THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE

Lefebvre may have thought that ‘everyday life’ was his most important contribution to Marxist social theory. He may have insisted on the fundamental importance of dialectical materialism. However, his most influential contribution, across intellectual disciplines, has been his investigation of the social construction and conventions of space. Lefebvre understood the spatial as an issue cutting across disciplines, an ideal example to illustrate his demand for an end to the technocratic specialisation of academia and the organisation of government. He progressively extended his concept of ‘everyday life’ into first the rural life of the peasantry, then into suburbia and ultimately to discuss the geography of social relations in general terms. Lefebvre makes space both more material and more amenable to public debate and direct action by comparing cultural landscapes (such as Tuscany) as well as discussing the inequality and despair of class landscapes (like many upper-class enclaves and gendered consumption areas: ‘gay’ areas from the large, San Francisco’s Castro district, to the small, Ottawa’s Centretown ‘Pink Triangle’), in relation to the ghettos of the poor and the plots of tenant farmers. Lefebvre’s works on the city and on spacepublished under titles such as Urban Revolution (1970a) and Right to the City (1967d; 1968b; 1996) form a manifesto for independent social movements and community action. Although he may never have expected it, his magnum opus has become The Production of Space (1974a). As Kristin Ross argues, Lefebvre spearheaded the twentieth-century re-emergence

of a new image of society as a city-and thus the beginning of a whole new thematics of inside and outside, of inclusion in, and exclusion from, a positively-valued modernity. Cities possess a centre and banlieues, and citizens, those on the interior, deciding who among the insiders should be expelled and whether or not to open their doors to those on the outside.’