Any Labour Geographies in Urban Theory? Workers Meet Lefebvre and Harvey (Yet Again)

This paper examines the urban theory of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey to construct an urban perspective on labour geographies. Lefebvre understood work in a work-nonwork continuum beyond binarism, and Lefebvre and Harvey hailed the outpouring of working-class agency from cities. However, they may have obscured the role of labour movements in urbanisation when identifying the living-place (such as streets, neighbourhoods, or housing) as the primary seat of urban agency. Learning from labour geographers in the 1990s, I query this ambiguity to enhance the urban theory of Lefebvre and Harvey, conceive of the urban scale as the site of unfinished industrial/urban dialectics, and conceptualise labour agency as a producer of transformative continua in urbanisation. Interpreting Toyota's factories as rescaled pivots of industrial urbanisation, I explore how Japanese labour movements challenged just-in-time production, its union form, and its work/nonwork divides, producing new urbanising continua-even planetary ones-between different transformative agencies.