The Birth of Territory traces how the relations between land and power have been understood in a very wide range of texts from the period of classical Greece to seventeenth-century western Europe. For each period, Elden asks if it is meaningful to speak of writers as using a concept resembling the modern understanding of territory, that is of a bounded space as the object of rule.

Five days after Stuart Hall died, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed accusing academics of self-inflicted public irrelevance. That same day, Larry Grossberg, a student of Hall’s, published an essay reflecting on his former teacher’s intellectual influence around the world. Grossberg ended his tribute with the line: “It is a time to remember that ideas matter as we try to change the world, and that bad stories, make bad politics.”

The translation into English of Henri Lefebvre’s essay, ‘Dissolving City, Planetary Metamorphosis’, prompts an opportunity to pose afresh some questions about the intersection of politics and space, the state organisation of space, and the production of space. While the history of capitalism is intrinsically linked to how the modern state organises space­­ — to engender social relations in space and bind itself to space ­— the attention to these concerns has been dawdling in historical sociology.

This forum includes five commentaries on Lefebvre’s brief, still-timely, and provocative essay. 

Henri Lefebvre’s “Dissolving city, planetary metamorphosis” is noteworthy because it rearticulates various problems Lefebvre tackled in the decades before 1989. One of his last texts, the article certainly does, as David Wachsmuth and Neil Brenner point out, serve as an intriguing link to current debates on comparative urbanization. However, the article also reminds us how Lefebvre’s work is punctuated with missed opportunities.