Urban-rural Relations in Western Marxist Urban Theory—Focusing on Lefebvre, Castells, and Harvey

The urban-rural relationship constitutes a crucial dimension within Marxist political economy and historical dialectics. Whilst Western Marxist urban theorists are renowned for their critique of urban spatial structures, their theoretical frameworks inherently encompass profound reflections on this relationship. These works elucidate the historical trajectory and structural drivers of urban-rural relations under the capitalist mode of production. Among them, Lefebvre employs spatial dialectics to examine urban-rural relations within the historical process of urbanization. His profound experience in rural sociology and mature theory of spatial production jointly construct a holistic analytical framework for understanding capitalist urban-rural transformation. Castells, through his theoretical progression from collective consumption to mobile spaces, exposed the networked restructuring mechanisms of urban-rural power structures in the era of information capitalism. Harvey, grounded in the theory of geographically uneven capital accumulation, dissected how urban-rural spaces function as structural arenas for the transfer and reproduction of capitalist crises. Contemporary China’s practical imperative to forge a new paradigm of integrated urban-rural development necessitates a theoretical re-examination of urban-rural thought within Western modernization processes. Though these perspectives detach from the overarching historical-scientific vision and dilute Marx’s social revolutionary theoretical focus, they nonetheless offer critical reference points for grasping urban-rural relations within China’s modernization trajectory and constructing an autonomous Chinese knowledge system for integrated urban-rural development.