Book: Urban Revolution Now
Łukasz Stanek, Christian Schmid, Akos Moravánszky eds., Urban Revolution Now: Henri Lefebvre in Social Research and Architecture, Ashgate (2014)
When in 1970 Henri Lefebvre published The Urban Revolution, he aimed at coming to terms with what he identified as the emerging tendency towards the complete urbanization of the society.
The objective of Urban Revolution Now is no less ambitious: to draw a general picture of the global processes of urbanization today, at the time when the tendency identified by Lefebvre has become reality. This book gathers the results of numerous empirical studies which reveal the multiplicity of processes of urbanization and the variety of their patterns and actors around the globe, including Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong-Kong, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Serbia, Spain, United Kingdom, and United States.
The common denominator for these case studies are Lefebvre’s concepts, such as “production of space”, ”lived space”, “right to the city”, “differential space”, “centrality”, and “everyday life”, which are developed beyond the context of their formulation forty years ago. Urban Revolution Now is the first collection of studies which mobilize systematically these concepts in empirical research within an overarching framework of Lefebvre’s theory.
Through contributions by urban researchers, historians and theorists of architecture and urbanism, geographers and political scientists, this book advances the current theoretical and political debates drawing on Lefebvre’s work. It argues that his theory of production of space offers an important and productive conceptual framework for an interdisciplinary urban research and design today.
See the presentation of the book at the website of the publisher
Reviews in English:
Do Young Oh, The LSE Review of Books, May 2015
Nathaniel Coleman, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, October 2015
James Thompson, Urban Geography, March 2016