Making the political aspect of Lefebvre's work available in English for the first time, this book contains essays on philosophy, political theory, state formation, spatial planning, and globalization, as well as provocative reflections on the possibilities and limits of grassroots democracy under advanced capitalism.

Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life. The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live). In the course of his exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy. This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures.

A collection of previously untranslated writings by Henri Lefebvre on rural sociology, situating his research in relation to wider Marxist work On the Rural is the first English collection to translate Lefebvre’s crucial but lesser-known writings on rural sociology and political economy, presenting a wide-ranging approach to understanding the historical and rural sociology of precapitalist social forms, their endurance today, and conditions of dispossession and uneven development. In On the Rural, Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton present Lefebvre’s key works on rural questions, including the first half of his book Du rural à l’urbain and supplementary texts, two of which are largely unknown conference presentations published outside France. On the Rural offers methodological orientations for addressing questions of economy, sociology, and geography by deploying insights from spatial political economy to decipher the rural as a terrain and stake of capitalist transformation. By doing so, it reveals the production of the rural as a key site of capitalist development and as a space of struggle. This volume delivers a careful translation—supplemented with extensive notes and a substantive introduction—to cement Lefebvre’s central contribution to the political economy of rural sociology and geography.

The book blends readability and accessibility common to undergraduate control systems texts with the mathematical rigor necessary to form a solid theoretical foundation. Appendices cover linear algebra and provide a Matlab overivew and files. The reviewers pointed out that this is an ambitious project but one that will pay off because of the lack of good up-to-date textbooks in the area.

Simultaneously analysing the restructuring of urban governance and the transformation of national states under globalising capitalism, 'New State Spaces' is a mature analysis of broad interdisciplinary interest.

Spatial Ecologies asks why French cultural and critical theory since 1968 has turned from investigating questions of time to examining space. Verena Conley ranges over the work of Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Jean Baudrillard, Marc Auge, Paul Virilio, Bruno Latour, and Etienne Balibar to analyze how they reconsidered the experience of space in the midst of political and economic turmoil and to find out what writing about space can tell us about life in late capitalism. Conley links this question to Heidegger's concept of habitality and shows how this concept of space informs much of French theory.