THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE by HENRI LEFEBVRE
And other considerations on globalization
“If space is produced, if there is a productive process, then we are dealing with history.”
We are confronted by an indefinite multitude of spaces, each one piled upon, or perhaps contained within, the next: geographical, economic, demographic, sociological, ecological, political, commercial, national, continental, global. Not to mention nature’s (physical) space, the space of (energy) flows, and so on.
Nowadays we are used to the notion of nation and all other characteristics attributed to it, but this notion is quite new in our brief history. How is produced the space of a nation? When considered in relation to space, the nation may be seen to have two moments or conditions.
First, nationhood implies the existence of a market gradually built up over a historical period of varying length. Such a market is a complex ensemble of commercial relations and communication networks. It subordinates local or regional markets to the national one, and thus must have a hierarchy of levels. The social, economic and political development of a national market has been somewhat different in character in places where the towns came very early to dominate the country, as compared with places where the towns grew up on a pre-existing peasant, rural and feudal foundation. The outcome, however, is much the same everywhere: a focused space embodying a hierarchy of centres (commercial centres for the most part, but also religious one, ‘cultural’ ones, and so on) and a main centre — i.e. the national capital.
Secondly, nationhood implies violence — the violence of a military state, be it feudal, bourgeois, imperialist, or some other variety. It implies in other words, a political power controlling and exploiting the resources of the market or the growth of the productive forces in order to maintain and further its rule.
According to Lefebvre’s hypothesis, these two ‘moments’ indeed combine forces and produce a space: the space of the nation-state.
Case Study:
Why China flourished under the communist system while USSR collapsed?
From the point of view of their respective approaches to space, the Soviet model and the ‘Chinese road to socialism’ represent an opposition that is tantamount to a contradiction.
The Soviet model has as its starting-point a revision of the capitalist process of accumulation, coupled with a good intention — the desire to improve this process by speeding it up. This reinforced and intensified version of the capitalist model seeks to achieve rapid growth by relying on deliberately privileged ‘strong points’ — on large-scale enterprises and cities. All other places remain passive and peripheral relative to centres — centres of production, of wealth and of decision. The result is the creation of points of concentration or vortices: the strong points grow even stronger, the weak ever weaker. Such vortices are seen as having a regulatory role because, once established, they ‘function’ automatically. Peripheral areas, meanwhile, abandoned to stagnation and (relative) backwardness, are more and more oppressed, controlled and exploited.
The Leninist law of uneven growth and development is thus in no way dealt with, nor are its negative effects countered. Just the opposite, in fact.
The ‘Chinese road’ testifies to a real concern to draw the people and space in its entirety into the process of building a different society. This process is conceived of as a multidimensional one, involving not only the production of wealth and economic growth but also the development and enrichment of social relationships — implying the production in space of a variety of goods as well as the production of space as a whole, the production of a space ever more effectively appropriated. The rift between strong and weak points would have no place in such a process. Uneven development would disappear or at least tend to disappear. This strategy means that the political action will not result in the elevation of either the state or a political formation or party above society. This is the meaning generally given to the ‘cultural revolution’.
‘Change life!’ ‘Change society!’ These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from the Soviet constructivists of 1920–30s, and from their failure, is that new social relationships call for a new space, and vice versa.
The creation (or production) of a planet-wide space as the social foundation of a transformed everyday life open to myriad possibilities- such is the dawn now beginning to break on the far horizon. These words were written by the author on 1974 when the book was published. We can surely say that the process of creating a planet-wide space is still ongoing today, with technology that has made possible the creation of a whole new space: virtual space.
To conclude, we can state that globalization has played a vital role in the creation and destruction of (social) spaces. Cultures have come in contact with each other, the exchange not only economic but on every sphere of human activity has made humans more conscious about our global village. Globalization is a way of thinking, thinking globally.
