Production of Space

Lefebvre's Spatial Triad

Philosophically and politically, then, Lefebvre sought to transcend the simplistic dualisms that opposed space and time, subjectivity from the material world, the local from the global. Lefebvre believed that the dominant tendency in Western philosophy toward dualisms had the effect of flattening the richness and complexity of human experience. To break through the philosophical and conceptual impasse of dualistic frameworks, Lefebvre proposed a conceptual triad. Lefebvre's conceptual framework distinguished among three different kinds of space: spaces of representation, representational space, and spatial practices.

Lefebvre defined spaces of representation as the rational spaces of planners and engineers. It is, in short, a view of how space ought to be, representing a kind of power over space. In contrast, Lefebvre saw representational space as passively experienced, imaginative, and ultimately dominated space. Although both are forms of representation of space, the former is a reflection generally of a hegemonic group and thus has the power to actually build that representation into landscapes. The latter, however, is a space of resistance that challenges those dominant representations of space. The final category, spatial practices, involves the activities that collectively serve to produce space and are interwoven with the other two dimensions of Lefebvre's triad.

Lefebvre's production of space framework also contained a historical argument about the development of social space. Here Lefebvre distinguished abstract space from what he termed concrete space. As he characterized it, concrete space was the space of lived experience. Abstract space, in contrast, was space abstracted from lived experience and embodied in the distant perspective of planners, bureaucrats, and businessmen and crystallized in maps, planning documents, and shopping malls. For Lefebvre, modernity involved the gradual colonialization of concrete space by abstract space. The task of a progressive politics, then, was to reclaim the spaces of everyday life from the homogenizing tendencies of both capital and state power.

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