Lefebvre argues for the necessity of a ‘planetary’ scale of analysis. In The production of Space, he proposes a grounding for this analysis that ties together all scales of place, region , nation and globe into a broadened concept of social production. Examining the spatiality of society and political action, he proposes that spaces are produced not only through naming, but they are interrelated with each other in a series of ‘historical modes of production of space.’ Furthermore, they are interrelated with political and economic processes in that the activities associated with each place form its identity and exclude other activities. Everyday routines, the conventions of debate and interaction, all take place at one or another spatial scale and in space, making their spatial characteristics a crucial issue for utopian thought and attempts to change society. Such arrangements ground the inequalities of local cultures, from the repeated routines of everyday life to the cultural monuments and icons of the state. What is required is not a piecemeal analysis as disciplinary specializations tend to do, but a comprehensive study of this "spatial dialectic " of identities, activity and images associated with any given place.

How can one conceptualize in one unitary ‘social theory of space’ the various ‘levels of space’, which are specified and analyzed by various professional discourses ‘about’ space. Lefebvre proposes a threefold dialectic within spatialisation, which consists of:

1. Spatial practice with all the contradictions in everyday life, space perceived (l’espace percu) in the commonsensical mode- or better still, ignored and fetishized with time.
2. Representations of space (which might be explained as discourses ‘on’ space); the discursive regimes of analysis, spatial and planning professions and expert knowledge that conceive of space (l’espace concu)
3. Spaces of representation. This is space ‘as it might be,’ fully lived space (l’espace vecu). It is derived from the historicity of the everyday environment as well as from utopian thoughts and imaginations.

Each aspect of this three-part dialectic is in relationship with the other two. Altogether they make up space. All these aspects can be latent, ideological or expressed in practice in a historical spatialisation, and may either reinforce or contradict each other in any given site or moment.

In The Production of Space, Lefebvre moves the analysis of space from the older discourses ‘on’ space (typically, that of ‘social space’) to the analysis of the process by which meta-level discourses ‘of’ space are socially produced. Rather than discussing a particular theory of social space, he examines the struggles over the meaning of space and considers how relations across territories are given cultural meaning. In the process, Lefebvre attempts to establish the presence of a ‘lived’ spatialisation within the hegemonic ‘conceptual’ and ‘abstract’ theories of space promulgated by disciplinary discourses and the everyday attitude that ignores the spatial altogether. He ultimately develops a radical phenomenology of space as a humanistic basis from which to launch a critique of the denial of individual and community’s ‘right to space’ under the abstract spatialisation embodied in capitalism and technocratic structures of the state.

The effect is to reunite over-specialized areas of knowledge by substituting or giving an overriding emphasis to the spatiality of action, objects, laws, economic processes and cultural practices rather than analyzing them in terms of priorities prescribed by disciplinary understandings which tend to attach themselves to different phenomena and processes. This would mean, in our case, analyzing the action of protest marches or urban violence in terms of:

• Spatial manifestations ( marching bodies, direction, mass of people)
• Objects (truncheons, individuals versus the crowd, ‘lines’ of police)
• Laws ( restrictions on assembly, codes on behavior)
• Semiotic Codes ( inferred meanings and connotations of protest, of marchers)
• Economic processes ( dependence of merchants on access and order)
• Cultural practices ( pedestrians blocking traffic or marchers just ‘sitting in’ on road)