ABSTRACT
In the last chapter, I argued that Lefebvre’s account of the emergence of the state mode of production in the latter half of the twentieth century provides a framework for conceptualising the intrinsically spatial nature of the contemporary state form. This analysis also offers an explanation for the shifting and contradictory manifestations of public power at the central and local scales, within systems of spatial planning and in broader attempts to govern the social through explicit prohibitions and less intrusive forms of regulation. In both its Keynesian and more recent neoliberal incarnations, the state has been a pivotal actor in the production of space. Accordingly, its interventions and distributions of resources are inscribed within the overall organisation and governance of urban space. But the forms and outcomes of state practice are also incorporated into lived experience at the level of the everyday, which Lefebvre regards as a platform for the extension of capital accumulation and the administration of social practice – but also as a potential site for the reassertion of resistance to both capital and state power. In this chapter, I return to the everyday – a concept that occupied Lefebvre for most of the second half of the twentieth century. In doing so, I explore three elements of his approach to the everyday that have been overshadowed in the existing literature and that have important implications for the reception of his work within the fields of law, politics and cultural studies.
