My guide Where to start with reading Henri Lefebvre? has been updated. It’s just a minor update with an updated link to On the Rural and links to the recent books by Patrick Rumsby, Henri Lefebvre, Boredom and Everyday Life (Lexington) and Christian Schmid, Henri Lefebvre and the Theory of the Production of Space (Verso).

This comes in response to a question to me on Twitter. Where should you start with Henri Lefebvre?

I think many people, especially in Geography, go to The Production of Space. That’s a major work, certainly, but I don’t think it’s a good place to start. It’s a difficult book, which was Lefebvre’s writing up – the theoretical culmination – of several years working on urban and, earlier, rural questions. All-too-often it is read through the lens of the first chapter – a broad, conceptual schema – and not balanced by the much more historical study found in later chapters. I’ve heard several people say that this was the first, and last, thing of Lefebvre they read, or started to read. Any serious engagement with Lefebvre has to come to terms with this book, but it’s not a good place to start.

continues here…