I want to suggest a different kind of reading which focuses on two fruitful impulses that I think Lefebvre offers here: first a theoretical one, the concept of paradoxes; and second a practical (and meanwhile well known) one, the claim for a right to the city.

More than anything, what this brief article makes clear is the vagueness with which Lefebvre had always understood the notions of the city and the urban as well as the urgent need we have today to clarify the latter.

On the Wrong Side of the Track situates the Olympics moment in longue durée tracing the depictions of the East End as the locus of Victorian gothic imaginary, a place inhabited by truculent locals long indifferent to national popular injunctions.

This book explores the transformation of the Middle West Side of Manhattan (1894-1914) through the lens of the sociospatial dialectic. In particular, it examines how this area of the city was conceived by reformists and government officials, lived by constrained residents, and altered through the deviating perceptions and practices of different people operating in and through this space.

In the secular spaces of the city’s art museums the last judgment has receded, replaced by the permanent judgment of the present — there is only a future of more crisis and more actions on that crisis. Catastrophe is everywhere and ever-present.