Prog Hum Geogr 2013 Kipfer 115 34

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Henri Lefebvre: Debates and controversies1

Stefan Kipfer, Parastou Saberi and Thorben Wieditz
Prog Hum Geogr 2013 37: 115 originally published online 29 May 2012
DOI: 10.1177/0309132512446718
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Article
Henri Lefebvre: Debates and

controversies1
Progress in Human Geography

37(1) 115134
The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0309132512446718
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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 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 Lefebvres 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.
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 reedition of his texts (the 1957 call for a revolutionary 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
the Front 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 who
insist 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: kipfer@yorku.ca
116
Progress in Human Geography 37(1)
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 international context of the alter-globalization movement. Neither of these faces of Lefebvre will
convince those on the French left (including
some with a past in structuralist urban sociology) 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 theoretically variegated. In this production of a plurality 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 important works into French.
Against this backdrop, our paper intends to
make a modest contribution to Lefebvre scholarship by taking selective stock of recent
Lefebvre-inspired debates in the English language. We do not assume that there is only one
plausible Lefebvre; or, for that matter, that
Lefebvre represents a panacea for strategy, theory, 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 interpretations which are characterized by deep political
uncertainties compounded by an enduring postmodern 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 transforming 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 one
situates Lefebvrean insights within their political and philosophical context, treating him only
as a general inspiration for a more rigorous
marxist geographical political economy
(Harvey, 1973, 1989a, 1989b, 2006), or absorbing him into the postmodern version of the linguistic 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 now
possible to identify a third wave of Lefebvre
scholarship (Goonewardena et al., 2008). In this
mould, supposedly postmodern problems
(language, identity, the body, subjectivity, culture) can be tackled by drawing on the materialist, marxist, and dialectical theoretical strands
coming together in Lefebvre. From this angle,
Lefebvre appears as a representative of a heterodox and open-ended, passionately engaged and
politically charged form of marxism. Considerations 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 urbanization and space, which recast his critique of
everyday life (Merrifield, 2002; Ross, 1997,
2008). Without recognizing the links between
Kipfer et al.
117
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 political 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 (Keucheyan, 2010) was his early argument (most developed in Dialectical Materialism, 2009b) about
the various transformations of Hegel in Marxs
work. This argument yielded an open-ended conception 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, to
bridge 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 integration of Heidegger and Nietzsche with Marx
and Hegel was fraught with deep problems, particularly 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 antihumanism [of structuralism and poststructuralism]
championed by Althusser, Michel Foucault and

Jacques Derrida, with whom he shared several interests including ideology, power and language
renders the impressionable Anglo-American sketch
of him as a postmodern student of space philologically unsustainable. It also calls into question the
coherence of his own selective appropriations of Heidegger 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 Letter on Humanism. (Goonewardena, 2011: 4546)
Neither structuralist nor deconstructive versions

of anti-humanism can withstand the new
non-liberal, dialectical humanist commitment
to 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 involvement in detailed empirical research (both rural
and urban) represented a veritable labour process through which Lefebvre forged the major
concepts in his theories of urbanization, space,
and state. His interest in considerations of architecture 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 social
totality, as a level of reality in a mediating relationship to everyday life and state-bound and
global social institutions. Lefebvres 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
118
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 revolution without an urban revolution, no urban revolution 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 justify arguments for a spatial turn of social theory
(Soja, 1989), but this turn should not be
conceived in ontological terms. As Lefebvre
(1991b: 96) has it, time may have been promoted to the level of ontology of the philosopher, 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 imperative that space be de-reified in the same way
Marx proposed to do for the commodity: by
treating spatial form not only as a powerful
social force but also as a product of necessarily temporal processes, strategies, and projects. 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 reorientation 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 lived
experiences 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 urbanization 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 Brazil
and 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 analyses will be determined by developments beyond
the North Atlantic.
III Dialectical urbanism: the urban

as form, level and mediation
Lefebvres 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
Kipfer et al.
119
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 contradictory level of everyday life (P), the daily
rounds of lived experience, on the other.
Caught between macro and micro levels of
reality, 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 imaginary-affective)
processes
(Lefebvre,
1991b). The urban as centrality is thus not easily identifiable. Not reducible to physical markers (density, particular characteristics of the
built environment), it must live through
social practice. Of particular importance in this
regard are those practices which link social differences either to produce economic surplus
and concentrate power or to create more fleeting nodes of oppositional or alternative practice. Practices of centrality are sometimes
linked to physical forms in reasonably stable
ways. This is the case, for example, when economic power is concentrated in downtown
financial districts or airport complexes. Sometimes, 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 industrialization 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 revolution 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, political, commercial, religious) functions and forms
of social, political, and economic life that are
qualitatively distinct from the countryside. The
death of the city does not necessarily refer to the
destruction of the physical environment. It
describes the process by which the forms of
centrality and difference characteristic of the
historic city implode in the process of capitalist 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 dispersed, functionally disaggregated, and
politico-economically administered forms of
life. In turn, Lefebvre expects that the death of
the historic city opens up the possibility of peripheralized 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 for spatial centrality.
Lefebvres notion of the right to the city,
although not rooted in 19th-century metropolitan 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 and The
Right to the City), which is recast shortly thereafter in his history of space (in The Production
120
of Space), is modeled on the West European

experience. Lefebvres urbanism is not theoretically 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 character. His revolutionary romanticism
(Lefebvre, 1971a, 1995) suggests that the past
cannot be restored in its lost organic unity; formerly rural versions of festivality, for example,
are transposed in form and thus take on a different meaning in revolutionary urban moments
such as the Commune and 1968. Claiming the
right to the city is thus not about restoring historical forms of the city (the street, organic
town life) or magnifying aspects of really existing urban life (heterogeneity). It is about asserting revolutionary perspectives on urban society
that emerge out of struggles in social spaces
where the city may never have existed: modernist company towns and the campuses, factories, and high-rises of French Fordism. One
could say that the implosion of the (historical) city under conditions of urbanization
(urban revolution I) is both obstacle and precondition for claims to the city as a new
form of centrality in a postcapitalist society
(urban revolution II).
The right to the city doubles as the right to
difference. The latter term may lead one to suspect 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 uncertainty, 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 centrality is always built on processes linking and
concentrating social differences, these processes can take qualitatively distinct forms.
Minimal or induced difference refers to manifestations of difference typical of our current
social order. It denotes the actually existing
ensemble of differences that, however articulated, must remain confined by the fragmented
alienations of private property, individualism,
the administered commodity form, the abstracted
linguistic sign, racism, and the patriarchal family. Maximal or produced difference, however,
refers to the possibility of non-alienated forms
of individuality and plurality in a postcapitalist,
creatively self-determined urban society. Calls
for the right to the city (spatial and socialpolitical 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 difference. 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 segregationhomogenization of the postwar metropolis
(Luscher, 1984).
IV Debating Lefebvre today

How can Lefebvres work (and his dialectical
urbanism) help us make sense of the contemporary world? His manifold insights provide many
promising starting points to understand some of
Kipfer et al.
121
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 inconclusive, need to be translated: de- and recontextualized. In the following, we do this by tracing
Lefebvres presence in debates on social movements, 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 himself. For example, Lefebvres quest for a genuinely 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 contributor 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 that
they 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 determined by broader forces than determining
agents in historical change. As we will see
below, Lefebvres emphasis on the unpredictable 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 theoretically circumscribed field or location: collective 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 developed and spatially disarticulated points of struggle may be brought into a process of mutual
transformation. 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 reference points were squarely European. Nonetheless, researchers have deployed his concepts to
analyze colonial and postcolonial conditions.
Manu Goswami (2004) has brilliantly demonstrated how Lefebvres theories of state and
space can help us understand how India has
been produced as a social space through a historical 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
122
and developmentalist strategies of dispossessing forest dwellers in Gujarat have been normalized 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 considerations of land (as well as labour and capital) 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 relationship 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 masterplanned, counter-revolutionary Rural City project in Chiapas (Wilson, 2011), strategies of
slum clearance and military urbicide (Kipfer
and Goonewardena, 2007), and mobilizations
of colonized peoples, for example in Israels
occupied territories (Yiftachel, 2009). In this
respect, Lefebvre remains of particular relevance to grasp the imperial as well as capitalist
dimensions of urbanization and depeasantization 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, second, 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 discovered this second, conceptual meaning of colonization 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 subsequent 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 worldwide urbanization of revolutionary politics
aimed at creating a multipolar world (Kipfer
and Goonewardena, forthcoming).
To deploy Lefebvres colonization to
understand the imperial heartland in postcolonial times requires considerable care. The concept of colonization as a state strategy of
territorial 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 combination of economic super-exploitation, territorial
domination, and everyday humiliation. Once
complemented by counter-colonial insights
about the geographies of historical (de)colonization (those of Frantz Fanon, for example)
(Hart, 2006; Kipfer, 2007; Ross, 1995), however, the notion of colonization can be used
productively to think about how colonial legacies 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 compared 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, deterritorializing forces (networks, flows, and hybridities)
Kipfer et al.
123
have made a focus on territorial polarization

obsolete (Hardt and Negri, 2000; for critiques,
see Hallward, 2001; Sparke, 2001). Colonization helps us understand the role of urban strategies 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 Poulantzas, Lefebvre treats the state as an institutional 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 scrutinize the productivist logics of mid-20thcentury state forms (Stalinism, fascism, Social
Democracy) (Lefebvre, 1977). In capitalist
contexts, he focuses on the changing role of
states in promoting, financing, subsidizing,
and regulating capitalism and the class compromises that sustained it in West Europe. To
the productivism of the SMP, Lefebvre counterposes a new left notion of radical democracy: 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 represents an important reformulation of his theory of
the production of space. On the one hand,
Lefebvre underlines how the state plays a central role in the production of abstract homogeneous, 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 specificities 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 colonial 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). As
Neil 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, conceived, and lived dimensions. This approach
avoids the logical conflation of territory and territoriality (Cox, 2002; Raffestin, 1980) or the
presupposition of territory as a pregiven,
bounded region (Weber, 1968), or bounded
space (Delany, 2005; Giddens, 1981; Storey,
2001). While the social weight of state territoriality can help naturalize state intervention
(Brenner and Elden, 2009b: 372373), it is ultimately subject to conflict, contestation, and historical malleability.
Today, when many have construed the relationship 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
124
bloodless coups detats in Italy and Greece to

restore market confidence in the Euro zone
(Kouvelakis, 2011), authoritarian state intervention 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 recognize 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 discourses, the contemporary war on terror has
forced us to ponder how best to examine the
characteristics 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 militarization 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 indirectly, 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 processes. 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 metropolitan regions, for example. In fact, Lefebvres
notion of the urban as level allowed him to conceptualize the relationship between urbanization and the urban (fleeting form of centrality)
in multiscalar, tendentially worldwide terms.
On this basis, some have gone as far as to suggest that the urban represents the veritable episteme 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 considerations
of 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 relativized. 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 gender 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).
Kipfer et al.
125
This has not stopped a number of feminists and

theorists of sexuality, heternormative or otherwise, 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 redirected to show how the geographies of sex work
are best considered as produced conceived,
lived, and perceived social spaces (Hubbard
and 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 disproportionately on the backs of women, who
carried the burden of privatized consumption
work under that very postwar capitalism which,
in advertising campaigns and womens magazines, promised women new levels of economic
autonomy, affective fulfillment, and sexual liberation. 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 districts and apartment superblocks he analyzed
(Lefebvre, 1970a; Stanek, 2011). In The Production of Space and De lEtat, Lefebvre again
took up the critique of the gendered family
units of postwar urbanism, where he emphasized 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 deploying problematic and contradictory notions of
nature (Loftus, 2012; Smith, 2004; but see
Schmidt, 1972). Two things are clear, however. Lefebvres critique of everyday life resonates 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 quantitative and productivist leanings of state socialism and statist social democracy. In this light,
some have gone as far as suggesting that
Lefebvres work pushes one to consider the possibility of an ecological mode of production
(Ajzenberg, 2011). Also, Lefebvres urban and
spatial writings at least gesture towards a nondualist perspective on nature. While his view
of nature as a mere material support for the production of space is problematic, his argument
about the transformation of nature in the urbanization 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 urbanization, 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
126
since Lukacs) thus takes place through the

urban revolution: the institution of capitalism
through the uneven imperial and sociospatially differentiated process of urbanization.
This insight has been important for the formation of urban political ecology as a now wellknown research field (Keil, 2003; Kipfer et al.,
1996; Swyngedouw, 1996). For all its limitations, 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 ecological imperialism is a key feature, means that
we cannot abstract ecological questions from
urban contexts or consider urban questions
without reference to ecological processes.
Urban space represents a socio-ecological landscape, 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 profound 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 sensuous 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 structuralism (Ross, 1995: 176). The best-known
regulationists in France Alain Lipietz, Robert
Boyer, Hugues Bertrand, Michel Aglietta, Jaque

Mistral were polytechnicians, working at precisely those institutions that planned the Fordist
modernization of capitalism, such as the Institut
national de la statistique et des etudes
economiques
(INSEE), the Centre detude
des
(CERC), and the Centre
revenues et de couts
detudes
prospectives deconomie
mathema a` la planification (CEPREtique appliquees
MAP) (Dosse, 1997; Scherrer, 2005; Vidal,
2000). Regulation theory emerged from within
the very institutions that promoted the territorialization of the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption with the help of SaintSimonian technocracy and the disciplinary
social sciences, which were set up with much
US support to stop the progress of Marxism
(Ross, 1995). When they abandoned marxism
altogether (Husson, 2008), major French regulationists in a sense returned to their roots in postwar 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), and
science/theory (over everyday life and embodied knowledge) thus holds to a significant
extent for regulationists. It is thus plausible in
one sense to mobilize Lefebvre to drum up arguments in British autonomist political marxism
against neo-Poulantzian state and regulation
theory (Charnock, 2010). This manoeuvre overlooks two crucial issues, however. First,
Lefebvres analysis of everyday life in the survival of capitalism asked the same question as
the early regulationists did: how can capitalism
survive despite its own conflictual and crisisprone character? Lefebvre shared this concern
with the regulationists even though his approach
differed from them emphasizing transduction
over reproduction, dialectical over formalistic
method. Second, Lefebvres marxisme anarchisant was sympathetic to but not synonymous
with autonomism (or anarchism). His hatred
Kipfer et al.
127
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 made
an intervention in German-speaking regulation
theory, which had remained marxist and concerned 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 in
urban terms. Defined by conflicts over the use
and the structure of hierarchically organized
social spaces, the territorial relation mediates
social relations more broadly speaking. Multidimensional in nature (material, culturalsymbolic, 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 particular concern has been with the dialectic of
struggle at the heart of territorial relations.
While emerging from and tied to the contradictions and vagaries of everyday life, struggles 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 right

to 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 while
proposing often much-needed critiques and correctives of Lefebvres work. It is also Lefebvrean 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 urbanism that helped shape it. Without such contact
to the form and content of Lefebvres work and
life, 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 elsewhere), 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 necessary to appropriate it) with a sociospatial
128
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 initiatives that responded to the history of riot and
revolt after 1979 (Costes, 2009; Dikec, 2007).
Typical for Lefebvres institutional travels is
Roland 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 measures of urbanistic centrality, morphological
diversity, and social mixity into Frances postwar suburbs in order to reinvent urban civilization and fend off the threat of barbarism
emanating from social exclusion, segregation,
and the pre-political revolts of racialized
youth (Castro, 1994, 2007). Lefebvrean traces
thus reappear in the distinctly counter-revolutionary 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 nebuleuse

of NGOs and conferences (Habitat International
Coalition, The World Urban Forum). The institutional 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 milieus in German-speaking Europe, to antigentrification 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; Merrifield, 2006; Samara, 2007). This explosion of
right to the city discourses has spilled over into
lively academic debate (City, 2009; Rue Descartes, 2009). Spurred on by urban struggles,
intellectuals have revisited Lefebvres revolutionary concerns with surplus appropriation
(Harvey, 2008, 2011) or reformulated the right
to the city as a question resonating with struggles about: public space (Mitchell, 2003); antiracist politics (McCann, 1999; Tyner, 2007);
migrant rights, citizenship, and multiculturalism (Carpio et al., 2011; Gilbert and Dikec,
2008; Goonewardena and Kipfer, 2005); racialized strategies of privatizing education integrated 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 and
academic, is salutary, there is a danger that the
right to the city becomes fixed in statecentred ways: operationalized in pragmaticempiricist fashion and translated, for purposes
of legal reform or policy evaluation, as a concrete
legal right to habitate or participate in concrete 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 collective rights (to housing, participatory decision-making), as desirable as they are in our
hyperliberal times, cannot resolve the contradiction 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 highlight the strategic importance of the urban in
Kipfer et al.
129
social struggle (Uitermark, 2004), a usually fleeting, 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 useful to translate concrete movement demands into
tangible reforms, but if such tactical moves come
at the expense of a broad, transformational perspective, they may become cases of misplaced
concreteness. Once narrowed to particular
reforms only, they become akin to earlier projects of reducing autogestion (which Lefebvre
understood as a generalized process of transforming all aspects of life before, during and after
a revolutionary rupture) to a project of injecting
homeopathic doses of group work and codetermination into workplace management
methods in late Fordist and state-socialist contexts (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 dedifferentiated, conception of politics as a spontaneous encounter of horizontally networked
subjects (everybuddy) (Merrifield, 2011,
2012). By extrapolating from real, but particular currents in the Euro-American indignados
and occupy movements of 2011, this postLefebvrean libertarianism misreads the global
political conjuncture (Davis, 2011). The mobilizations in Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, Greece, and
the USA teach us at least three things of relevance 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 (Rousseau, 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 proclaimed it in 1968. To make sense of this typically 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 notfor-profit sectors.
Note
1. This paper is an expanded, revised, and updated version
of Stefan Kipfer, Parastou Saberi, and Thorben Wieditz, Henri Lefebvre, in Frank Eckardt (ed.), Handbuch Stadtsoziologie (Wiesbaden: Verlag fur
Sozialwissenschaften, 2012). Thanks to Kanishka Goonewardena and the anonymous reviewers for advice and
critique.
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Progress in

Henri Lefebvre: Debates and controversies1

>> Version of Record - Jan 18, 2013

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Henri Lefebvre: Debates and

Progress in Human Geography

whose right to the city is said to translate into

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Progress in Human Geography 37(1)

governmental left, notably those active in the

context and overall orientation of Lefebvres

II Philosophy, politics, everyday life

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Lefebvres urban contributions and his other

championed by Althusser, Michel Foucault and

Neither structuralist nor deconstructive versions

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Progress in Human Geography 37(1)

Lefebvre, for whom social struggle never

III Dialectical urbanism: the urban

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political economy of the built environment (as

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Progress in Human Geography 37(1)

of Space), is modeled on the West European

insight is Lefebvres (1970b, 2008) distinction

IV Debating Lefebvre today

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the harsh realities of our urbanizing world order

1 Urban social movements

Substantially, Lefebvre sees the urban aspect

2 Colonialism and postcolonial situations

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Progress in Human Geography 37(1)

France, shanty dwellers in Latin America,

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have made a focus on territorial polarization

other hand, Lefebvre makes it clear that states

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Progress in Human Geography 37(1)

bloodless coups detats in Italy and Greece to

Lefebvres discussion of scale (echelle),

much more attention to spatial scales, such as the

argued that a focus on scale (echelle)

5 Gender and sexuality

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This has not stopped a number of feminists and

work resists Lacanian perspectives on gender

6 Urban political ecology

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Progress in Human Geography 37(1)

since Lukacs) thus takes place through the

Boyer, Hugues Bertrand, Michel Aglietta, Jaque

national de la statistique et des etudes

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

Lefebvres insight that the extended state is

V Conclusion: politics and the right

In Anglo-America but not only there

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Progress in Human Geography 37(1)

struggle against segregation that produces new

(UN-Habitat and UNESCO), and a nebuleuse

movements, from housing and slum-dweller