With, against and beyond Lefebvre: Planetary urbanization and epistemic plurality

In this paper, we discuss a number of recent efforts to critique, dismantle and problematize the categorical ontologies of ‘the urban’ and articulate an overarching epistemological framework for urban theory. Our intervention in these debates, which to date have focused primarily on Henri Lefebvre’s hypothesis regarding ‘planetary urbanization’, highlights the absence of an engagement with the long legacy within feminist urban scholarship of confronting and dismantling the categories of the ‘urban’ and ‘rural’. We argue that attending to this legacy foregrounds two conceptual and intellectual challenges that Lefebvre sets for us in his writings on the urban phenomenon. The first relates to Lefebvre’s arguments about the central role that a focus on difference and everyday life must play in understanding late capitalist urbanization and the urban condition. The second relates to Lefebvre’s articulation of the simultaneous problem and imperative of epistemological plurality within urban theory, including the role he ascribed to intellectual cooperation on the study of the urban phenomenon. We conclude by offering some thoughts on the importance Lefebvre attached to residual forms of difference – both lived and epistemological – in urban research and action, and by extension, probe some of the limits of Lefebvrian frameworks for understanding the contemporary urban condition.