Space, place and society

• Premise - the urban is a constellation of – spaces, – places and – social practices

• and planning is a discipline and profession whose members seek to make interventions into the relations among these

Traditions

• Geography - the spatial science– locational theory

• body of theories seeking to explain the location and distribution of (economic) activities

• nomothetic

• “to build accurate generalizations with predictive power by precise quantitative description of spatial distributions, spatial structure and organization, and spatial relationships” (Berry and Marble 1968)

Space modelled or mapped

Traditions

– chorology• the study of areal differentiation of the earth’s surface/the

science of regions

• idiographic

• “a view of the whole” [as distinct from chorography, of the parts]” (Ptolemy)

Ideas about space• “space is a treacherous philosophical world” (Blaut 1961)

• conceptions of space– absoluteabsolute - space as distinct, physical and empirically real in itself– relativerelative - space as a relation between events or aspects of events,

bound to time and process; important in the project of generalization because geographers must be able to replicate cases

– relationalrelational - (Harvey 1973) space as contained in “objects in the sense that an object can be said to exist only insofar as it contains and represents within itself relationships to other objects … hence spatial analysis becomes social analysis” (ES emphasis)

Spatiality I• the human and social implications of space

• human spatiality as “the fundamental basis on which geographical inquiry as a science [knowledge] of the world can be explicitly founded

• ontology - how can we understand the (taken-for-granted) world and our experience and molding of it?

Spatiality II

• The “in-order-to” … the power of context to human experiences of place … our constellations of relations and meanings … a situating endeavour in which we make room or give space … presence/absence and participation/exclusions in systems of socio-spatial practices (e.g. planning)

Spatiality III• Lefebvre (1984)

– spatial practice/perceived space

– representations of space/conceived space

– spaces of representation/lived space

– “All space is not socially produced, but all spatiality is” (Soja 1985).

– “Space is not a reflection of society, it is society” (Castells 1984).

Place

• “that which places [us] in such a way that it reveals the external bonds of [our] existence and at the same time the depths of [our] freedom and reality” (Heidegger 1958)

• “a centre of felt value” (Tuan 1977) and repository of meaning;

• an object of intentionality