Abstract
This is the first issue of an academic journal, of which I am aware, to focus on Henri Lefebvre and urban planning. Urban spatial planning evolved as a concept to integrate the complex social, economic, environmental, political and land use conundrums of late 20th century society. Similarly, the spatial ideas of Henri Lefebvre encompass these issues but stress the importance of everyday life, production, culture and history. This thematic issue of Urban Planning is predicated principally on three of Lefebvre’s major works: The Production of Space (Lefebvre, 1974/1991), Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre, 1947/1991) and The Urban Revolution (Lefebvre, 1970/2003). Lefebvre’s ideas regarding the investigation of cities and urban society have been taken up most vigorously in the fields of geography, urban studies and latterly architecture. Despite this, it is clear that Lefebvre’s five central concepts—the production of space, abstract space, everyday life, the right to the city and planetary urbanisation—provide powerful tools for the examination of urban planning, cities and urban society in the Global North and South. Anglophone urban planning first embraced Lefebvre’s ideas in the 1980s. Surprisingly then, it is only in the last ten years or so that urban planning academia and research has witnessed a blossoming of interest in Lefebvre’s ideas.
Highlights
Henri Lefebvre is one of the most cited thinkers in the broad field of urban studies
Lefebvre was shocked and disappointed by various aspects of the French modernist new town programme and its implementation. He criticised the: top town ‘expert’ planning far away in Paris, unsettling speed of development, urbanisation impact on the Béarn countryside and rural everyday life, utilitarian monotony of the designs that seemed to inhibit community life and, perhaps most of all, the sheer boredom induced by the new town, with all the social dangers that it can engender
In recent research (Leary, 2013; Leary-Owhin, 2018) I argue that it is rather unfortunate that planning practitioners and theorists have, with a few notable exceptions, tended to ignore the potential contributions that Henri Lefebvre’s ideas can make to planning theory and practice
Summary
Henri Lefebvre is one of the most cited thinkers in the broad field of urban studies. There have been significant impacts on various urban struggles and city politicians regarding Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of the right to the city (Colau, 2016; Garbin & Millington, 2018) He is one of the few great 20th century European philosophers to engage directly with urban planning both in theory and in practice. The central question I pose here is the one in this editorial This issue of Urban Planning seeks to contribute to and extend the debate regarding the application of Lefebvre’s ideas to the current challenges and opportunities of urban planning. Before introducing the papers though, I present a brief summary of Lefebvre’s interaction with planning (see Leary-Owhin & McCarthy, In Press) for a fuller account
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