The Production of Space
Author
Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991), French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, and the most important twentieth-century theorist of space and everyday life.
Publication Details
La production de l'espace. Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1974. English translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith, The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. 454 pp. ISBN 978-0-631-18177-4.
Description
The book's title is its argument. Space is not a container in which social life happens, nor an empty coordinate system awaiting content. It is produced — made by societies, through labour, technology, law, capital and habit — and once produced it acts back, shaping what can be done in it and by whom. "(Social) space is a (social) product."
Lefebvre's target is a double abstraction he traces through Western philosophy: the treatment of space either as pure mathematical extension (Descartes, and by inheritance the planner) or as a category of mind (Kant). Both, he argues, place space outside society and therefore outside politics, which is precisely the effect that serves the interests of those who organise it.
The Spatial Triad
The book's operative contribution, and the reason it is still read. Lefebvre proposes three moments, always simultaneously in play:
- Spatial practice (perceived space). The material production and routine use of space — the commute, the delivery route, the daily circuit. It is space as it is empirically performed, and it can be observed and measured.
- Representations of space (conceived space). The space of planners, architects, engineers, surveyors and administrators: mapped, zoned, coded, standardised. This is the dominant form in any society, because it is the form in which space is designed and governed.
- Representational space (lived space). Space as directly inhabited through images, symbols, memory and association — the space of users and of artists, "dominated and hence passively experienced," and therefore also the space of resistance and appropriation.
The characteristic conflict of modernity, on Lefebvre's account, is conceived space colonising lived space: the plan overwriting the inhabitation. Much of the book is a history of that process.
Other Key Ideas
- Abstract space. The space produced by capitalism — homogeneous, fragmented into saleable parcels, and hierarchical — which presents itself as neutral while systematically erasing difference.
- Differential space. The space Lefebvre hopes will succeed it, which restores use, difference and the body.
- The right to the city. From his 1968 work: a claim to participate in producing urban space, not merely to be consulted about it.
Difficulty
The book is long, digressive and unsystematic, and the translation is not easy. Lefebvre proceeds by accumulation rather than argument, and the triad — the part everyone uses — is never given a clean summary in the text. Most readers meet it through Edward Soja or David Harvey.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
The triad transfers to interfaces and platforms almost without modification, and is one of the most useful analytic imports available to this field. A platform's conceived space is its data model, specification and intended use; its perceived space is what people routinely do in it; its lived space is what they make of it — the appropriations, workarounds, private meanings and communities the designers did not plan. Nearly every significant conflict on a platform is lived and perceived space pushing back against conceived space. See also Space and Place and The Social Logic of Space.
