Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

U r b a n r e v o L U t i o n
deep within The Urban Revolution (p. 179; pp. 194–95), he says
he’ll be returning to some of the book’s contents in another monograph,
bearing the title Theories of Urban Space. Lefebvrian aficionados
will know this text never materialized under that rubric.
They’ll know instead that here lie the seeds of what would eventually
become The Production of Space, regarded by many critics as
his most accomplished work.
More and more Lefebvre believes that despite their “blind
fields,” technocrats and cybernanthropes did see with collective
clarity when it came to one aspect of neocapitalist reality: they
knew that executing their will meant obeying a “social command.”
This writ wasn’t accented on such and such a thing, on such and
such an object, as on a “global object, a supreme product, the ultimate
object of exchange: space” (p. 204; p. 154). Thus this power
to control future economic and political destinies is predicated on
a command not of objects in space but of space itself. “Today,”
Lefebvre says, “the social (global) character of productive labor,
embodied in the productive forces, is apparent in the social production
of space” (p. 205; p. 155).
Today, space as a whole enters into production, as a product,
through buying and selling and the part exchange of space.
Not too long ago, a localized, identifiable space, the soil, still
belonged to a sacred entity: the earth. It belonged to that cursed,
and therefore sacred, character (not the means of production
but the Home), a carryover from feudal times. Today, this ideology
and corresponding practice is collapsing. Something new
is happening. (p. 205; p. 155)
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