The concept of uneven development, as developed by Karl Marx, has been applied by the theorists of the socio-spatial school in order to explain the city building process. According to Marx, a major contradiction of capitalism lies in the simultaneous emergence of concentrations of wealth and capital, on one hand, and poverty and dispossession, on the other. This ‘general law of capitalist accumulation’ as Marx termed it, highlights the capital-labour conflict. It was in the 1970s that the Marxian tradition was revived in urban sociology. In this lecture we will discuss the socio-spatial approach as developed in the works of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey.

From this perspective the capitalist mode of production was based on a spatial dynamic.  Urban analysis was influenced by the work of Henri Lefebvre for whom the unevenness in accumulation and ownership is expressed spatially in terms of inequalities in the residential pattern and in the provision of urban services.  Lefebvre dealt with the organization of space as a material product, delineating the relationship between social and spatial structures of urbanism. Edward Soja summarizes the socio-spatial dialectics in the following way: “The structure of organized space is not a separate structure with its own autonomous laws of construction and transformation, nor is it simply an expression of the class structure emerging from the social (i.e. aspatial) relations of production. It represents, instead, a dialectically defined component of the general relations of production, relations which are simultaneously social and spatial.” ¹