While certain aspects of Lefebvre’s writings have been examined extensively during the last three decades within the disciplines of geography, cultural studies, sociology, urban planning and social theory, there has been no comprehensive consideration of his work within legal studies.
Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City provides the first detailed analysis of the relevance and importance of the social theory of Henri Lefebvre for the study of law and the administrative state.
Introducing Lefebvre to a legal audience, this book begins by surveying the importance of Lefebvre’s work within the social sciences, and outlining the ways in which it can inform both critical legal theory and other areas of critical legal studies, such as the emerging field of critical legal geography.
Key themes that run through Lefebvre’s oeuvre are then considered in some detail, including his unorthodox, humanist approach to Marxist theory, his sociological and methodological work on everyday life, his theory of the production of space, his contribution to state theory and his concept of the ‘right to the city’.
Drawing on political struggles which surround the production of space, Lefebvre’s theoretical categories, Chris Butler argues, suggest a new way for critical legal scholarship to conceptualise law: as a central component in the relationship between state power and the inhabitance of space.
The elements of Lefebvre’s work thus offer not only an important perspective on how urban governance and public administration have been transformed by fundamental shifts in the architecture of the state, but also an opportunity to examine how this transformation contains the possibility of new forms of spatial citizenship.
