Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre

In the past fifteen years, Henri Lefebvre’s reputation has catapulted into the stratosphere, and he is now considered an equal to some of the greats of European social theory (Bourdieu, Deleuze, Harvey). In particular, his work has revitalized urban studies, geography and planning via concepts like; the social production of space, the right to the city, everyday life, and global urbanization. Lefebvre’s massive body of work has generated two main schools of thought: one that is political economic, and another that is more culturally oriented and poststructuralist in tone. Space, Difference, and Everyday Life merges these two schools of thought into a unified Lefebvrian approach to contemporary urban issues and the nature of our spatialized social structures.

Kanishka Goonewardena was trained as an architect in Sri Lanka and now teaches urban design and critical theory at the University of Toronto. He is working on two books, The Future of Planning at the "End of History" (forthcoming from Routledge) and The Urban Sensorium: Space, Ideology and the Aestheticization of Politics, exploring the making of cities, capitalism, and ideology.

Stefan Kipfer teaches urbanization, urban politics, and planning in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto. Informed by urban social theory, especially Henri Lefebvre, Frantz Fanon, and Antonio Gramsci, his research is focused on comparative politics, restructuring and colonization in metropolitan regions.

Richard Milgrom teaches community design and urban planning processes in the Department of City Planning at the University of Manitoba. Based on his experiences as an architect and social justice activist his courses encourage direct involvement with communities. His research focuses on participatory design in culturally diverse environments.

Christian Schmid is lecturer for urban sociology in the Department of Architecture ETH Zürich and senior researcher at ETH Studio Basel, Switzerland. He is the author of Stadt, Raum und Gesellschaft: Henri Lefebvre und die Produktion des Raumes, a leading work on Henri Lefebvre, as well as numerous publications on urban politics, social movements, regulation theory and urban social theory.