“[Lefebvre] hoped that an analysis of space, and specifically of the “lived spaces” that people actually experience, would be able to apprehend human life as a complex whole and avoid reducing our understanding of experience to small fractions of life, such as class status, gender, race, income, consumer habits, marital status, and so on.”

• I think people today have gotten really used to the idea of reducing people to statistics – we think of people (that we don’t know personally) less as complex human beings and more as shallow representations of numerical values.

“To take an archetypical example, when a developer buys a plot of land, he or she acquires property rights that confer extensive control over what that land will become. According to the regime of property rights, the role of that land in the everyday life of the surrounding community need not be considered. Those who inhabit the area need not play a role in decisions about the land. A property rights regime works to separate the land from the surrounding community of users, and it abstracts the land from its role in the web of urban social connections.”

• I guess this is striking to me because I never really considered how owning land can totally separate you from the land surrounding it. I suppose you could take this to mean or imply that homeless people are more entwined with their community than the landowners of that community.

“As I discuss above, Lefebvre sees “the urban” not merely as urbanization, but as a society beyond capitalism, one characterized by meaningful engagement among inhabitants embedded in a web of social connections.”

• I really love this idea that a utopia should be catagorized by the meaningful interactions between people, that a society is “perfect” not because of how well-off the inhabitants are, but because of the happiness they’ve found amongst one another.