While certain aspects of Henri Lefebvre’s writings have been examined extensively within the disciplines of geography, social theory, urban planning and cultural studies, there has been no comprehensive consideration of his work within legal studies. Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City provides the first serious analysis of the relevance and importance of this significant thinker for the study of law and state power. Introducing Lefebvre to a legal audience, this book identifies the central themes that run through his work, including his unorthodox, humanist approach to Marxist theory, his sociological and methodological contributions to the study of everyday life and his theory of the production of space. These elements of Lefebvre’s thought are explored through detailed investigations of the relationships between law, legal form and processes of abstraction; the spatial dimensions of neoliberal configurations of state power; the political and aesthetic aspects of the administrative ordering of everyday life; and the ‘right to the city’ as the basis for asserting new forms of spatial citizenship. Chris Butler argues that Lefebvre’s theoretical categories suggest a way for critical legal scholars to conceptualise law and state power as continually shaped by political struggles over the inhabitance of space. This book is a vital resource for students and researchers in law, sociology, geography and politics, and all readers interested in the application of Lefebvre’s social theory to specific legal and political contexts.

Mustafa Dikec reveals the aesthetic premises that underlie Hannah Arendt, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Ranciere's political thinking, and demonstrates how their politics depend on the construction and apprehension of worlds through spatial forms and distrib

The Space between Us brings the connection between geography, psychology, and politics to life. By going into the neighborhoods of real cities, Enos shows how our perceptions of racial, ethnic, and religious groups are intuitively shaped by where these groups live and interact daily. Through the lens of numerous examples across the globe and drawing on a compelling combination of research techniques including field and laboratory experiments, big data analysis, and small-scale interactions, this timely book provides a new understanding of how geography shapes politics and how members of groups think about each other. Enos' analysis is punctuated with personal accounts from the field. His rigorous research unfolds in accessible writing that will appeal to specialists and non-specialists alike, illuminating the profound effects of social geography on how we relate to, think about, and politically interact across groups in the fabric of our daily lives.

An entertaining and engaging social and cultural history of the London community of Peckham that offers lessons in urban living. “Is there life in Peckham?” asks a pop song of the 1980s. Peckham has been treated as a joke and a place to be avoided. It has been celebrated in television comedies, and denigrated for its levels of crime. It is a center for the arts and the creative industries, yet it also suffers from social deprivation and racial tension. Passport to Peckham is a guide to an unofficial part of London—social and cultural history written from the ground up. In this entertaining and engaging account, Hewison invites readers to explore Peckham’s streets and presents the portrait of a community experiencing the stresses of modern living. Old and new residents rub against each other as they try to adjust to the challenges created by urban regeneration and the more subtle process of gentrification. Artists have lived and worked in Peckham for more than a century, and now Caribbean and West African communities are adding their own flavors in terms of music, drama, poetry, and film. Focused on a few square miles, Passport to Peckham raises issues of urban policy, planning, culture, and creativity that have a far wider application. As London and other major cities recover from the COVID crisis, are there lessons in urban living to be learned from the pleasures and pains of Peckham? The answer from one of Britain’s most distinguished cultural critics is an emphatic yes.

This book analyses the spatial politics of a range of British novelists writing on London since the 1950s, emphasizing spatial representation as an embodied practice at the point where the architectural landscape and the body enter into relation with each other. Colombino visits the city in connection with its boundaries, abstract spaces and natural microcosms, as they stand in for all the conflicting realms of identity; its interstices and ruins are seen as inhabited by bodies that reproduce internally the external conditions of political and social struggle. The study brings into focus the fiction in which London provides not a residual interest but a strong psychic-phenomenological grounding, and where the awareness of the physical reality of buildings and landscape conditions shape the concept of the subject traversing this space. Authors such as J. G. Ballard, Geoff Dyer, Michael Moorcock, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, Geoff Ryman, Tom McCarthy, Michael Bracewell and Zadie Smith are considered in order to map the relationship of body, architecture and spatial politics in contemporary creative prose on the city. Through readings that are consistently informed by recent developments in urban studies and reflections formulated by architects, sociologists, anthropologists and art critics, this book offers a substantial contribution to the burgeoning field of literary urban studies.

In her innovative study of spatial locations in postcolonial texts, Sara Upstone adopts a transnational approach, focusing on the major texts of Wilson Harris, Toni Morrison, and Salmon Rushdie with reference to other postcolonial authors. Challenging the privileging of the nation, Upstone shows that spatial locales such as the journey, city, home, and body enable personal or communal statements of resistance against colonial prejudice and its neo-colonial legacies.

Spatializing Politics is an anthology of emerging scholarship that treats built and imagined spaces as critical to knowing political power. Essays illustrate how buildings and landscapes as disparate as Rust Belt railway stations and rural Rwandan hills become tools of political action and frameworks for political authority.

Jay Pather, Performance and Spatial Politics in South Africa offers the first full-length monograph on the award-winning choreographer, theater director, curator, and creative artist in contemporary global performance. Working within the contexts of African studies, dance, theater, and performance, Ketu H. Katrak explores the extent of Pather's productive career but also places him and his work in the South African and global arts scene, where he is considered a visionary. Pather, a South African of Indian heritage, is known as a master of space, site, and location. Katrak examines how Pather's performance practices place him in the center of global trends that are interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, collaborative, and multimedia and that cross borders between dance, theater, visual art, and technology. Jay Pather, Performance and Spatial Politics in South Africa offers a vision of an artist who is strategically aware of the spatiality of human life, who understands the human body as the nation's collective history, and who is a symbol of hope and resilience after the trauma of violent segregation.

This monograph uses the latest archaeological results from Mongolia and the surrounding areas of Inner Asia to propose a novel understanding of nomadic statehood, political economy, and the nature of interaction with ancient China. In contrast to the common view of the Eurasian steppe as a dependent periphery of Old World centers, this work views Inner Asia as a locus of enormous influence on neighboring civilizations, primarily through the development and transmission of diverse organizational models, technologies, and socio-political traditions. This work explores the spatial management of political relationships within the pastoral nomadic setting during the first millennium BCE and argues that a culture of mobility, horse-based transport, and long-distance networking promoted a unique variant of statehood. Although states of the eastern steppe were geographically large and hierarchical, these polities also relied on techniques of distributed authority, multiple centers, flexible structures, and ceremonialism to accommodate a largely mobile and dispersed populace. This expertise in “spatial politics” set the stage early on for the expansionistic success of later Asian empires under the Mongols and Manchus. Inner Asia and the Spatial Politics of Empire brings a distinctly anthropological treatment to the prehistory of Mongolia and is the first major work to explore key issues in the archaeology of eastern Eurasia using a comparative framework. The monograph adds significantly to anthropological theory on interaction between states and outlying regions, the emergence of secondary complexity, and the growth of imperial traditions. Based on this approach, the window of Inner Asian prehistory offers a novel opportunity to investigate the varied ways that complex societies grow and the processes articulating adjacent societies in networks of mutual transformation.

This critical engagement with Doreen Massey’s ground-breaking work in geographic theory and its relationship to politics features specially commissioned essays from former students and colleagues, as well as the artists, political figures and activists whose thinking she has helped to shape. It seeks to mark and take forward her compelling contributions to geographical theorizing and political debate. High profile contributors include Lawrence Grossberg, Chantal Mouffe, Jamie Peck and Jane Wills The global reach and significance of Massey’s work recommends this volume to a diverse readership Provides an agenda for work on spatial politics and critical geography Sets out the contours of a human geography informed by Doreen Massey’s work