Lefebvre Plan de La Obra 2013-05!28!602

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The Production of Space


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1974,1984 by Editions Anthropos English

translation 1991 by Donald Nicholson-Smith

BLACKWELL PUBLISHING350 Main Street, Maiden, MA 02148-5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK

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Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

English translation first published 1991

25 2007

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lefebvre, Henri, 1905-[Production de l'espace, English]

The production of space / Henri Lefebvre; translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith p. cm.

Translation of: La production de l'espace.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-631-18177-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Space and time. I. Title.

BD621.I.4813 1991115-dc20 90-21058

CIP

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Envoi

Imprisoned by four walls

(to the North, the crystal of non-knowledge

a landscape to be invented

to the South, reflective memoryto the East, the mirror

to the West, stone and the song of silence)

I wrote messages, but received no reply.

Octavio Paz


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Contents

Translator's Acknowledgements ix1 Plan of the Present Work 12 Social Space 683 Spatial Architectonics 1694 From Absolute Space to Abstract Space 2295 Contradictory Space 2926 From the Contradictions of Space to Differential Space 3527 Openings and Conclusions 4018 Afterword byDavid Harvey 4259 Index 435


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1

Plan of the Present Work

Not so many years ago, the word 'space' had a strictly geometrical meaning:

the idea it evoked was simply that of an empty area. In scholarly use it was

generally accompanied by some such epithet as 'Euclidean', 'isotropic', or

'infinite', and the general feeling was that the concept of space was

ultimately a mathematical one. To speak of 'social space', therefore, wouldhave sounded strange.

Not that the long development of the concept of space had been forgotten,

but it must be remembered that the history of philosophy also testified to the

gradual emancipation of the sciences and especially of mathematics -

from their shared roots in traditional metaphysics. The thinking of Descartes

was viewed as the decisive point in the working-out of the concept of space,

and the key to its mature form. According to most historians of Western

thought, Descartes had brought to an end the Aristotelian tradition which

held that space and time were among those categories which facilitated the

naming and classing of the evidence of the senses. The status of such

categories had hitherto remained unclear, for they could be looked upon

either as simple empirical tools for ordering sense data or, alternatively, as

generalities in some way superior to the evidence supplied by the body'ssensory organs. With the advent of Cartesian logic, however, space had

entered the realm of the absolute. As Object opposed to Subject, as res

extensa opposed to, and present to, res cogitans, space came to dominate, by

containing them, all senses and all bodies. Was space therefore a divine

attribute? Or was it an order immanent to the totality of what existed? Such

were the terms in which the problem was couched for those philosophers

who came in Descartes's wake for Spinoza, for Leibniz,


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