ABSTRACT
A huge natural gas field was discovered in 1951 in the Lacq commune near the historic hamlet of Mourenx, a few miles east of Navarrenx, by the French petroleum company Total. Mourenx’s modernist planning was a major impetus for Henri Lefebvre refocuses on the urban in the early 1960s. Differential space is therefore one of the desired outcomes of the production of space for its immediate societal benefits and its propulsive role in the transition to an urban society. Lefebvre encourages us to see differential space or spaces of difference and associated social relations as critiques and examples of everyday life. Lefebvre is most associated with his prodigious written output, but he was also a prolific reader and researcher. Out of dialectical interaction between the marginality and heterotopia of the Nanterre campus and centrality of Paris, a temporary concrete utopia emerged.
