Andy Merrifield, Lefebvre in the age of COVID: Lessons from The Urban Revolution and Paris Commune – Monthly Review online
Henri Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution (1970) quietly celebrated its 50th birthday under lockdown, and our greatest ever urban revolution, the Paris Commune (1871), just toasted its 150th. Both book and event have lost none of their lustre for helping progressive people think about city life, even as COVID-19 threatens to destroy that life. We might say especially as COVID-19 threatens that life, because both The Urban Revolution and the Paris Commune offer vital instruction about how we might rebuild a post-pandemic urban world, rebuild it democratically.
COVID has upended urban life as we once knew it. But it intensified already existing pathologies, those contaminating “normal,” pre-pandemic life. For decades, business-as-usual exploitation has meant cities have become not only functionally and financially standardised, but also unaffordable and unequal. Recent social distancing disrupts these inequities even more, crimping cities as sites of physical encounters, hurting poorer, immobile denizens the most. Nowadays, our urban reality is one of the de-encounter, a thinning down rather than thickening up, the dispersion and dilution of city life, its fear and loathing. [continues here]
Progressive Geographies 
underground musical geographies
https://newbooksnetwork.com/capitals-of-punk
building the barricades
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/03/herbert-marcuse-student-revolts-of-1968-ucsd-lecture
Currently reading Merrifields reflections on Lefebvre, won’t comment here on the substantive things…but one question regarding Lefebvre’s books has been bugging me ever since The Production of Space came out, god way back in 1996 by Blackwell….because there’s no answer I can find anywhere. Perhaps you have some insight into publications in the pipeline. Why hasn’t his The Right to the City been available in english? After all this time it remains a huge omission. Is there any reason why this important book isn’t available in english? I’ve contacted editors at Verso and asked them if they could commission an edition, as well as update their Lefebvre library with a new edition of The Production of Space…but no reply. Hmm, curiouser and curiouser. Any ideas?
It’s included in Writings on Cities (1996), edited by Elisabeth Lebas and Eleanore Kofman – https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/Writings+on+Cities-p-9780631191889 Part II of that book is the whole French text in translation. It’s not immediately obvious from the way the book is presented. Thanks for reading and commenting.