Henri Lefebvre Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Henri Lefebvre - Essay ExampleThese critiques of the city were the basis for Lefebvres investigation of the cultural construction of sterile notions of cities, of nature and of regions (Shields, 2002). Within his writings, Lefebvre brought attention to the tendency of academia to place too much emphasis upon the classification of studies as being psychology, sociology, archaeology or geographics among others, that all had as their end goal a study and understanding of space and other human geography issues.In analysing city life, Lefebvre argued popularness or commonplace is a soul-destroying feature of modernisticity and extended Marxs analysis of this concept by discovering new forms of alienation within the city. According to this view, consumption is part of the outlet of a failure to recognize this alienated state on the part of the modern consumer, which Lefebvre called the mystification of apprisedness (Shields, 2002). This early work influenced Walter Benjamins Marxist analysis of culture as well as reflecting Le Bons work on crowds and the furtherance of psycho-geography.In discussing space, Lefebvre delineated three key components of the urban lifestyle. These components include the perceived space of everyday social life that was predominantly ignored by professional life, the conceived space of cartographers and planners who work to segregate portions of land out to particular private owners within the free-enterprise(prenominal) society, and lived space which exists in the imagination of the fully human individualist who keeps it alive through accessibility to the arts and humanities. This third space not only transcends but has the force-out to refigure the balance of popular perceived space and the conceived space of arrogant professionals and greedy capitalists (Shields, 2002). This conceptual space, as opposed to material space, is considered by Lefebvre to be of much greater significance to the shaping of the individual as is shown in the comment space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of inhabitants and users... This is the dominated...space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. In terms of organized society, Lefebvre indicated this conscious awareness of these representational spaces as illuminated through art and the humanities was the only way in which Utopia could be reached. Within the French society of the interwar period, Lefebvre pointed to the dystopian malaise of his fellow countrymen as they struggled through periods of famine and industrial transition as well as the later society in which the urban landscape changed the rural nature of his homeland to develop his rhythm analysis. Through this analysis of the everyday life of the city, Lefebvre indicates that the increases in speed seen through our advances in technology have quickened the rate of the everyday, making it harder to keep up with both the changing rhythms of the city as w ell as the changing dynamics of the individual within that city. This model of modern concrete spaces and their interrelationship with the conceptual interior spaces that have been defined within the modern context have helped human geographers to further