Geography Discuss how the writings of Henri Lefebvre have influenced Essay

Geography Discuss how the writings of Henri Lefebvre have influenced geographers understaning of the modern city which has been persistently shped by the spaces - Essay Example y of Consciousness (1925), Morceaux choises de Karl Marx (1934), Morceaux choises de Hegel (1938), L’Existentialisme (1946), Knowledge and Social Criticism, Philosophic Thought in France and the USA (1950), Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes (1962), Dialectical Materialism (1968), Evolution or Revolution (1974), Toward a Leftist Cultural Politics: Remarks Occasioned by the Centenary of Marx’s Death (1988), The Critique of Everyday Life (1991) and Writings on Cities published posthumously in 1996. It was through the translation and wide distribution of Dialectical Materialism that he became known worldwide as the father of the dialectic yet has also been hailed as the pioneer of critiques of the city and the ‘spatial turn’ in theory. Following World War II, Lefebvre was greatly impacted by the depression of the people around him who felt alienated from the new forms of work in the newly industrialized nation as well as by the new bureaucratic institutions of civil society. His writings exploring the ideas of Marx and Hegel were burned by the Vichy Regime during World War II and he was persecuted as a Communist sympathizer following the war. It wasn’t until the 1960s that he finally found a position as a professor at a school called Nanterre back in Paris where he was able to continue his work into the study of the cities. â€Å"Nanterre provided an environment in which he developed his critique of the alienation of modern city life which was obscured by the mystifications of the consumerism and the mythification of Paris by the heritage and tourism industries.   These critiques of the city were the basis for Lefebvres investigation of the cultural construction of stereotypical notions of cities, of nat ure and of regions† (Shields, 2002). Within his writings, Lefebvre brought attention to the tendency of academia to place too much emphasis upon the classification of studies as being psychology, sociology, archeology or geography among others,