ABSTRACT
Henri Lefebvre has enjoyed wide currency over the past two decades. One of his path-breaking contributions to urban research is the thesis of complete urbanization, producing an urban society that is not only real but also virtual. This thesis has enlightened research on urbanization across the world. Nevertheless, like other great thinkers at any time, Lefebvre, being a Frenchman born at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as someone who experienced the rapid rise of industrial capitalism since the 1950s, the turbulent years of the 1960s and the signicant change in the nature of state intervention since the 1970s, is very much spatiotemporally bounded (Gardiner 2000: 10-17; Merrield 2006: 8). Smith (2003: xx-xxi) has objected that The Urban Revolution is incapable of addressing the rapidly expanding urbanizing world as well as the more complex web of capital and the state in the present day. In response, there are numerous attempts either to defend Lefebvre by commenting that he had already foreseen these ‘anomalies’ or to explore seriously the ways to extend Lefebvre over time and across space. As an example of the latter, Kipfer et al. (2008: 299) think that it is straightforward: just extend Lefebvre by taking into account colonialism and patriarchy. Globalizing Lefebvre entails ‘linking considerations of everyday life to a broad critique of the imperial and patriarchal aspects of capitalist world order’. How feasible is this task?
