Immense credit is due to Henri Lefebvre for having inaugurated new itineraries of inquiry in critical and cultural theory in the aftermath of the Second World War. Enduring achievements are found in all of his myriad writings, but nowhere more than in his watershed Production of Space (1974), a monumental study in which he asserts that after the turmoil of 1968 a renewed awareness of space complicates inherited ways of calculating time. Space is no longer a neutral background against which humans move about, but is what humans produce as, in turn, it shapes or even produces them. It is both a medium in which things are fashioned and a milieu in which they find their place. Lefebvre correlatively offers a theory and a history of contemporary space coordinated according to the effects of uneven economic development, the advent of the modern State (generally in upper case), and the impact of the accelerated circulation of capital in the bourgeois sphere during the “Trente Glorieuses” or three decades of prosperity that France witnessed after 1945.

He argues that those in power, together with those in collusion with governmental agencies, impose spatial constraints that regiment the lived experience of entire populations. Acutely aware of the Cold War as a time of intense transformation, early on Lefebvre foresees an impending globalization that under the impact of consumer capitalism will displace industrial society from its basis in the manufacture of objects to the commerce of information. He calls into question the heroic Marxist efforts aimed at unifying the world that finished in the gulag, and the longer-lasting effect of the totalitarian state. More traditional (and, as his use of “tradition” implies, “slower” and more deliberate) ways of using space are jettisoned where signs take the place of things. Because they define their lives through the ways they handle and exchange their “things” while living within a regime of signs, humans become increasingly alienated from their bodies and their ties to the world.