Henri Lefebvre has become increasingly influential in the years since he passed away in 1991. Picked up in landmark books of Marxist (or Marxian) geographers such as David Harvey and Ed Soja, the work’s insights have had a bracing impact on the study of the city and the discipline of geography in particular, witnessed in contemporary scholarship of a planetary urbanism or the diagnostic studies of the neoliberal metropolitan turn of recent decades.

Instrumentally, Lefebvre's work was taken up in the Anglophone academy for its particular recognition of the importance of the spatial in influencing the dynamics of social change. Lefebvre in some ways provided a figurehead, a social theorist of renown whose value was both symbolic and substantive. Symbolically, urban studies at times was often considered in the 1960s and 1970s as a less than favoured sub-discipline of the social sciences. But the city had proven to be a focus of political change, a dynamism that inspired a generation of writers whose interests were as much ethical and political as they were analytical and technocratic. Scholars such as Manuel Castells, David Harvey and Doreen Massey all saw the city as a crucible through which forms of class power were exercised and social injustice reproduced. As a leading leftist French thinker for much of the 20th century, a critic of structuralist and Althusserian Marxism and with an uneasy relationship with the Situationists, Lefebvre was nevertheless an author whose work reflected the spirit of the 1960s. His gravitas lent weight to the urban theorists whose Marxian provenance may at times have differed from his own but whose work increasingly was influenced by his insights. But the fact that Lefebvre's Production of Space was not translated into English until the 1990s and the sheer scale of his written archive and legacy meant that the work can never be understood purely in terms of coherent scientific scholarship alone. At times prolix, inevitably evolving over many decades, Lefebvre's own writing contains both puzzling contradictions and powerful insights. So in a sense it is perhaps more important to think of scholarship that is inspired by the work of Lefebvre, rather than work that is straightforwardly faithful to the detail of any particular paradigm.