as desirable, inevitable, and most importantly, a sustainable process with just outcomes. Ultimately, the material reality of how the risks and benefits are distributed across the local, national, and global landscape through spatial practice is masked. Focusing exclusively on discourse ignores the real material conditions that give rise to and result from that discourse. Therefore, we argue Lefebvre's (1991) trialectic offers a way to address the interplay between representations and discourses of space and material reality.
... We cannot discuss urbanism in the mixed-city without considering the mechanisms of urban segregation. The scholars of the Chicago School defined social urban space as an ethnic mosaic in which communities of different origins tend to group together 10 This discussion began with the early work on urban space as a social product in the 1970s (Castells, 1977;Harvey, 1973) and continued with the criticism of this conception in the 1980s (Martins 1989;Shields 1991;Soja 1980). The exploration of postmodernism as a concept that is related to space (Harvey 1989a;Soja 1986) with an emphasis on the research of everyday life as a methodology linked to this line of thought (Featherstone 1992;Ross 1988;Silverstone 1994). ...
... We cannot discuss urbanism in the mixed-city without considering the mechanisms of urban segregation. The scholars of the Chicago School defined social urban space as an ethnic mosaic in which communities of different origins tend to group together 10 This discussion began with the early work on urban space as a social product in the 1970s (Castells, 1977;Harvey, 1973) and continued with the criticism of this conception in the 1980s (Martins 1989;Shields 1991;Soja 1980). The exploration of postmodernism as a concept that is related to space (Harvey 1989a;Soja 1986) with an emphasis on the research of everyday life as a methodology linked to this line of thought (Featherstone 1992;Ross 1988;Silverstone 1994). ...
This is a socio-spatial research that explores the reciprocal relationship between art, urban space and the public., It suggests that this three-headed intersection, forms a conceptual framework for deciphering the unique urbanism of the city in which they takes place. The research expends the theoretical discourse regarding this relationship beyond the common perspective of art as an urban renewal strategy to position it within the theoretical discourse on urbanism
Through a discussion, that ranges between macro and micro perspectives and between art’s ability to reinforce or subvert the socio-spatial structures of the city, this research presents the unique characteristics of Acre as an example for a peripheral mixed city in the Middle East. On the on hand, the research demonstrates how the city’s socio-spatial structures, stemming from the continual Israeli-Palestine conflict, are replicated in the city's artistic activity. This insight is analysed first through a macro perspective of the five theatre institutions, showing how each institution functions as a closed sphere, which addresses only a small part of the population, and therefore fails to challenge the urban socio-spatial power relations. It then proceeds in using a micro perspective, which focuses on the Fringe Theatre Festival, to demonstrate how the city’s artistic hierarchy is translated into spatial segregation, which duplicates the urban segregation and condenses it to the scale of one quarter.
On the other hand, this research reveals processes of change in the power structures of Acre's urbanism and highlights art’s part in this process. The macro perspective focuses on the struggle between the city and the Tel Aviv artists’ community in 2017. The accumulation of forces of cultural production, evolved into a city consciousness, which enabled it to stand up for its right to produce and manage its own cultural capital. The micro perspective followed life stories and trajectories of individual artists suggesting that the local theatre field enabled alternative artistic trajectories that progress under different rules from those of the national theatre field. Through these twofaced insights, the research culminates; suggesting that art has the power to bring about changes in cities, not only as part of culture-led-urban-renewal strategies, but also as part of change in the city's socio-spatial structures.
In addition to this theoretical contribution on the methodological level, the research presented here contributes super-positioning; a method adopted from architectural practice in order to integrate top-down macro perspectives with bottom up micro perspectives. Utilizing superposition, it combines methods from architecture and urban studies, mainly spatial and historical research, with methods from the social sciences and specifically ethnography. On the empirical level, the study provides a new perspective on the city of Acre, as a mixed peripheral city in the Middle East, examining its relation to artistic activity. It therefore expands upon the body of knowledge dealing with these types of cities and emphasizes how their unique characteristics lead to 'other' forms of urbanism.
... Homeomorfismus (Martins 1982;Lefebvre [1974Lefebvre [ ] 1991C. Butler 2003) odkazuje ke ztotožnění dvou rovin reality, myšlené, představované, "mentální" (reprezentace prostoru) s praktikovanou, žitou, "sociální" (prostory reprezentace) (Lefebvre [1974(Lefebvre [ ] 1991. ...
The paper questions the dominant representation of space (normative space) and its visuality in the case of spatial experience without sight. While the relationships between individuals and spaces are differentiated, normative space (re)produces the conception of one depersonalised and thus disembodied space and denies alternative conceptions of spaces. The aim of the paper is to present the process of independent experiencing of new spaces by visually impaired people. This experience is interpreted in the context of two theories: Lefebvre's production of space and Butler's theory of performativity. Our results are based on interviews with 16 visually impaired people and 2 people with knowledge about visual impairment from their profession. The interview partners learn two sets of spatial information: 'information for communication with others' and 'information necessary for spatial mobility'. While the first set of information is required to become part of the visual world and reveal the performative (re)production of the visuality of space, the second set of information is connected to non-visual experience and thus makes it possible to look beyond the normative space, to see visuality as a norm, and to start to reflect on the political connotation of spatial conceptions. © Robert Osman, Lucie Pospíšilová, 2016
... Lefebvre's urban considerations play a constitutive, nonreductive 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 Lefebvre, for whom social struggle never ceased to be a decisive reference point in urban research (Martins, 1982). In Goonewardena's sharp formulation, the upshot of Lefebvre's placement of the urban in the heart of radical theory is that 'there can be no socialist revolution without an urban revolution, no urban revolution without a socialist revolution, and neither without a revolution in everyday life' (Goonewardena, 2011: 60). ...
Wie viele französische Intellektuelle seiner Generation hat Lefebvre die Distanziertheit der traditionellen Philosophie von Politik und Alltagsleben verurteilt. Seine Schriften sind mit Erkenntnissen über alltägliche Existenz und revolutionäre politische Engagements durchzogen: anti-koloniale Agitation Mitte der 1920er, kommunistische Parteipolitik von 1928 bis 1958, die antifaschistische Résistance während des Zweiten Weltkriegs, die Neue Linke und der Mai 1968. In den frühen 1920ern war Lefebvre Mitglied einer kleinen Gruppe von linksgerichteten Studenten, welche die Zeitschrift Philosophies gründeten und die dominierende Bergson’sche Philosophie dieser Zeit anfochten. Angezogen von ihrer radikalen Kritik der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft und des Rationalismus, und ihrem Verlangen, das Leben zu verändern, hat sich Lefebvre kurz darauf den Surrealisten angeschlossen. Während er ihre Kritik des Realen durch das Surreale und ihre Wiedergabe des Trivialen als unerträglich schätzte (Lefebvre, 1991, 29), kritisierte er ihre Geringschätzung des Realen. „[L]ife is not changed magically by a poetic act, as the surrealists believed“, erinnert uns Lefebvre Jahre später (1968, 90).
... Alternativní formou bydlení jsou squaty, tedy obsazené opuštěné budovy, které často zakládají lidé zpochybňující soukromé vlastnictví a systém, jenž lidem nedokáže zaručit dostupné bydlení. Lidé, kteří přišli o veškeré živobytí, zpochybňují existující zákony a mocenské struktury alternativní praxí za hlavní příčinu chápání prostoru jako mentální kategorie označuje geografický determinismus a geografy, plánovače a urbanisty za jeho hlavní tvůrce (Lefebvre 1991, Martins 1982. Výzva k vyšší reflexivitě je tak směřována právě k nim. ...
... Lefebvre's urban considerations play a constitutive, nonreductive 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 Lefebvre, for whom social struggle never ceased to be a decisive reference point in urban research (Martins, 1982). In Goonewardena's sharp formulation, the upshot of Lefebvre's placement of the urban in the heart of radical theory is that 'there can be no socialist revolution without an urban revolution, no urban revolution without a socialist revolution, and neither without a revolution in everyday life' (Goonewardena, 2011: 60). ...
Aided with French and German scholarship, this paper takes stock of Henri Lefebvre’s relevance in contemporary 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 survey is that Lefebvre’s capacity to contribute to cutting-edge urban research requires a selective translation of his work. While the modalities of translating Lefebvre vary depending on the subject matter, transfiguring Lefebvre for today is most plausible when taking into account the dialectical nature of his urbanism and the open-ended and integral character of his marxism.
... See Elden 2001b. 11 On this, and other aspects of Lefebvre and space, see Martins (1982). 12 See for the former, for example, Quaini (1982) and Harvey (1999). ...
This article argues that the work of Martin Heidegger is extremely important in understanding Henri Lefebvre's intellectual project. It suggests that Lefebvre's trio of influential thinkers—Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche—are partnered by Heidegger. But this is Heidegger read in a particular way, and subjected to a Marxist critique—turned back on his feet, grounded, made real.
This is pursued in detail through a rereading of Lefebvre's The Production of Space. The two terms in this title need to be examined, and while the importance of space develops a number of insights from Heidegger, the stress on production shows the political and Marxist nature of this research. The Production of Space is therefore situated, and needs to be read, between Marx and Heidegger. The article closes with some comments on the interrelation of history, space and politics, and offers the possibility of a left-Heideggerianism.
... Since the early 1970s, when Anglo-American urbanists and geographers first began to discuss Lefebvre's approach to urban spatiality, his many post-1968 writings have inspired considerable discussion and any number of critical appropriations in the English language. From the early discussions of his urban theory in the 1970s (Castells 1972(Castells , 1977Harvey 1973) through the critical engagements with his approach to sociospatial theory during the 1980s (Gottdiener 1985;Martins 1982;Shields 1991;Soja 1980) to the more recent appropriations of his work in the context of debates on the condition of postmodernity (Gregory 1994;Harvey 1989;Jameson 1991;Soja 1989), the body and sexuality (Blum and Nast 1996;Stewart 1995), everyday life (Featherstone 1992;Kaplan and Ross 1987;Ross 1988Ross , 1995Silverstone 1994), the production of scale (Brenner 1998(Brenner , 2000Smith 1990), urban struggles (Keil 1998;Kipfer 1998;McCann 1999;Schmid 1998;Soja 2000) and the transformation of urban citizenship (Boudreau 2000;Purcell 2001), Lefebvre's writings have served as central reference points within a broad range of theoretical and political projects. Clearly, this diversity of readings and appropriations reflects not only the extraordinary richness of Lefebvre's ideas, but also the changing intellectual, political and social contexts in which his work has been read and debated during the last three decades. ...
... Early discussions of Lefebvre by Harvey (1973) and Castells (1977) were, according to Gottdiener (1993), undermined because they did not have the benefits of Lefebvre's "polished, completed arguments" on space, published in The Production of Space. Gottdiener's work in the 1980s on urban space (Gottdiener, 1985) and Soja's (1980) discussion of the sociospatial dialectic-the complex interrelationship between society and space-overcame the early difficulties and brought Lefebvre's notions of the social production of space to a wider anglophone audience (see also Martins, 1982). ...
Since the early 1990s, Henri Lefebvre's theory of the social production of space has become widely used by Anglophone academics to understand contemporary urban processes in the Western world. This article argues that care must be taken in transporting Lefbevre's theoretical framework from one context to another. When applied in places like U.S. cities, it must be contextualized in relation to significant sociospatial processes, especially race. It is also argued that when the racialized geographies of U.S. cities are taken into account, Lefebvre's work—with its focus on the role representation plays in the production of space—aids our understanding of contemporary urban processes. The article develops this argument through an engagement with the racialized public spaces in and around downtown Lexington, Kentucky. The killing of an African-American teenager by a White police officer and the ensuing violence and commentary, especially two editorial cartoons, provide the opportunity to contextualize Lefebvre's theory. Furthermore, the case allows us to understand the role racialized representations of space play into the construction of urban geographies. The paper concludes by emphasizing the role of the body in Lefebvre's understanding of space and suggests that his twin notions of “the right to the city” and “the right to difference” hold out hope for the grassroots development of antiracist urban public spaces.
GİRİŞ
Türkiye’de taşkömürü üretiminin yoğunlaştığı Zonguldak Metropolitan Alan kapsamında ortaya çıkan sana�yisizleşme ve yeniden yapılanma sürecinin metropolitan alanı oluşturan dört kentten biri olan Zonguldak kentinde yarattığı sosyo-mekânsal değişim, farklı katmanlarda yeniden yapılanma sürecini ortaya çıkarmıştır. Demografik, ekonomik, toplumsal ve mekânsal değişimi açığa çıkaran bu süreç içerisinde Zonguldak’ın kentsel yapısında ve kentsel anlam kurgusundaki farklılık, değişen belli üretim ilişkilerin yeniden üretildiği mekânın günlük deneyimini, onun algılanmasını ve onun kavranmasını da değiştirmiştir. Çalışma, temelde, geçirdiği ve geçirmekte olduğu sosyo-mekânsal değişim ile Zonguldak’ın “yer” niteliğindeki değişimi ilişkilendirmekte ve tartışmaktadır.
Çalışma, sosyo-mekânsal değişimi ortaya çıkaran sanayisizleşme ve sanayisizleşme sonrası yeniden yapılanma sürecine Marksist tarihsel coğrafya ve Fenomenoloji alanlarının sosyo-mekânsallık ve yer tartışmalarını bü�tünleştiren bir filtre üzerinden bakmakta ve Zonguldak’ın “Yer” niteliğindeki değişimin, dinamik bir ele alışla
değerlendirmektedir.
İlk olarak çalışmanın kuramsal bağlamını oluşturan sosyo-mekânsallık, sosyo-mekânsal bağlamda mekânın ele alınışı, yer, anlam, yer kimliği, yer duyumu kavramlarına ilişkin bir kavramlar alanı çizilecek, yerin sos�yo-mekânsal bağlamı tartışılacaktır. Zonguldak’ta sosyo-mekânsal değişime konu olan sanayisizleşme ve ye�niden yapılanma süreci üzerine kısa bir değerlendirmeden sonra yer olarak Zonguldak’ın sosyo-mekânsal
değişimi, bunun görünümleri ve yer ile anlama olası etkileri incelenecek, yeni sorular bütününde sorunsal değerlendirilecektir.
Improving comprehensive agricultural productivity is an important measure to realize agricultural modernization. Based on the data from Jilin Statistical Yearbook, this study analyzed the spatial and temporal characteristics of comprehensive agricultural productivity discrepancy in the main agricultural production areas of Jilin Province, China. The comprehensive agricultural productivity of 25 county-level administrative units were evaluated by a comprehensive index system based on five aspects which included 20 indicators from 2004 to 2017. The pattern of the discrepancy was analyzed by the spatial differentiation indices and spatial convergence theory. The results were as follows: 1) the overall comprehensive agricultural productivity was in a ‘W-type’ rising trend; 2) the discrepancy was in ‘inverted W-type’ trend; 3) the spatial distribution characteristics were mainly discrete plaque and ‘inverted V-type’; 4) the formation of differences was forced by a combination of internal and external driving forces. Our study demonstrates the effectiveness of rising agricultural productivity and the level of economic and social developments in different counties in Jilin Province.
Haitians, who are labeled perpetually 'in-transit' by the Dominican state, are the most spatially incarcerated subjects in Dominican tourist space. Dominicans and Haitians live together as 'awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative' neighbors and yet remain divided along lines of class, race, and citizenship (Tsing 2005: 4). This paper examines the Dominican Republic's historical strategies around nation-building and accessing cheap labor that cast Haitians as racialized others. It then tracks how contemporary Haitian informal workers including market women enlarge their social space through magical practices, which are both effective and stigmatizing. The everyday lived and imagined experience of Haitians in a coastal village where the Dominican state is limited in its ability to order space with legal or bureaucratic disciplinary tactics, illustrates the dialectical nature of the global processes currently at play in much of our world. Magical thinking and practice provides an ideoscape upon which all villagers project their visions of modernity in a climate of heightened competitive pressure and increased securitization that criminalizes the landless poor and non-citizen migrant alike.
Given that one of the defining elements of capitalist society is the ubiquity of forms of abstraction through which social relations are mediated, it is not surprising that a generalised ‘reproach of abstraction’ has taken on a critical orthodoxy within social theory and the humanities. Many of these attacks against a pervasive culture of abstraction have an obvious resonance with longstanding critiques of the abstractions inherent in law. This article explores the critique of the power of abstraction that is a central theme in Henri Lefebvre’s depiction of the ‘abstract space’ of contemporary capitalism. In doing so, it will be emphasised that Lefebvre’s work is not primarily concerned with the rejection of abstraction per se, but with understanding the relationships between dominant forms of abstraction and concrete social practices. Of particular interest here is Lefebvre’s reformulation of the concept of concrete abstraction which extends his work beyond a polemical dismissal of the violence of abstraction into broader theoretical debates about the role of the abstract in the reproduction of social relations. Building on this aspect of Lefebvre’s work, I will argue that the concept of concrete abstraction can provide a means of understanding the relationships between the concrete and the abstract in existing juridico-political relations.
Providing for the movement of people and things is an inevitable and increasingly important element of urban governance. Urban life in Australian cities has been physically structured around the private motor vehicle, and transport policies have historically focused on the public funding of large-scale public roadways. There is no better example of this approach to transport planning than in Southeast Queensland, where government departments associated with responsibilities for road infrastructure have traditionally wielded enormous power, and have repeatedly attempted to impose large-scale technological solutions for transport problems without regard for their wider impacts on urban life. Despite an emerging awareness of the need to reduce carbon emissions by establishing alternative models of urban mobility, local authorities in Brisbane have recently followed in this well- established tradition by embarking on an ambitious expansion of river crossings and underground road tunnels as a way to increase the capacity of private vehicular flows through the inner city. This article is an exploration of the philosophical framework ‘driving’ these political decisions and their inevitable imposition of new spatio-temporal laws on Brisbane’s inhabitants. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s account of the relationship between the production of space and social rhythms, it is argued that these transport planning decisions and the way they govern mobility will reproduce the destructive effects of abstraction on both space and the rhythms of the city.
This article provides an exploration into Henri Lefebvre's conceptual triad in production of space - spatial practice, representations of space, and spaces of representation - and tries to supplement and revise it with new theoretical approaches. Firstly, the dialectical tensions in the conceptual triad are identified through Gregory, Soja and Harvey's elaborations on Lefebvre's formula, leading to a view of "dialectics in multitude" that lay emphasis on relation and process. Secondly, the author applies concepts from Giddens' structuration theory, Butler's performativity, and actor-network theory on spatial practice to focus on the dialectical tension between structure and agency. Thirdly, the two often dichotomized concepts of "representations of space" and "spaces of representation" are both generalized as fields for political struggle, and expounded as having their own dialectical tensions which are knowledge-ideology and body-imagination respectively. Finally, the author argues that the conceptual triad of production of space must be put into historical-geographical context to realize its analytical and strategic values.
Since 1993, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has granted over $4.8 billion to public housing authorities to demolish, rehabilitate, and rebuild public housing dwellings across the country. The funding program, called HOPE VI, has received a great deal of commentary about its effects on low-income families and communities. This paper examines a specific HOPE VI development and its surrounding Capitol Hill community. The site was one of the first HOPE VI grantees in the country and has been operating at full capacity since 2000. This paper examines the spatial organization of residential housing in the community in which the HOPE VI site is located. What makes the community such a provocative study is its social geography. The HOPE VI development separates two neighborhoods that are differentiated by race, income, and access to resources; thus, it acts as a buffer between the two communities. The community is also divided by a freeway that separates a predominately poor, black residential area from a mostly wealthy, white residential area. By using several empirical studies and theoretical perspectives that examine subjugated minority populations via urban planning to ethnographic data that I have gathered since 1995, this paper demonstrates how broader structural forces, such as housing policy, discriminatory practices, economic restructuring, and hegemonic discourse, all shape communities in which the poor live.
The concept of the ‘nation-state’ is too often deployed both as a generic term for central state apparatuses and as a reference to the distinct spalial scales on which nation-state power is organized. One problematic consequence of this conceptual slippage among state theorists has been a failure to distinguish adequately shifts in the regulatory capacities of the central state from more general reconfigurations of state territorial organization on divergent spatial scales. This essay argues that currently unfolding transformations of state form are associated above all with shifts along the latter axis, that of the socio-spatial organization of state power. After a brief theoretical discussion of the spatial dimensions of the modern nation-state based on Henri Lefebvre's theory of ‘state space’ (l'espace étatique). this argument is developed through an examination of post-war regional and urban planning policies in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). A major concern of this study is to explore and concretize Lefebvre's thesis that the capitalist state is constantly engaged in the ‘production of space’. Shifts in regional and urban planning policy in the FRG since the mid-1970s, it is argued, are systematically linked to a reconfiguration of the spatial form of the nation-state under global capitalism, embodied above all in a transformation of the spatial scale on which state power is deployed. The growing importance of regional and local states as both agents and sites of capitalist restructuring is linked to structural shifts in the spatial scale of stale territorial organization. This approach to the production of spatial scale entails a critique of ‘phase models’ of capitalist development (such as regulation theory and world-system analysis) which fail to specify the spatial scale to which each periodization corresponds. The territorial scale ot capitalist socio-spatial organization has been reconfigured at various junctures during the history of global capitalist development: spatial scale is socially produced.
By applying the Lefebvrian lens, this paper tries to understand why unlike previous similar cases, the latest removal of the Star Ferry and Queen's Pier was so controversial. To Lefebvre, embedded in "spatial practices" that "secrete" a place are two contradicting spaces: "conceived spaces" produced by planners to create exchange values and "lived spaces" appropriated by citizens for use values. Applying Lefebvre's framework to examine the "Piers saga", it is found that the pre-Second World War (WWII) piers were "conceived" by spatial practices of a colonial and racially segregated trading enclave. The public space in the commercial heart that housed the previous generations of piers was not accessible to the Chinese community, thus denying them opportunities to appropriate them and turn them into "lived" spaces. It was only after WWII when the Government carried out further reclamation to meet the needs of an industrializing economy that inclusive public spaces were conceived in the commercial heart, enabling the general public to "appropriate" them as "lived" space. When the Government planned to remove this very first "lived" space in the political and economic heart of the city to conceive further reclamation for the restructuring economy, the more enlightened citizens were determined to defend it.
A growing body of work over the past two decades has been explicitly concerned with the interdisciplinary connections between law and questions of space. Traversing topics such as the regulation of the city, control of public space and the symbolic dimensions of spatial conflicts, this literature constitutes an important contribution to critical legal scholarship. However, there is still much work to be done on the development of the theoretical foundations of this field. This article presents the writings of the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre as revealing a sophisticated theory of space with potentially profound implications for the research program of critical legal studies. Lefebvrean ideas are directly relevant to the renewal of critical approaches to the structure and form of planning law and regimes of urban governance. His work also contains fertile resources for research into the transformation of traditional forms of political citizenship into the broader concept of urban citizenship. Both these examples highlight the importance of the politics of space for critical legal thought and the role Lefebvre's social theory may play in its future development. Yes Yes
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