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1 T he increasing international interest in the theory of production of space in urban research since the late 1980s appears somehow paradoxical in the face of the historical conditions that seem most unfavorable for a rereading of Lefebvre ’s work. First, what does it mean to read Lefebvre’s Marxist theory in the course of the symbolic liquidation of socialism; after the end of the Soviet Union and other socialist states in Europe and the evolution of China; in the face of the vanishing of the international communist movements and the decline of the communist parties; and given the gradual dismantling of the postwar institutional compromises in Western Europe, which stemmed from socialist inspiration and for which Marxism was a major theoretical reference?1 More specifically, what is the relevance of Lefebvre’s work for urban research today, after the political and economic end of the regimes that instrumentalized Marxist rhetoric and, to a certain extent, realized some Marxist postulates, such as that of undoing, or at least limiting, the commodification of space?2 While the economic, financial, and social crisis at the end of the first decade of this century challenged the intellectualdelegitimizationofMarxism ,whichbecame,again,attractivetoanincreasing numberofreadersbothintheformerEastandinthe“formerWest,”thischallenge was not followed by a theoretical and political reassessment of twentieth-century socialism, a theme increasingly handed over from the discipline of “transitology ” to that of history of the “century of totalitarianisms.” Where the readings of Lefebvre are concerned, this omission feeds into the routine of legitimizing his work as having nothing to do with popular democracies in Central and Eastern Europe—as if the greatest possible achievement for a Marxist intellectual would have been to ignore the historically unprecedented attempt to realize socialism Henri Lefebvre The Production of Theory 1 Henri Lefebvre 2 that he witnessed during his life, however disappointing this realization might have been. Yet, in fact, Lefebvre himself was much more thoughtful about the end of socialist states in Europe, which he witnessed just before his death in 1991 and whose importance for his work he admitted without having enough time to reflect upon.3 It is thus necessary to interrogate the cognitive value of Lefebvre’s theory in today’s postsocialist urban condition, which is not limited to the situation of the countries behind the former Iron Curtain but which encompasses both a state of mind and the all-too-real deconstruction of Fordist–Keynesian national welfare states with the concomitant shift in patterns of urbanization, urban morphologies, and development policies around the globe. But this apparent “failure” of the philosophical and political foundations of Lefebvre’s theory is not the only challenge for its reading today. With the concepts coined or shaped by Lefebvre, such as “centrality,” “monuments,” “urban everyday,” and even “the right to the city,” having been increasingly incorporated into dominant discourses of architects, planners, administrators, and developers , his work seems to be at least equally undermined by its own “success.” Thus, Lefebvre’s theory would share the fate of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999) described as “artistic critique,” focused on demands of autonomy, creativity, and authenticity, put into crisis in the course of the 1970s and 1980s by “its seeming success and the ease in which it found itself recuperated and exploited by capitalism.”4 The situation in his native France is particularly symptomatic in this respect, where the presence of Lefebvre’s concepts in mainstream discourse on architecture and urbanism during the last forty years is countered by an almost equally long tendency toward erasing his name from this discourse,5 an erasure effectuated often by those influenced by Lefebvre’s work to such an extent that they have no choice but to deny it in order to preserve their own identity. Does this mean that Lefebvre’s theory has been suppressed—or rather “superseded” and reduced to mere slogans, with the concept of the “right to the city,” to continue with one example, becoming an empty battle cry when detached from its specific historical context of the late 1960s and the social and spatial struggles around the French welfare state? This double challenge is addressed in this chapter from within a historical account of the formulation of Lefebvre’s theory of space. This requires contextualizing the formulation of his theory in his involvements in urban sociology, architecture, and urbanism. These engagements, stretching from the 1940s to the 1980s, reflect the transformations of the French...

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