The Urban Question as a Scale Question: Reflections on Henri Lefebvre, Urban Theory and the Politics of Scale*

Abstract

Throughout his two major works of the 1970s, The production of space (1974) and De l’Etat (1976–78), Henri Lefebvre describes capitalist globalization as an intensely contradictory integration, fragmentation, polarization and redifferentiation of superimposed social spaces. Lefebvre (1991: 351) elaborates this thesis through a series of questions to which much of his work of the 1970s was devoted: