Gottdiener, Mark

The Social Production of Urban Space as the Center of Analysis: Henri Lefebvre

In the 1970s, Gottdiener was already aware of the philosophical and sociological ideas of Henri Lefebvre. When preparing his first book, Planned Sprawl (1977), he realized the weakness of the dominant urban ecology in explaining metropolitan growth patterns. However, Marxian political economy, as developed by Manuel Castells and David Harvey among others, also had limitations. To achieve a better theoretical frame, Gottdiener took the task of introducing into the Anglophone debate Henri Lefebvre's work on Marxism, everyday life, and conception of space, a project that culminated in The Social Production of Urban Space (1985).

For Gottdiener, Lefebvre's value as an urban thinker lies in four areas. First, Lefebvre showed that economic categories such as rent, profit, or uneven development, which Marx and Engels used in the study of industrial urban capitalism, can also be applied in analyzing cities. Second, Lefebvre valorized real estate investment as a “second circuit of capital,” a partly independent area to make profit and acquire wealth. Third, Lefebvre maintained that space never is neutral background for social activities but both the condition and product of those activities, reproducing social relations and the very relations of production. Fourth, Lefebvre discussed the importance of government and state actions in space.

Gottdiener develops Lefebvre's theory, showing how both the real estate industry and the state conceptualize space through its abstract qualities, such as size, distance, monetary value, and profit. For people, however, space is the milieu of everyday life. The uses and meanings of this appropriated social space, for example, home and neighborhood, may be undermined by real estate projects and public plans, causing conflicts. According to Lefebvre, the conflict between abstract and social space is fundamental, ranking with the separate and different conflict among classes. Gottdiener notes that, with this view, Lefebvre departed from the Marxian perspective, which holds that class conflict is the basic force in the history of capitalism.

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