Lefebvre's Concept Research Articles

Women of Maguey and Mezcal: The Other Everyday Symbolic World of the Palenque

Objective: To explore and highlight the role of women in the production of maguey and mezcal in Oaxaca, with the aim of analyzing how they have resisted and adapted to the dynamics of gender, class, and ethnicity that have historically limited their participation in a male-dominated context. Theoretical Framework: It is based on María Lugones' theory of coloniality, Pierre Bourdieu's concept of male domination, and Henri Lefebvre's concept of everyday life. Method: Qualitative research through semi-structured interviews with women mezcal producers and observations in palenques. Results and Discussion: It is revealed that women mezcal producers have played a crucial but historically invisible role in mezcal production. Despite barriers of gender, class, and ethnicity, they have redefined their role in palenques, gaining recognition within their communities. However, they still face cultural and structural challenges that limit their full participation and visibility in the mezcal market. Research Implications: There is a need to revalue the role of women in mezcal production, promoting inclusion and recognition. The visibility of women mezcal producers could transform gender dynamics and open economic and social opportunities. Originality/Value: This research highlights the role of women mezcal producers, providing a gendered and decolonial perspective. It reveals their resistance in a traditionally male-dominated space, suggesting new inclusion policies in rural sectors.

What's emotion got to do with it? Reflections on the buildings of the Portuguese (Family) Courts.

Courthouses, as public edifices, serve as the physical backdrop for the administration of justice. Simultaneously, they are spaces inhabited and visited by a diverse array of court users, ranging from judicial professionals to litigants. This article explores the nuanced interplay between courthouse spaces and the emotional experiences they generate. It starts by surveying existing studies that examine such an intricate relationship. Then, and by drawing from a sample of interviews conducted across two distinct time periods (2010-2011 and 2017-2019) in Portugal, the article delves into the lived experiences of judges, prosecutors, and litigants. Their narratives provide a multifaceted view of the emotional experiences associated with the Portuguese (Family) Court buildings. To analyse these experiences, I turn to Henri Lefebvre's concept of lived space. Lived space refers to the emotions, memories, and interactions within a particular spatial context. Such dimension, in relation to courthouses, directly connects to the lived experience of legitimacy loss and low self-esteem affecting decision-making, on the one hand, and estrangement and rights' exclusion, on the other hand, felt by those subjects. By investigating how the spatial configurations of courthouses shape our emotions, we gain insights into the profound impact of such built environments on our understanding of the justice system, and the physical and symbolic obstacles in accessing it.

From Pastoral Vistas to Urban Realities: Exploring the Transformative Journey through the Primordial Village of Aathi in Sara Joseph’s Gift in Green and Pallikaranai

Space in its purest form is a pristine canvas, a blank slate awaiting the brushstrokes of life. Space is a profound repository, a vessel into which the essence of actions, movements, emotions, and sensations can be infused. It invites the human experience to inscribe its tales, thereby creating a complex tapestry of moments, memories, and significance. Space's vastness invites exploration and self-expression; it is a stage awaiting the magnificent performance of existence. Nevertheless, space is not a single entity. It is similar to a chameleon in that its meaning varies depending on the observer. What a particular location signifies to one person may be vastly different from what it means to another. This paper intends to characterize the transformational journey of cityscapes, tracing their emergence from rural or pastoral settings and elucidating their profound impact on the physical and mental health of their denizens. This article seeks to utilize Henri Lefebvre's seminal concept of representational space, or lived space, as a potent analytical tool for a comprehensive investigation of Sarah Joseph's literary work Aathi translated into English by Valson Thampu as Gift in Green. Furthermore, this study engages in a comparative analysis, drawing parallels between Sara Joseph's evocative depiction of the asphyxiated fictional realm of Aathi and the tangible urban reality of Pallikaranai in Chennai, thus casting light on the intricate interplay between fiction and reality.

A river runs through the landscape: Everyday use in an ever changing environment

The meaning of riverine landscapes to society has evolved to serve our ever-changing needs, from harvesting and transporting resources to arenas for outdoor recreation and contemplation. From the 18th century, rivers have been important resources for industry and hydroelectric power. The objective of this study is to explore and describe the rhythms of everyday use of a river environment using multiple quantitative and qualitative methods, and to identify subjective, multiple and often competing relations. We use Lefebvre's concept of rhythmanalysis and Ingold's contextual approach as a tool for bridging scientific and methodological disciplines. Our results show a wide breadth in everyday activities and a dynamic relation between people and the river on multiple time scales. The use of the river environment appears orderly and predictable, but the wide spectrum of everyday users on different spatiotemporal scales is diverse and forms multiple rhythms at each locality. The partial lockdown in Norway in response to Covid-19 and the subsequent shifts in people's daily routines changed the rhythm of daily and weekly use patterns, and demonstrates how rhythms can change rapidly in the face of large-scale, societal agitation. We argue that rhythmanalysis is a useful analytical tool in interdisciplinary approaches to better understand the use and valuations of landscapes.

Urban (Digital) Play and Right to the City: A Critical Perspective

In this paper I discuss the concept of the right to the city in articulation with the concept of urban play and more specifically, the diverse body of research related with playable and playful cities. Following a brief review of these two concepts and related studies, I critically discuss the possibilities of articulating Lefebvre's radical concept of the right to the city to contemporary interventions on urban and digital play.

Where walls of power meet the wall of money: Hydropower in the age of financialization

AbstractTheir ability to absorb substantial capital makes hydropower dams attractive projects for the “wall of money.” Although global webs of dynamic financial flows enable megaspatial transformations with huge temporal impacts, their opacity and fragmentation obfuscate possibilities for democratic decision making and accountability. This paper explores the question whether the interest in renewables and the ability of large infrastructure to absorb capital has changed the role of large dams as instruments of political, financial, and territorial power. An analytical framework inspired by Lefebvre's concept of “production of space” is used to examine the structural and context‐specific dimensions of current hydropower development. Ultimately, we hope to contribute to an alternative conception of the landscape in which the myopic focus on capital accumulation is replaced with social and environmental justice.

Choreographing the rhythms of encounter in Singapore's maid agencies

This paper builds on Lefebvre's concept of rhythmanalysis in order to extend our understanding of geographies of encounter in everyday social life. Focusing on the encounters that take place at maid agencies that match migrant domestic workers with local employers in Singapore, we develop the conceptual construct of choreography to show how bodies in spaces of encounter are rhythmically ordered to move through space in particular ways at specific speeds and times. The concept is also useful in studying encounters between migrants and citizens not just as serendipitous events but as purposively designed. Foregrounding the tangled relationalities that exist between maid agents, domestic workers, and employers, we show how employers’ interactions with the materialities of the migration industry – such as the spatial arrangement of the maid agency and the biodata used in the selection of workers – set particular diagrammatic rhythms into motion, prefiguring corporeal migrant–local encounters before they begin. We depict migrant women's punctuated rhythms of moving and waiting, revealing how the eurythmia of the maid agency both conceals and is dependent on the arrhythmia of their bodies. Finally, by emphasising that choreography requires both design and performance, we investigate how migrant women are able to overturn the ordering of rhythms through improvisational moments. Attending to the practices of the maid agency allows us to reveal how relations of power between migrants and locals are reproduced within contexts of temporary labour migration.

Sacred Rhythms and Political Frequencies: Reading Lefebvre in an Urban House of Prayer

AbstractIn recent years, Lefebvre's concept of rhythm analysis has been implied in various ways to critically examine how rhythms are formed, disrupted, and reformed through different urban venues. One theme that this body of knowledge has yet to comprehensively examine, however, is how changes in the urban sphere impact the spatial rhythms of religious institutions in cities, which can be pivotal for understanding how religious institutions are formed as urban public spaces. This article addresses this issue with a rhythm analysis of a particular religious urban locus: a synagogue in the mixed Palestinian and Jewish city of Acre in northern Israel. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and an urban survey, the article discusses how different forms of rhythm‐making undergo a process of contested synchronization with linear and cyclical rhythms of the city. More specifically, how the ability to forge a space hinges on the ability to maintain a rhythmic cycle of attendance, which, in turn, is not only dependent on the ability to achieve synchronization amongst the needs of the different participants but is also intertwined with the larger linear cycle of urban life as a rhythmic equation that fuses the personal with the political, the linear with the cyclical, and the religious with the urban.

Performing Politics: Dissent of the Mass Movement Against Neoliberal Policies in the Philippines

Nationalist and democratic mass movements consistently resist the implementation of neoliberal policies by the Philippine government. The government’s affirmation to the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), inclusion of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), and the hosting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in 2015 and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in 2017, among others, have all been dealt with protests by tens of thousands of militant activists. In these demonstrations, activists convert major roads into public spaces wherein not only dissent against imperialist globalization, privatization, and issues alike are expressed, but also it made an opportunity for them to further educate the people about how the said issues affect their personal and everyday lives. This paper combined Habermas' concept of a public sphere, Lefebvre's concept of public space, and Foucault's concept of micropolitics as a form of resistance in setting a basis to establish that political participation at resistance is a form of performance. A performative look on political participation will not only give a better meaning on political works but also deepens the understanding of one on discourses and resistances.

Property advertising and the representational production of suburbia: “Functional suburbs” and “lifestyle suburbs” in Auckland

AbstractThis paper joins literature on suburban advertising with Lefebvre's concept of representational space to analyse property advertisements as part of the representational production of suburban space. Based on comparative analysis of advertising material for suburban residential developments on Auckland's “North Shore” in two time‐periods—1950s and 2010s—the paper examines changes and continuities in thematic content. While property advertisements in the mid‐1900s emphasised the “functional suburb,” paying attention to attributes such as quality of utilities and proximity to the central city, more recently advertisements have more strongly emphasised the “lifestyle suburb,” with a focus on middle‐class community and natural amenity.

Menuju Urbanisasi Pulau Kecil: Produksi Ruang Abstrak dan Perampasan

<p class="ISI-Paragraf"><span lang="EN-US">Agrarian conflict in Pari Island of Seribu Islands, Jakarta has been undergoing for more than twenty years. The conflict involves main parties, in which the locals are diametrically opposed to local government-backed tourist corporations. This inductive qualitative study explores the historical information of the conflict and constructs a theoretical proposition at the mezzo level concerning the cause of this conflict by using an analytical tool from Lefebvre's concept of "production of space" and "accumulation by dispossession" by Harvey. The purpose of this study is to obtain a theoretical explanation at the intermediate level on the relation between abstract space production, dispossession and rural urbanization in favor of the tourism industry. The result shows, the production of abstract spaces, dispossession and urbanization located in a linear path for the production of capital space that turn social space into a space of capital accumulation, transforms agrarian resources into commodities and creates landless free labor for the future modern tourist industry. This study also shows that imbalanced contestation of spatial conflicts in Pari Island potentially marginalize local communities, furthermore, converting insular space into exclusively private-based industries is inappropriate because corporation has geographically expansive tendencies. Thus, policy makers are advised to support the life of differential spaces so that the diversity and particularity that exist in Pari Island can live together. It is this action that will overcome the damage caused by the production of abstract spaces and dispossession in the past and become the solution to the agrarian conflict in Pari Island.</span></p>

Revisões sistemáticas da literatura: parte I

A PARC Pesquisa em Arquitetura e Construção realizou, em 2017, uma chamada específica para artigos de Revisão Sistemática da Literatura (RSL). RSLs são estudos secundários com vistas a mapear, encontrar, avaliar criticamente, consolidar e agregar os resultados de estudos primários identificando ênfase, tendências e lacunas de pesquisa. Esta chamada teve grande repercussão, tendo a revista recebido aproximadamente 50 submissões. Desta forma, serão publicados em 2017 dois números especialmente dedicados a RSLs, sendo este denominado de Parte I. Foi também acrescida à revista uma seção para continuamente divulgar este tipo de estudo acadêmico. O presente número apresenta Revisões Sistemáticas da Literatura realizadas por pesquisadores dos estados brasileiros de São Paulo, Paraná e Mato Grosso. As instituições de origem dos autores abrangem a Universidade Estadual de Campinas, a Universidade de São Paulo, Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho, a Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-Americana e o Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia de Mato Grosso. As áreas de formação envolvidas concentram-se em Arquitetura e Urbanismo interagindo com a Engenharia Civil, Física, Música e Educação Física. As temáticas abordadas são: flexibilidade em projetos de arquitetura, transporte cicloviário, a relação entre os conceitos de Henri Lefebvre (HL) e a arquitetura no debate acadêmico contemporâneo, o comportamento térmico de ambientes construídos internos sob a influência das envoltórias verdes, características arquitetônicas e o decaimento sonoro de salas acopladas e a origem, evolução e importância dos elementos vazados (cobogós).

The Architecture of ‘Passive Revolution’: Society, State and Space in Modern Mexico

AbstractThis article analyses the political economy of Henri Lefebvre's concept of ‘state space’ with specific attention directed towards the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City, completed in 1938. The conditions of modernity can be generally related to the spatial ordering of urban landscapes within capital cities conjoining the specifics of national identity with imitative processes. Antonio Gramsci captured such sentiments through his understanding of the condition of ‘passive revolution’. The key contribution of this article is to draw attention to forms ofeveryday passive revolution, recognising both cosmopolitan and vernacular aspects of modern architecture in relation to the Monument to the Revolution. A focus on the Monument to the Revolution thus reveals specific spatial practices of everyday passive revolution relevant to the codification of architecture and the political economy of modern state formation in Mexico. These issues are revealed, literally, as vital expressions in the architecture of everyday passive revolution in modern Mexico.

Spatialities of contentious politics: The case of Istanbul’s Beşiktaş neighborhood, çArşı footfall fandom and Gezi

Following the literature on spatiality of contentious politics and inspired by Lefebvre's concept of everyday life, we argue that the study of Istanbul's Beşiktaş neighborhood as a “relational place” can help us contextualize the Gezi Park resistance that took place in the city in 2013. Though the neighborhood is very open to homogenizing pressures of neoliberal transformation, it still has lingering diverse and vibrant networks. This has partly been possible through the football fan group çArşı, which combines a wide series of community activism with neighborhood-based rhythms and rituals, generating a new urban sociability. This “place-framing” role that çArşı played in Beşiktaş, also allowed this fan group to combine its neighborhood power with the ongoing political mobilization during the Gezi resistance. The case of çArşı demonstrates how a simultaneous look at everyday life and place-based networks can help us explore the processes of contentious politics and analyze contingent ties between space, rhythms, and politics.

The reproduction of rural spaces through education: Abstraction of the rural and the creation of new differential spaces

This paper examines the situating of rural communities in the United States within the neoliberal global context. It will focus on Henri Lefebvre's concept of abstract space, as well as additional theories on the ways space is produced and understood. The paper will use these theories to create an understanding of the ways rural communities are shaped and the role education plays in reproducing neoliberal ideology specifically through rural school consolidation. Abstracted rural space and schools are leading rural youth to internalize neoliberal ideology wherein they see themselves as economic actors rather than active engaged members of their community, and the best way to be successful is to gain the mobility to move to an urban center. Under this line of thought, rural exists only to serve capital as a site of resource extraction and low wage labor. The paper will conclude with a discussion on the way rural education can provide rural youth with the knowledge in which to produce rural spaces that represent what a modern rural community should be, focusing on improving the quality of life for residents, rather than what neoliberal capitalism needs it to be through the creation of common schools. This type of education can lead to the development of a right to the rural, a play off of Lefebvre's right to the city, wherein rural youth can critically examine their place and the place of rural communities in the world.

Beyond the Urban–Suburban Divide: Urbanization and the Production of the Urban in Zurich North

AbstractStarting from current debates on ‘global suburbanism' and ‘postsuburbia', this article explores the changes that the former ‘urban periphery' of Zurich North has experienced in the last three decades. It mobilizes Henri Lefebvre's triadic concept of conceived, perceived and lived space in aid of an analysis of the profound urban transformations that can be observed. The construction of a new tramline serves as a guideline for an analysis of the implementation of new governance arrangements strengthening cross‐border cooperation between individual municipalities and new strategies of cooptation and expertise. This resulted in the production of new urban structures which led to a more densely woven and connected urban fabric primarily providing spaces for the headquarter economy and middle‐class housing. Concomitantly, great efforts have been made to create new public spaces, an urban image and even an urban atmosphere. These have proved at least partially successful, thus promoting a symbolic redefinition of the former urban periphery as a distinctively ‘urban' space. Conventional definitions and concepts no longer suffice to adequately understand such novel urban forms, leading to the conclusion that division into an ‘urban' and a ‘suburban' world is no longer a useful tool for urban analysis.

The intelligent woman's guide to the urban question

The ‘urban question’ isn't a question with an answer—not like the ‘housing question’, which is in essence, ‘Is the private market model of housing provision separable from capitalist social relations?’ and to which Engels replied categorically ‘No’ (though it took a book to say it). But, like the housing question, the urban question is an invitation to deeper analysis of a superficially straightforward matter, with its roots, as is the case with so many concepts in critical social theory, planted firmly in Marx. This paper situates the urban question in history, tracing its lineage from Marx to Lefebvre to Castells to its recent iterations via Lefebvre's concept of planetary urbanisation. In the course of this journey the paper considers the meanings and usefulness of the question to critical urban research and action. The paper concludes that the underlying concepts of the evolving urban question do meaningfully engage with age-old and contemporary questions of how to bring about social change, and that their utility lies in the capacity of those asking the question to crystallise the possibilities of such change.

Creative industries, public engagement and urban redevelopment in Hong Kong: Cultural regeneration as another dose of isotopia?

Culture-led urban regeneration has been the buzzword of many cities around the world nowadays. There are two related ways to interrogate this problematic. First, it is about the extent to which it is a real urban future for cities. Second, it is about its applicability to cities other than those in the West. This article attempts to tackle these related queries by, first, invoking Lefebvre's concepts of utopia vs isotopia and, then, drawing on two cases of cultural regeneration in an industrial district and an old residential neigbourhood in Hong Kong. The conceptual discussion of utopia highlights the imperative of spatial contradictions as the prerequisite for the emergence of concrete utopia; otherwise, it only results in isotopia. As such, it is difficult for cultural regeneration to produce utopia. This, in turn, calls for greater attention to the historical–geographical processes that have produced the conditions for the concerned city. It is these processes that differentiate Hong Kong from many others in the West. The prevailing land (re)development regime has favoured some processes at the expense of others. The two empirical cases have confirmed that either spatial contradictions were not there, or if they ever emerged, they were time and space specific. These conditions rendered it difficult to nurture creativity and to really relegate the decision-making power to the people, thereby denying the possible applicability of the problematic of cultural regeneration to Hong Kong.

Re-imagining the care home: a spatially responsive approach to arts practice with older people in residential care

This paper considers some of the spatial challenges of doing arts projects with older people in care homes, including those living with dementia. It reflects on the author's own experience of running a performance project with residents with at a care home in North London. Drawing on Lefebvre's concept of socially produced space, it argues that repetitive and task-oriented nature of caregiving can create particular challenges for artists who are bringing new activities in. However, rather than seeing the routine practices of a care home as a hindrance to creative activity, this paper suggests that an aesthetic engagement with the space itself can support artists and residents to re-imagine care homes as creative spaces in their own right. This argument is illustrated through an analysis of a sound project that took place in a care home dining room. In describing how the author worked with residents to explore the acoustic properties of the space, it suggests some ways in which artists may find inspiration from the care home environment. In particular, it considers the significance of atmosphere when doing arts practice in care homes as something which can create a shared sense of place. The paper concludes by considering the particular contribution of the artist to the culture of care in light of emerging concepts of relationship-centred care. It suggests that an aesthetic engagement with care homes can draw attention to the relational nature of caregiving, and the wider network of spaces that make up a care home environment.

Making space for an international branch campus: Monash University Malaysia

AbstractThis paper presents findings from an empirical study of an international branch campus established through a partnership between a Malaysian property development conglomerate, the Sunway Group, and Monash University, an Australian university known for its global aspirations. Using Lefebvre's concept of social space we analyse the perceived, conceived and lived spaces that constitute the campus of Monash University Malaysia and its urban setting in the township of Bandar Sunway. Dramatically transformed from a disused mining site and showcased as a ‘progressive’ urban project, the township symbolises the Sunway Group's commercial success and political pragmatism in managing the dynamics of Malaysia's ethnicised political economy. The broader student experience suggests that the configurations of power that shape ethnic and class relations at the scale of the national are reproduced in the composition of the student body, in students' on‐campus interactions and in the rhythms of their everyday lives within the township. By attending to the material, symbolic and imaginary dimensions of one international branch campus, we provide a more nuanced and textured understanding of the globalisation of higher education, highlighting different forms of agency exercised by key actors.