Henri Lefebvre’s 1974 book Production de l’espace has been referred to as having “no parallel in philosophy and the history of knowledge” (Schmid, 2008, 33).
In Leckie and Given’s chapter: Henri Lefebvre and Spatial Dialetics, in the book Critical Theory for Library and Information Science (2010), Lefebvre’s work is described this way:
“What unites all of [Lefebre’s] work – from his first to most mature works – is his deeply humanistic interest in alienation. . . . Humanism . . . he argues, is the key motivation for Marx and for social change anywhere. It is not technological progress, the absence of war, or ease of life, or even length of life, but the chance for a fully lived life that is the measure of a civilisation. The quality of any society lies in the opportunity for the unalienated and authentic life experience that is gives all its members. Grounded in anything else, democracy falls short of what it could be” (Shields, 1999, 2).
Leckie and Given explore Lefebvre’s work in relation to library spaces, physical and virtual, and suggest that his work could be applied to LIS studies of academic learning spaces and the “social production of space within library and information milieus.”
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