Henri Lefebvre’s urban theory argues that the city is not merely a built environment but a living social process shaped by conflict, use, memory and power. In Writings on Cities, Lefebvre challenges the reduction of urban space to planning, administration or economic function, insisting instead that the city must be understood as an oeuvre: a collective work created through everyday practices, encounters and rhythms. This idea is politically significant because modern capitalism transforms urban life into fragmented, regulated and commodified space. Streets, housing, transport systems and public squares are no longer simply places of shared experience; they become instruments through which the state and the market organise behaviour, separate social groups and privilege exchange-value over lived use. Against this alienating tendency, Lefebvre develops the idea of the right to the city, not as a narrow legal entitlement, but as a radical demand for inhabitants to participate in producing and transforming urban life. The city, for him, belongs most deeply to those who live, use and animate it, rather than only to planners, property owners or bureaucratic authorities. His analysis also connects urban space with temporality: everyday rhythms, gestures, movements and repetitions reveal how social life is organised and how it might be disrupted. The city is therefore both a site of domination and a field of possibility. It can reproduce inequality, abstraction and exclusion, yet it can also generate encounters, creativity and collective resistance. Lefebvre’s importance lies in showing that urban justice cannot be reduced to access to services or efficient design; it requires the democratic reappropriation of space itself. His work remains powerful because it treats the city as a struggle over how life is lived, who has the authority to shape it, and whether urban space serves profit or human flourishing.