ABSTRACT
An increasingly rigidifying orthodoxy has begun to emerge within Marxist spatial analysis that threatens to choke off the development of a critical theory of space in its infancy. The concept of a socio-spatial dialectic is introduced as a means of reopening the debate and calling for the explicit incorporation of the social production of space in Marxist analysis as something more than an epiphenomenon. Building upon the works of Henri Lefebvre, Ernest Mandel, and others, a general spatial problematic is identified and discussed within the context of both urban and regional political economy. The spatial problematic is not a substitute for class analysis but it can be an integral and increasingly salient element in class consciousness and class struggle within contemporary capitalism.
Space and the political organization of space express social relationships but also react back upon them .... Industrialization, once the producer of urbanism, is now being produced by it ... . When we use the words “urban revolution” we designate the total ensemble of transformations which run throughout contemporary society and which serve to bring about the change from a period in which questions of economic growth and industrialization predominate to the period in which the urban problematic becomes decisive.
