Space Difference, Everyday Life ─ Reading Henri Lefebvre

In the past fifteen years, Henri Lefebvre’s reputation has catapulted into the stratosphere, and he is now considered an equal to some of the greats of European social theory (Bourdieu, Deleuze, Harvey). In particular, his work has revitalized urban studies, geography and planning via concepts like; the social production of space, the right to the city, everyday life, and global urbanization. Lefebvre’s massive body of work has generated two main schools of thought: one that is political economic, and another that is more culturally oriented and poststructuralist in tone. Space, Difference, and Everyday Life merges these two schools of thought into a unified Lefebvrian approach to contemporary urban issues and the nature of our spatialized social structures.

Kanishka Goonewardena was trained as an architect in Sri Lanka and now teaches urban design and critical theory at the University of Toronto. He is working on two books, The Future of Planning at the "End of History" (forthcoming from Routledge) and The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideology and the Aestheticization of Politics, exploring the making of cities, capitalism, and ideology.
Stefan Kipfer teaches urbanization, urban politics, and planning in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto. Informed by urban social theory, especially Henri Lefebvre, Frantz Fanon, and Antonio Gramsci, his research is focused on comparative politics, restructuring and colonization in metropolitan regions.
Richard Milgrom teaches community design and urban planning processes in the Department of City Planning at the University of Manitoba. Based on his experiences as an architect and social justice activist his courses encourage direct involvement with communities. His research focuses on participatory design in culturally diverse environments.
Christian Schmid is lecturer for urban sociology in the Department of Architecture ETH Zürich and senior researcher at ETH Studio Basel, Switzerland. He is the author of Stadt, Raum und Gesellschaft: Henri Lefebvre und die Produktion des Raumes, a leading work on Henri Lefebvre, as well as numerous publications on urban politics, social movements, regulation theory and urban social theory.

CONTENTS

List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Preface and Acknowledgements

1 On the Production of Henri Lefebvre
Stefan Kipfer, Kanishka Goonewardena, Christian Schmid and Richard Milgrom

Part I: Dialectics of Space and Time

2 Towards a Three-Dimensional Dialectic: The Theory of the Production of Space
Christian Schmid
3 Space and Representation: Reading the Urban Revolution
Walter Prigge
4 Space as Concrete Abstraction: Hegel, Marx, and Modern Urbanism in Henri Lefebvre
Lukasz Stanek
5 Mondialisation before Globalization: Lefebvre and Axelos
Stuart Elden
6 Lefebvre without Heidegger: "Left Heideggerianism" as contradictio in adiecto
Geoffrey Waite

Part II: Rhythms of Urbanization and Everyday Life

7 Marxism and Everyday Life: On Lefebvre, Debord and Some Others
Kanishka Goonewardena
8 In Search of the Possible: Henri Lefebvre and Everyday Life
Klaus Ronneberger
9 Rhythms, Streets, Cities
Kurt Meyer
10 Lessons in Surrealism: Relationality, Event, Encounter
Sara Nadal-Melsió
11 A Faustian Fusion: Lefebvre and Debord
Andy Merrifield


Part III: Difference, Hegemony and The Right to the City

12 Hegemony, Everyday Life and Difference: How Lefebvre Urbanized Gramsci
Stefan Kipfer
13 Totality, Hegemony, Difference: Henri Lefebvre and Raymond Williams
Andrew Shmuely
14 Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of State Productivism
Neil Brenner
15 Right to the City: Politics of Citizenship
Liette Gilbert and Mustafa Dikeç
16 Lucien Kroll: Design, Difference, Everyday Life
Richard Milgrom

17 Globalizing Lefebvre?
Stefan Kipfer, Christian Schmid, Kanishka Goonewardena and Richard Milgrom