Challenging New State Spatialities: The Open Marxism of Henri Lefebvre

Abstract: It is possible to identify a subterranean tradition within Marxism—one in which dialectical thought is harnessed not only to expose the necessarily exploitative and inherently crisis‐prone character of capitalism as an actual system of social organisation, but also to critique the very categories that constitute capitalism as a conceptual system. This paper argues that Henri Lefebvre's work can be included within this tradition of “open Marxism”. In demonstrating how Lefebvre's work on everyday life, the production of space and the state derives from his open approach, the paper flags a potential problem of antinomy in an emergent new state spatialities literature that draws upon Lefebvre to supplement its structuralist–regulationist (“closed”) Marxist foundations. A Lefebvre‐inspired challenge is therefore established: that is, to develop a critique of space which does not substitute an open theory of the space of political economy with a closed theory of the political economy of the regulation of space.     

Sites of Social Centrality and Segregation: Lefebvre in Belfast,a “Divided City”

Abstract: This paper applies Henri Lefebvre's ideas on participatory democracy and spatial politics to the context of “divided cities”, a milieu often overlooked by scholars of Lefebvre. It considers, via Lefebvre, how the heterogeneous and contradictory statist methods to deal with ethno‐national violence in Belfast have in effect increased segregated space. State‐led approaches to public space as part of conflict transformation strategies appear contradictory, including attempts to “normalize” the city through inward capital investment and cultural regeneration, encouraging cosmopolitan notions of inclusive “civic identity”, and reinforcing segregation to contain violence. These processes have done little to challenge sectarianism. However, as Lefebvre suggests that dominant representations of space cannot be imposed without resistance, this paper considers the alternative strategies of a disparate range of groups in Belfast. These groups have formed cross‐cleavage networks to develop ritualized street performances which challenge the programming of public space for segregation.     

New‐Build Gentrification and the Everyday Displacement of Polish Immigrant Tenants in Greenpoint,Brooklyn

In response to research that has downplayed or denied the reality of gentrification‐induced displacement, critical urban geographers have called for rethinking the concept of displacement. This article takes up that call by examining the impact of new‐build gentrification on the everyday place‐making abilities of Polish immigrant tenants in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Based on nearly four years of work as a tenant organizer, this article looks at the forms of “everyday displacement”—the ongoing loss of the agency, freedom, and security to “make place”—experienced by immigrant tenants who struggle to remain in the neighborhood. Drawing upon Lefebvre's spatial triad and Blomley's work on the social relations of property, this article argues that everyday displacement is experienced through the production of new spaces of prohibition, appropriation, and insecurity that constitute a form of neighborhood erasure.     

Beyond the Right to the City: Territorial Autogestion and the Take over the City Movement in 1970s Italy

The cry and demand for the Right to the City (RttC) risks becoming a cliché, merely signifying urban rebellion rather than proving its practical content on the ground. I explore the limits of the thesis via its fraught entanglement with private property rights and the state‐form; and through Lefebvre's radical critique of the state, political economy and rights elsewhere. Rights claims, I contend, unintentionally reify the uneven power relations they aim to overcome, while routinely cauterising the hard‐fought collective social force that forces social gains. As a counter to the RttC thesis, I explore the autonomous Take over the City (TotC) movements of 1970s Italy, arguing that these largely neglected eminently immanent forms of territorial community activism, brought here into dialogue with Lefebvre's conception of territorial autogestion, surpassed the RttC thesis in praxis. The experience of “Laboratory Italy” thus provides highly suggestive lessons for a contemporary politics of urban space.     

Safe Space: Towards a Reconceptualization

The term “safe space” dates to the late twentieth century women's movement, but it has since been used in many different contexts. In this paper, we review and analyze historical and contemporary “safe spaces”. These include “separatist” safe spaces in women's, anti‐racist, and feminist communities, “inclusive” safe space classrooms, and safe spaces in which (non‐human) objects are central. We argue that safe spaces should be understood not through static and acontextual notions of “safe” or “unsafe”, but rather through the relational work of cultivating them. Such an understanding reveals several tendencies. Namely, safe spaces are inherently paradoxical. Cultivating them includes foregrounding social differences and binaries (safe–unsafe, inclusive–exclusive) as well as recognizing the porosity of such binaries. Renegotiating these binaries is necessarily incomplete; a safe space is never completely safe. Even so, we encourage the critical cultivation of safe space as a site for negotiating difference and challenging oppression.     

Gender,Power and Crib Geography: Transitional spaces and potential places

D. W. Winnicott's notion of 'transitional space' is noted as a potentially important contribution to post-Englightenment thinking because it decenters reason and logic in favor of playing with and making use of as the qualities most characteristic of human being. Winnicott is also, perhaps, the one child development theorist whose speculations parallel most closely contemporary post-modern interests of geographers. His principal concerns are how children (and adults) bridge the gap between egocentricism and recognition of an external world and how they distinguish between self and other. Unlike Piaget, Freud or Lacan, Winnicott does not problematize the separation of the child and her external environment primarily in terms of objective distancing, naming, rationalizing or compartmentalizing. Rather, Winnicott describes the place of play and child development in terms of transitional spaces which, we argue, bear close resemblance to the ideas which surround Henri Lefebvre's trial by space. In part, our intent is to spatialize Winnicott's ideas and to give specific form to some of Lefebvre's abstract notions of how space is produced. Winnicott's ideas are particularly intriguing for geographers because transitional spaces are theorized as the spaces out of and from which culture arises. As with play (an object), in culture there is something to make use of (a tradition), but the child/adult also has the capacity to bring something of her inner self to the tradition. In addition to discussing the potential of a link between the work of Lefebvre and Winnicott, the paper discusses the value to geography of post-structural feminist Jane Flax's recent interrogation of Winnicott's ideas. Flax's concern is to rework Winnicott's ideas from a feminist perspective and apply them to an account of identity formation which focuses upon justice and the play of differences. Transitional spaces help conflate notions of self and place, but they are also places wherein liberatory notions of justice and difference may develop.     

An Informational Right to the City? Code,Content, Control,and the Urbanization of Information

Henri Lefebvre talked of the “right to the city” alongside a right to information. As the urban environment becomes increasingly layered by abstract digital representation, Lefebvre's broader theory warrants application to the digital age. Through considering what is entailed by the urbanization of information, this paper examines the problems and implications of any “informational right to the city”. In directing Tony Benn's five questions of power towards Google, arguably the world's most powerful mediator of information, this paper exposes processes that occur when geographic information is mediated by powerful digital monopolies. We argue that Google currently occupies a dominant share of any informational right to the city. In the spirit of Benn's final question—“How do we get rid of you?”—the paper seeks to apply post‐political theory in exploring a path to the possibility of more just information geographies.     

Tahiti: the ripples of a myth on the shores of the imagination

Influenced by Henri Lefebvre's ideas about the production of space as a continually evolving dialogic process, I trace the long post‐contact history of “Tahiti” as an entangled place where the production and product are continually intertwined. I examine more than two hundred years of historical twists and turns that result in a dialogic process of place making. Tahiti is generated when the imaginary place collides with the material existence, each reflecting and recasting the other. This intertwined history includes 18th‐century French imperialist philosophies and voyages of exploration; 19th‐century colonial intervention, romantic novels and Gauguin's colourful canvases; and 20th‐century French chocolates, Hollywood movies, French nuclear testing, postcards and more.     

Thinking Past Henri Lefebvre: Introducing “The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology”

This introduction to the translation of Henri Lefebvre's 1956 essay “The theory of ground rent and rural Sociology” moves through three stages. First, it suggests that Anglophone appropriations of Lefebvre have tended to focus too much on his urban writings, at the expense of understanding his early work on rural sociology, and failing to recognise how his urban focus emerged as a result of his interest in rural–urban transformation. Second, it provides a summary of his wider work on rural questions, including his unfinished work on a major treatise of rural sociology; and outlines the key themes of the present essay in relation to these other projects. Third, it connects Lefebvre's issues to wider debates in political economy and geography about aspects of the rural, land and ground rent, not least including the work of Antonio Gramsci and José Carlos Mariátegui.     

Contesting the Divided City: Arts of Resistance in Skopje

This paper examines issues of power and resistance in “divided cities”. Basing my analysis on fieldwork I carried out in Skopje, Macedonia, I look at how urban space may be constructed and used by hegemonic groups as a means of asserting their power and how, in turn, the city may be a place of resistance where power is contested and public space reappropriated. Drawing on Lefebvre's perspective on the production of space, I compare the conceived city to the lived city and examine how urban inhabitants may resist the division of the city and challenge hegemonic representations. I also draw on Debord's psychogeography to define an artistic, active and participatory approach to urban space through which the inhabitants may re‐conquer their right to the œuvre and to the city. I argue that the city as a lived environment may offer narratives other than division and that there are alternatives to the divided city.     

The Texture of Heritage: A Reading of the 750th Anniversary of Stockholm1

This paper employs Henri Lefebvre's term ‘texture’ as a means of analysing a series of events that took place in June 2002 to mark the 750th anniversary of Sweden's capital city. The resulting case study demonstrates that heritage is the present‐day use of the past and that selection and interpretation shift according to contemporary demands. The latter prompts a continuing series of ‘particular actions’ (Lefebvre) that require explaining and elucidating to new audiences in fresh contexts. This provides heritage with its impetus whilst also accounting not only for its range and reach but also for its richness as a source of study.     

The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideology and the Aestheticization of Politics

This essay outlines a theoretical framework for investigating the links between the production of urban space (Lefebvre) and the production of ideology (Althusser) and hegemony (Gramsci) by proposing the concept of “the urban sensorium”. With a view to the aesthetics of urban experience and everyday life, this concept aligns Fredric Jameson's “postmodern” adaptation of city planner Kevin Lynch's research on “cognitive mapping” with Walter Benjamin's insights on “aestheticizing politics” in order to ask: how does urban space mediate ideology and produce hegemony while aestheticizing politics? In so doing, the spotlight falls on a conceptual constellation including four key theoretical terms: “ideology”, “aesthetics”, “mediation” and “totality”. While working through them, the essay argues that Jameson's outstanding contribution to a spatialized understanding of “postmodernism” lies above all in his Marxist (Lukácsian, Althusserian and Sartrean) theorization of mediation and totality; whereas radical students of the city can find the richest dialectical elaboration of these two concepts with special attention to space and urbanism in the oeuvre of Henri Lefebvre, especially in the recently translated The Urban Revolution.     

Taking Space: Moments of Rupture and Everyday Life in Occupy London

Taking space has been a common feature of recent social movements worldwide, and was a defining act of the Occupy movement. This article examines the taking of two spaces by Occupy London in October 2011, and argues that there was a tension between taking space as a moment of rupture, lived space‐times of intensity that provide an opening to new possibilities, and everyday life, the routines and rhythms through which social life is reproduced. My argument builds on the work of Lefebvre, bringing together his conceptualisation of “moments” and everyday life, and his radical theory of the production of space. I argue that examining the tensions over taking space provides a useful angle to explore some of the challenges faced by the Occupy movement, such as an unequal division of labour on camp, and may help in negotiating them.     

Reimagining GIScience for relational spaces

A mismatch between largely absolute Newtonian models of space in GIScience and the relational spaces of critical human geography has contributed to mutual disinterest between the fields. Critical GIS has offered an intellectual critique of GIScience without substantially altering how particular key geographical concepts are expressed in data structures. Although keystone ideas in GIScience such as Tobler's “First Law” and the modifiable areal unit problem speak to enduring concerns of human geography, they have drawn little interest from that field. Here, we suggest one way to reformulate the computational approach to the region for relational space, so that regions emerge not through proximity in an absolute space or similarities in intensive properties, but according to their similarities in relations. We show how this might operate theoretically and empirically, working through three illustrative examples. Our approach gestures toward reformulating key terms in GIScience like distance, proximity, networks, and spatial building blocks such as the polygon. Re‐engaging the challenges of representing geographical concepts computationally can yield new kinds of GIS and GIScience resonant with theoretical ideas in human geography, and also lead to critical human geographic practices less antagonistic to computation.     

Space,identity politics and resource control in Indonesia's transmigration programme

Indonesia's recent history has revealed the fragility of a national unity created under a political authoritarianism that was itself underpinned by the country's relative economic success. The government's transmigration resettlement scheme has been one particularly powerful mechanism through which the New Order government (under President Soeharto) has sought to achieve unity amidst the country's disparate ethnic groups. By resettling Javanese people, Indonesia's largest and most politically central cultural group, the state has attempted to achieve a presence of the “centre” in the country's “margins”, and in turn, extend a particular imagined geography across the archipelago. This paper examines the spatial politics of this process in one particular region, where transmigration has been coloured by environmental authoritarianism and concerns over the activity of “illegal forest squatters”. It draws on Henri Lefebvre's concept of socially produced space to demonstrate how local people have challenged the spatial authority of the state, and the ways subtle forms of resistance are expressed in agrarian landscapes and livelihood practices in Lampung. The paper concludes by reflecting on the possibilities of linking such resistance to emerging social movements which are beginning to challenge the post-Soeharto government's authority outside Java.     

Rescaled “Rebel Cities”, Nationalization,and the Bourgeois Utopia: Dialectics Between Urban Social Movements and Regulation for Japan's Homeless

Urban social movements (USMs) and regulation have co‐evolved in Japan to deal with homelessness, spatializaing their politics on the national and subnational scales. The author first theorizes these USM–regulation relationships as scale‐oriented dialectics between two opposing forces—“commoning and othering”—both of which in my view are always internalized in today's “rebel cities” (Harvey 2012, Rebel Cities, Verso). Then, he analyzes two trajectories of USMs that attempted commoning—ie radical opening up of public goods/spaces within “zones of weakness” (Lefebvre 2009a )—against policing and workfare disciplines. The author detects “rescaling” dialectics in the case of Yokohama and “nationalizing” dialectics in the case of Tokyo. Lastly, through exploring and refreshing Engels's notion of the (petit‐)bourgeois utopia, the author concludes that our commoning projects and imaginaries are constrained by capitalist urban form that spatially others the homeless; but truly revolutionary moments of commoning emerge whenever people—even temporarily—conquer the fetishism of the public/private binary embedded in this urban form.     

Relational concepts of space and place: Issues for planning theory and practice

This paper seeks to conceptualize and explore the changing relationships between planning action and practice and the dynamics of place. It argues that planning practice is grappling with new treatments of place, based on dynamic, relational constructs, rather than the Euclidean, deterministic, and one‐dimensional treatments inherited from the ‘scientific’ approaches of the 1960s and early 1970s. But such emerging planning practices remain poorly served by planning theory which has so far failed to produce sufficiently robust and sophisticated conceptual treatments of place in today's globalizing’ world. In this paper we attempt to draw on a wide range of recent advances in social theory to begin constructing such a treatment. The paper has four parts. First, we criticize the legacy of object‐oriented, Euclidean concepts of planning theory and practice, and their reliance on ‘containered’ views of space and time. Second, we construct a relational understanding of time, space and cities by drawing together four strands of recent social theory. These are: relational theories of urban time‐space, dynamic conceptualizations of ‘multiplex’ places and cities, the ‘new’ urban and regional socio‐economics, and emerging theories of social agency and institutional ordering. In the third section, we apply such perspectives to three worlds of planning practice: land use regulation, policy frameworks and development plans, and the development of ‘customized spaces’ in urban ‘regeneration’. Finally, by way of conclusion, we suggest some pointers for practising planning in a relational way.     

An American Prototype in Thomas Mann's Königliche Hoheit

This study is inspired by Henri Lefebvre's theories on the production of space to consider the issues of geographic scale, urbanism, and historical memory in Spanish playwright Jerónimo López Mozo's 1999 play El arquitecto y el relojero. In this drama, the discourses of scale and the spectacle of urban space permeate the dialogue and staging of the work while the characters confront contemporary anxieties about the spatial component of historical memory. Relying on Henri Lefebvre's tripartite theory of the production of space to explore this spatial component not only illustrates the important relationship between culture and space, but it also demonstrates how the production of space at one scale—the urban—simultaneously “articulates” (Delaney and Leitner) with the broader geography of the nation.     

Infrastructure Nation: State Space,Hegemony, and Hydraulic Regionalism in Pakistan

Large‐scale infrastructures are often understood by state planners as fulfilling a national integrative function. This paper challenges the idea of infrastructures as national integrators by engaging theories of state/nation formation and infrastructure in a postcolonial context. Specifically, I put Lefebvre's characterization of the production of state space as a homogenization‐differentiation dialectic in conversation with Gramsci's understanding of hegemony, bureaucracy, and nationalism to analyze the controversy surrounding the giant Tarbela Dam in Pakistan in the 1960s. I use the Tarbela controversy as a case study to elaborate a theory of postcolonial nation‐formation through state‐led infrastructural projects. I argue that in a postcolonial context the failure to articulate a hegemonic nationalist ideology to accompany the production of large‐scale infrastructure results in a fragmentation of state space in some ways, even as state space is homogenized and integrated in other ways. The paper also offers a “hydraulic lens” on the politics of regionalism in Pakistan.     

A Negative Geography of Necessity

Abstract: One of the many unfortunate results of the long‐lived misconception that Marx was a “determinist” is a lack of engagement with his ideas of necessity and negation. Reading the Grundrisse's famous comments on the annihilation of space by time, I trace the Hegelian roots of these concepts to show that for both Marx ahd Hegel, negation is the very act of critique itself, and necessity is properly understood not as the force of history, but as the object of historical explanation–what makes things the way they are and not another. It is therefore crucial to critical geography's efforts to identify the possibilities for social change, for that analysis must be predicated on an understanding for how things have emerged in their present form, i.e. the one we have to work with. I argue that a negative geography of necessity is the essential basis for anything we might call a communist geography, a geography of “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”.