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Henri Lefebvre
Thinkers

Henri Lefebvre

1901–1991

French philosopher who coined the right to the city and showed that space is not found: it is produced.

Against the idea that space is a neutral container in which things happen, Lefebvre argued that every society manufactures its own. An industrial estate, a gated community and a public square are not geographical accidents: they are economic and political decisions turned into stone, and for that reason they can be argued over and changed.

In 1968 he formulated the right to the city, which is not the right to be in it but to transform it. It is the idea later taken up by Harvey, by housing movements and by much of the international urban agenda, and it remains the underlying question: the city is made, but who makes it?

A French philosopher and sociologist born in 1901 and dead in 1991, a member of the Communist Party for thirty years and expelled in 1958, Lefebvre taught in Strasbourg and at Nanterre, where his students were protagonists of May 1968. He came from the critique of everyday life, to which he devoted three volumes between 1947 and 1981, and arrived at the city when functionalist planning and the housing estates of the Paris periphery seemed to him the built form of alienation.

The Right to the City (1968), The Urban Revolution (1970) and The Production of Space (1974) form his urban trilogy: space is not a container but a social product, the whole of society is becoming urbanised and the right to the city is the collective right to produce the space in which one lives. His influence was slow to reach the English-speaking world, until the translations of the 1990s, and since then Harvey, Soja, Brenner and the right to the city movements, from Brazil to Germany, have made him the most cited urban thinker of the twentieth century.

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