About 60 years since Lefebvre’s pioneering rural sociology, the relationship between the urban and rural continues to be an issue of debate. Lefebvre tracked not only the organization of the 20 th century French city and its suburbs as a spatial expression of modern capitalism but the countryside and the relationship between them. His understanding of urbanization was diverse. It included the late nineteenth century urbanization as peasants were displaced from the countryside to the city. The ’social spatialization’ of the city versus the countryside has been central to the spatialization of the modernization of European and North American nation-states. This dualism is foundational to Western stories of modernity and processes of industrialisation and urbanisation (Flaubert, Dickens). It lies at the heart of the foundation texts of sociology (Toennies, Weber, Engels). However, unlike the British perspective, shared by Marx and Engels, which posits a rupture between city and countryside (Williams), the French experienced late modernization in the wake of World War I. In Lefebvre’s 1955 rural sociology, cities colonize the rural, just as Situationnists such as Debord argued that capitalism and rationality colonized everyday life. This model and the trope of colonization strongly influenced both Lefebvre and Habermas, who adopted the metaphor from Debord. An urban lifestyle, industrial logic or rationality, efficiency and commodification transformed rural life from within. Lefebvre’s approach resonates with Latin American marxist urban theorists who posited separate developmental paths and more recently the thesis of multiple modernities (Martins, de Sousa Silva, Escobar). Lefebvre’s spatial reading of Marx, Engels and Hegel was adopted by Frederic Jameson and David Harvey in particular, embedding a Lefebvrean "humanistic marxism" in the recent development of critical cultural and urban studies in North America. However, the focus of Harvey’s focus on the city meant that the old, modernist opposition remained in place. Globalization has included a change in the primacy given to the city and the notion of city-regions as fundamental economic units has been influential over the last decade. This amounts to a change in the way cities are spatialized, and this is reflected in the proliferation of attempts to grasp and theorize the urban as city-region, global city, megacity, mega-region and so on (King, Sassen, Scott, Smith). This can also be seen in changing approaches to suburbs (Keil) which are now treated less as an uncertain in-between that violates the dominant urban-rural dualism and more as a legitimate morphology that is a manifestation of this changing spatialization (Brenner et al forthcoming). It is therefore not surprising that recently some urban theorists have proposed to embrace the countryside as part and parcel of urban studies. This is presented rather naively as a paradigmatic shift in urban research but in reality follows changes in economic theory and practice. Lefebvre’s approach will be illustrated with examples.