[7] As a Marxist theorist (but highly critical of the economic structuralism that dominated the academic discourse in his period), Lefebvre argues that this social production of urban space is fundamental to the reproduction of society, hence of capitalism itself.
The social production of space is commanded by a hegemonic class as a tool to reproduce its dominance (see Antonio Gramsci).
The city of the ancient world cannot be understood as a simple agglomeration of people and things in space—it had its own spatial practice, making its own space (which was suitable for itself—Lefebvre argues that the intellectual climate of the city in the ancient world was very much related to the social production of its spatiality).
A lesson to be learned from soviet constructivists from the 1920s and 30s, and of their failure, is that new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa.
[11]In his book The Urban Question, Manuel Castells criticizes Lefebvre's Marxist humanism and approach to the city influenced by Hegel and Nietzsche.
Many responses to Castells are provided in The Survival of Capitalism, and some such as Andy Merrifield[12] argue that the acceptance of those critiques in the academic world would be a motive for Lefebvre's effort in writing the long and theoretically dense The Production of Space.