A Theoretical Primer on Space

 

출처: http://www1.uwindsor.ca/criticalsocialwork/a-theoretical-primer-on-space

Robert P. Fairbanks II, "A Theoretical Primer on Space", Critical Social Work, 2003 Vol. 4, No. 1  

 

Abstract

 

The following paper chronicles a recent movement in the study of urban environments toward an appreciation of space and spatial theory. In recent years, urban anthropology has undergone a transformation by integrating a broad array of spatial theoretical perspectives from cultural geography, political economy, urban sociology, and regional and city planning. In order for the discipline of social work to gain access to these developments, this paper seeks to introduce and facilitate an advanced understanding of the roots of spatial analysis and spatial theory. Subsequent to this undertaking, a review of the interdisciplinary literature based on the tenets of spatial and geographical analysis will be provided. The latter review will proceed along the following two separate lines of categorical analysis: 1) Marxist geography; and 2) Cultural geography.

 

Introduction

Knowledge of space is critical to understanding the production and transformation of social relations, and in this regard the built environment is an important concept for any endeavor in social analysis, including those undertaken by the discipline of social work. Space is a multi-dimensional concept that is at once economic, political, semiotic and experiential, and in this sense it is an integral component of social interaction and an indispensable vector for critical theory, particularly when added to the vectors of time and being. Yet the questions raised by Henri Lefebvre’s postulations that daily life depends on the production (and consumption) of space remain largely unanswered, even in academic works coming out of Marxist geography that hold the category of space as their primary raison d’etre (Gottdiener, 1994). By reviewing a subsection of the growing academic literature on space and spatial theory, this paper seeks to demonstrate how the consideration of socio-spatial relations can enhance our understanding of people in their spatial environments. By introducing an appreciation of culture in relation to material forces such as space, and by emphasizing the social relations that these material forces evoke, spatial theory allows social work theorists to forge a relationship between the analytical categories of political economy, space, and culture . The challenge of such an undertaking is to consider the reciprocal construction of culture within certain spatial locations, particularly in relation to processes of capital accumulation and politics. The purchase of this challenge is profound, however, particularly for social workers seeking more cogent strategies for deploying concepts such as ecology, geography, and the “person in environment” approach.

As Michael Dear contends, “space is nature’s way of preventing everything from happening in the same place” (Dear, 2000, p.47). Henri Lefebvre staked much of his intellectual life on this simple proposition, yet the core of his work becomes infinitely more sophisticated when he draws our attention beyond mere inventories of what exists in space or a basic discourse on space – neither of which can produce a true knowledge of space (Lefebvre, 1974). In contrast, Lefebvre’s ontology asserts a greater importance for space as being present and implicit in the acts of creation and being, whereby the process of life itself is inextricably linked with the production of different spaces (Dear, 2000). Contrary to the idea that space is merely a reified alembic that boxes things in, Lefebvre implores us to appreciate the built environment as being structured through social relationships. People create space; thus the production of space is an inherently political project in which space is a mediating force that integrates an infinite number of active and dynamic cultural processes. In appreciation of Lefebvre’s prolific writings on space and the virtual revolution in critical thought that he has catalyzed, the purpose of this paper is two-fold: 1) To advance a foundational understanding of spatial theory; and 2) To explore a number of recent interdisciplinary writings that attempt to integrate a broad array of spatial theoretical perspectives with an appreciation of the political economies of geographical landscapes and the politics of everyday life. The second section of this undertaking will be broken down into two separate subsections in order to facilitate a more nuanced exploration of spatial analysis: A) Marxist Geography; and B) Cultural or human geography. It is hoped that this review paper will catalyze further discussion and eventual integration of spatial theory into the discipline of social work.

Space as a vector of Social Analysis: A discussion of Time and Space in the Abstract

Did it start with Bergson or before? Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic.
 

Michel Foucault, 1980
 

Space is never empty: it always embodies a meaning.
 

Henri Lefebvre, 1974

In his 1989 groundbreaking work titled Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Geography, Edward Soja advanced a compelling argument for the primacy of spatial analysis in social theory (Soja, 1989). He decried the fact that the nineteenth century emphasis on historical epistemology continued to pervade the critical consciousness of modern social theory at the direct expense of a spatial imagination in the contemporary present:

So unbudgingly hegemonic has been the historicism of theoretical consciousness that it has tended to occlude a comparable critical sensibility to the spatiality of social life, a practical theoretical consciousness that sees the lifeworld of being creatively located not only in the making of history but also in the construction of human geographies, the social production of space and the restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes (Soja, 1989, p. 10).

Soja moved on to chronicle a movement taking place primarily in the 1980’s among postmodern and critical geographers to reassert the interpretive significance of space “in the historically privileged confines of contemporary critical thought.” Soja’s sentiments are actively manifesting in disciplines as wide ranging as sociology, urban studies, critical geography, history, and anthropology, all of which have seen a veritable explosion in the realm of spatially informed scholarship and criticism. This ferment in critical discourse has introduced a new emphasis on spatial concepts and metaphors such as simultaneity, domain, horizontality, place, and heterotopia in attempts to counterbalance the previous dominance of temporal notions such as sequentiality, linearity, history, and utopia.

What is to be made of these recent arcane developments in critical discourse, and why have they become so prominent in contemporary urban theory? It should first be noted that social theorists and philosophers have long recognized that the rhythm of the day (time) and its localization (space) are two of the most important parameters of every day life. However, as Soja notes, these new developments in spatial geography are reflections of and reactions to Western social theory’s longstanding tendency to take space for granted, thus constructing a perception of passivity in space as merely the stage upon which humanity forges its world through time. The longstanding separation of history from geography and the dominance of time over space has had the effect of producing images of societies as being cut off from their material environment, “as if they were fashioned out of thin air” (Coronil, 1997, p.24). In this deceptive light, the social appropriation of space, as well as the ways in which space acts upon society, appears as immaterial, irrelevant, or lacking in terms of revolutionary valence and interpretive significance.

Scholars like Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault have long contended that an overdeveloped historicism has created a critical silence, “an implicit SUBORDINIZATION of space to time that obscures geographical interpretations of the changeability of the social world” (Soja, 1989, p.15). In recent decades, a complex set of cultural, economic and social transformations have brought about a countercurrent in critical thought that makes this subordination less and less tenable, and the result has been the forthcoming of parity to the space-time imaginary. Through a series of cultural transformations such as the collapse of meta-narratives (e.g. the Enlightenment Project and its teleological thrust); the widespread challenging of once unassailable “truths”; and the emphasis on multiple political strategies and identities in place of the unitary political narratives of modernity, a postmodern affinity for space has emerged. This new sensibility in critical consciousness privileges simultaneity over sequentiality, horizontality over verticality, surfaces over depths, and localisms over globalisms. It is amidst these upheavals that a postmodern spatial imaginary has pushed forward to displace the hegemonic presence of time in contemporary critical thought, and in the ensuing theoretical interstices the importance of geography and space in social analysis has emerged.

In some respects, recent developments in critical theory are built upon Marx’s conception of the fundamental unity between society and nature (a conception that has been typically lost in most Marxist thought) as a way to express the link between being and space, or society and nature. As Fernando Coronil explains, Marx contended that human production does not fall outside of the sphere of nature, “for human beings are a part of nature whose human nature is transformed by acting upon external nature” (Coronil, 1997, p. 27). Marx referred to this exchange between society and nature as “metabolic interaction,” or the exchange between society and nature whereby “nature is humanized while men [sic] are naturalized” (Marx, 1971; as cited by Coronil, 1997, p.27). This unifying perspective can thus be deployed not to install space and geography in the place of time, but to reassess the meaning of these polarized categories in terms of their dialectical interplay. Accordingly, a critical sensibility emerges whereby just as time occupies space, space can be seen as unfolding in time (Coronil, 1997). Spatial structure is now seen not merely as a container in which social life unfolds, but rather as a medium through which social relations are produced and reproduced. Space can now be conceptualized not as an absolute dimension but as a form of relationality, constructed out of the inter-relations between space, time and being. Accordingly, space can be brought back “from its unwarranted exile from politics” (Coronil, 1997), as it is no longer restricted only to the status of being a “stage” upon which political processes take place.

In addition to Marx, much of the newfound emphasis on space in contemporary social theory owes its lineage to Henri Lefebvre, whose many pathbreaking works (e.g. The Production of Space [1974]; Writings on Cities [1996] ) have long asserted the significance of space in the production, regulation - indeed even in the possibility of social life. It is widely held that Lefebvre is responsible for setting out the foundation for thinking about space in terms which integrate its socially constructed significance with its formal and material properties (Coronil, 1997; Lloyd, 2001; Soja, 1989). At the core of his project are the concepts of production and the act of producing space, leading to the premise that social space is a social product. Lefebvre’s triad of spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces offer a useful framework for understanding how the multiple forms of perceiving, conceiving of, and living in space have not only been produced historically, but also imbued with cultural significance (Coronil, 1997) 1 . Lefebvre contended that spaces are produced from social relations and from nature, as such spaces are both the product of and the condition of possibility for social relations. As a social relation, space therefore involves a relation between society and nature through which society produces itself as it appropriates and transforms nature (Lefebvre, 1974). Lefebvre’s work also elucidates relations of power in spatial analysis, by highlighting the fact that spaces are always constructed culturally through social interactions. The symbiotic relationship between social being and space is essential here, as it sets out a framework for analyzing not only the ways in which space shapes social life (and vice versa), but also the ways in which power operates through spatial structures. Of great importance in the latter issue is Lefebvre’s analysis of spatial formations and their direct linkage to modes of capital accumulation, as well as the social relations that derive from these formations.

It is germane in this context to elaborate a bit more on Lefebvre’s notion of spatial practice , a concept that highlights the active and dialectical nature of the social production of space. Spatial practices are dynamic principles of organization, keyed to dominant social relations of production, as such they embrace “production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial sets of characteristics of each social formation” (Lefebvre, 1974, p.33). Lefebvre’s work suggests that in order to understand the new relevance of urban neighborhoods in the present, we must consider the spatial practices that both produce and are produced by space in relation to the passage from one mode of production to another. Since each mode of production is assumed to have its own particular space, the shift from one mode to another (e.g. from Fordism to Flexism) necessarily entails the production of new space. We can expect, as Lefebvre contends, that social practices will continue to be directly linked to the contemporary moment in capitalism, as such they will express a relationship between global modes of accumulation and spatial outcomes at the local level. We are thus afforded a shift in consciousness from perceiving older postindustrial neighborhoods as empty shells of a bygone era, to perceiving them as active sites for understanding the contemporary present. As Lloyd notes, social space is inscribed by history, but it remains a dynamic and dialectical work in progress (2001). In this light, neighborhood spaces can be read for historical value, but it is important to note that they are also continuously reinscribed by the social dynamics in which they are embedded, as shifting social practices continue to actively reproduce neighborhoods through time. Thus while neighborhoods have the traces of time inscribed upon them, they are not reduced to relics, but stand rather as present spaces that create the possibility for contemporary social relations. A key issue for spatial research therefore becomes focusing on the identification of emergent spaces, and determining at which point they add up to new modes of production (Dear, 2000).

No discussion of spatial analysis is complete without recognizing the tremendous contributions of Michel Foucault to the development of critical human geography. Foucault’s conceptions of “heterotopias” have been instrumental in forging a spatial imaginary in contemporary critical theory. Similar to Lefebvre’s thought, Foucault’s heterotopias call attention to the actually lived and socially created spatiality as the habitus of social practices. Foucault speaks to these heterogeneous spaces as follows:

The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live within a void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another (Foucault, 1986, p.23).

Foucault’s move toward heterogeneity of spaces here opens up an archeological sensibility that privileges myriad sites (e.g. the cemetery, the hospital, the museum and the school) as worthy of deep spatial analysis. Foucault contrasts these “real places” with the fundamentally “unreal spaces” of utopias that present society in a homogenized, perfected form. He also sets out to displace the dominance of historicism and its emphasis on linearity and chronology, by advocating an analytical framework that excavates the spatial appropriations of power and their resulting effects on social life. Like Soja and Coronil, Foucault respects the role of history as well, thus he advocates for an integrative strategy, holding on to history but adding to it the crucial nexus that would flow through all of his work: the linkage between space, knowledge, and power. By recognizing that the “spatializing description of discursive realities gives on to the analysis of related effects of power,” Foucault surmised that “a whole history remains to be written of spaces – which would at the same time be the history of powers – from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat” (1980, p. 149). Foucault’s legacy continues perforce in contemporary spatial theory, and his influence will be reflected numerous times in later sections of this paper.

Lastly, it is essential to pay homage to Frederic Jameson, whose concepts of space are an essential element in his seminal work Lastly, it is essential to pay homage to Frederic Jameson, whose concepts of space are an essential element in his seminal work Postmodernism: or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1994). Jameson contended that space and spatial logic dominate postmodern culture in a way that time dominated the world of modernism, but his conception of aestheticized space is indeed quite separate from that of the materially built environment. Jameson’s notion of space emerges out of the ubiquitous dominance of media imagery and communications networks that collapse space-time configurations en route to creating a new postmodern “hyper space.” He contended that we currently lack the perceptual apparatus to assess this new hyperspace – an abstract field of imagery and transmission that we currently find ourselves in as subjects. The collapse of structural coordinates that have historically shaped experience launches a new set of spaces that are still inconceivable to most people, as the saturated space of multinational capitalism and communication networks drown out the specificity of geographical space. As such, the truth of an experience “no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place,” resulting in a disjuncture between the body and its built environment. The capacity of global communication to overcome distance and penetrate into all places generates his notion of hyperspace, which he contends is readable through various “surfaces” or “texts” such as architecture (the “privileged aesthetic language” as it is said to have an unmediated relationship with the economic), art, video, and other cultural forms. Jameson is fascinated by the strange glittery landscapes of late twentieth century capitalism, and while his affinity for “surfaces” represents a shift from previous scholarship on spaces, he is regarded as an essential theorist for tracking the emergent social order and unraveling obsolescent modernisms from emergent postmodernisms.

It is especially important to hold the basic tenets of Foucault and Lefebvre in our consciousness as we proceed toward the work of other scholars, for it is their work which can be noted as the “bloodlines” through which most spatially informed analysis flows (Dear, 2000). The foregoing discussion suggests that social analysis and research must take space as seriously as all other facets of social life, thus upholding the role of the built environment as a primary vector of analysis for social work. By incorporating space as a vector of analysis, we can come to elucidate enactments of power and oppression as the compromised products of practical struggles within shifting spatial equilibriums, as well as to engender an appreciation of the role of the built environment in everyday life. This abstract premise will be explored more contextually in the following sections.

Marxist Geography

There has been widespread movement in what has been called critical, Marxist or radical geography since the more general resurgence of Marxist thought in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s (Dear, 2000). At the crux of this movement is the role of space in the political economy of urban milieus, particularly in terms of the ways in which capital shapes the built environment. Several political economy theorists have taken the urban form as their site of analysis, but in this section a select few will be discussed based on their particular attention to space and geography. In this vein, David Gordon’s work stands as an early exemplar of the class struggle perspective of spatial organization. Gordon posited that conflict between labor and capital has produced historically distinct stages in the spatial formation of cities. He claims that just as capitalist strategies are developed to control workers at the site of production, capitalist spatial forms were also developed to maintain control over both produ ction and reproduction processes (1978). More specifically, Gordon explored how processes such as suburbanization not only resulted in a more isolated and thus controllable working class, but also weakened the power of inner city residents to hold capital accountable for the deteriorating and unhealthy working conditions for which it was responsible. Later, when capital learned that a dense spatial concentration of working class persons was more conducive to labor militancy, individual industrialists began to move factories to the suburbs. Subsequently, with production and the working class now decentralized to the outlying areas of cities, corporations began to separate their administrative functions from the production process and to relocate their headquarters downtown near banks, law offices, and advertising agencies. As such, Gordon concluded that central business districts and their towering skyscrapers embody the centralization of economic power in spatial form (1978).

While Gordon’s emphasis is on class struggle, a number of Marxist geographers take capitalist accumulation strategies, the political economy of space, and uneven development 2 as their primary emphases (Jackson, 1985; Smith, 1984, 1986; Zukin, 1991). No theorist has been more outspoken and prolific in the realm of Marxist geography than David Harvey. In his most recent work Spaces of Hope , Harvey advances a clarion call for the rejuvenation of Marxist thought by arguing that, contrary to being obsolete (as popular academic fashion would have it), the themes of The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital are more salient today than ever before. To build his case, he exhumes from the Manifesto discussions on the inevitability of crises that periodically shake society to its very foundations under capitalism. In the Manifesto, these crises of creative destruction are characterized by the absurdity of overproduction in the midst of innumerable but unfulfilled social needs, the degeneracy of spiraling inequities and famine in the midst of abundance, and the periodic destruction of previously created productive forces (Harvey, 2000). The contradictions of capitalism - with its glorious technological advances that completely transform the earth while simultaneously producing mass unemployment, disinvestment, and the destruction of various ways of life - are key to understanding the issues of uneven geographical development in the contemporary present.

Harvey’s work is indeed quite expansive, but it is safe to say that much of his analytical focus over the past 30 years has been on the organization of consumption, its contribution to the process of capital accumulation, and the concomitant configurations of urban space that emerge as a result. His primary emphasis on the circulation of capital through the production and utilization of the built environment reflects his belief that the geographical landscape is an ｅxpression of flows of capital. He contends, as such, that the spatial design of a city must facilitate the flow of capital, lest it b Harvey’s work is indeed quite expansive, but it is safe to say that much of his analytical focus over the past 30 years has been on the organization of consumption, its contribution to the process of capital accumulation, and the concomitant configurations of urban space that emerge as a result. His primary emphasis on the circulation of capital through the production and utilization of the built environment reflects his belief that the geographical landscape is an ｅxpression of flows of capital. He contends, as such, that the spatial design of a city must facilitate the flow of capital, lest it become outmoded, dysfunctional, or saturated, in which case space must be destroyed or strategically outmaneuvered in order to become resuscitated as a site of accumulation (Harvey, 1989). According to Harvey, accelerations in production and consumption turnover time (brought about through technological innovations and advanced organizational techniques in the labor process) have resulted in the annihilation of space by time to facilitate the rapid flow of capital (elsewhere he refers to this phenomena as “space/time compression”). This general quest to accelerate turnover time is accompanied by a continuous reshaping of geographical landscapes through a diverse set of processes as varied as deindustrialization, globalization, and gentrification.

It is at this point that Harvey locates a certain planned obsolescence of capitalist logic, in that in order to survive capital must destroy the geographical foundations – cultural, ecological, and spatial – of its own activities such that new accumulation strategies become possible. He provides examples in the massive redevelopment campaigns of cities such as Baltimore, as well as in the Federally funded urban renewal programs of the twentieth century (1989; 2000). He also discusses the debt financed/Federally funded processes of suburbanization, which he says solved a problem of under consumption by deconcentrating the built environment of cities (thereby creating more opportunities to invest while transforming the urban infrastructure) and effectively mobilizing demand by making car culture a necessity rather than a luxury. These transformations stand as exemplars of Harvey’s most notable concept, namely the “spatial fix” of capital accumulation strategies. Arguing that the “spatial fix” – described as the breaking down and reorganization of spatial barriers - is integral to the functioning of capitalism, Harvey asserts the primacy of space in Marxist thought:

Capitalism, Marx insists, necessarily accelerates spatial integration within the world market, the conquest and liberation of space, and the annihilation of space by time. In so doing it accentuates rather than undermines the significance of space. Capitalism has survived, says Lefebvre, ‘only by occupying space, by producing space.’ The ability to find a spatial fix to its inner contradictions has proven one of its saving graces (Harvey, 1989, p.190).

Harvey traces the phenomena of spatial fixes to their manifestations in uneven geographical development, as illustrations of capital’s phoenix-like affinity to rise again by reducing itself to ashes.

While political economy perspectives and Marxist geography have done a great deal to elucidate the inner logic of spatial development, the insistence upon the capitalist economy as being purely responsible for the formation of space has drawn considerable opprobrium from cultural critics. one scholar leading the attack is Stephen Haymes, an African American education scholar who argues that the work of Marxist geographers essentially objectifies space and therefore strips it of its cultural meaning (1995). Haymes contends that the Marxist perspective of the political economy of space has strongly contributed to the reinforcement of its perception as simply the location of objects and events (1995). By asserting that space and culture conform to capitalism and the logic of markets, Marxists render space as homogenous, universal, objective and abstract (Entriken, 1990; Hayden, 1995). This line of critique has brought many scholars to distinguish between space as location and space as place. With regard to the latter, place is understood as the context of human actions, whereby that context is constantly contributing to the formation of identity. As Entriken notes, the Marxist insistence on representing space as objective and interchangeable trivializes the particularity of place , and as such place becomes either location or a set of generic relations attributable only to the means of production. In agreement, Haymes argues that to view space as objective is to assume that it is divorced from how socially constituted subjects with particular racial, sexual, and class identities give space specific cultural meanings (1995).

To illuminate the critique of Marxist geography more specifically, I will focus now on the topic of gentrification in relation to the split between political economists and cultural theorists. Following Harvey’s lead, Neil Smith’s work on urban restructuring and gentrification incorporates the ideas of uneven development and differential ground rents as the premise for neighborhood transitions (1984; 1986). Smith argues that through sustained disinvestment, landowners and speculators intentionally allow center city locations to deteriorate in order to decrease land values such that they will eventually encourage more lucrative reinvestment. The most profitable tracts of land for capital accumulation are therefore in neighborhoods where price is significantly below potential ground rent. Even in the case of gentrification, a process widely understood in terms of status/identity distinction and aesthetic values, Smith and Harvey posit that the capitalist economy is purely responsible for the formation of space. They dismiss the urban phenomena associated with culture and identity in gentrification processes as being hopelessly ideological, in that the idea of “taste culture” and identity politics in resistance movements merely serves to conceal the fundamental economic forces that are essential to the formation of spaces. Moreover, taste and taste culture are said to be deliberately deployed by urban designers and architects to conceal the real basis of economic distinctions en route to the reproduction of the established order and the perpetuation of domination.

In a similar work on the gentrification of spaces, Sharon Zukin (1995) appears initially to depart from Marxist geographers by contending that gentrification, as an attempt to rediscover or recapture the value of historical place, is a cultural formation. She goes as far as to say that gentrification constructs social space (or habitus ) on the basis of cultural rather than economic capital, as gentrifiers are motivated by an appreciation for aesthetics and history. However, Zukin also describes the ways in which the cultural values of a specific place ultimately leads to the creation of a market for the special characteristics of space. For example, those areas that are revered for their historic value serve as a springboard for the commercial redevelopment of downtown districts. The result has been that the aesthetic appeal of gentrification has been abstracted and coopted into objects of cultural consumption. Zukin further explains that the cultural movement of gentrification was incorporated into contemporary architectural forms and styles (e.g. New Urbanism), which similarly attempt to replicate an authentic rendition of a city’s past often in hopes of attracting middle class residents. Ultimately, it is the real estate developers and property owners that become the dominant purveyors of gentrified cultural values in downtown commercial real estate markets. The consequence is that gentrification is transformed from “place defining into a market defining process” (Zukin, 1995, p. 215). Accordingly, culture is ultimately viewed in Zukin’s work as a function of capital investment, similar to the findings of Harvey and Smith.

The assertion by Marxists that place can be differentiated in terms of capital investment renders space as a re-useable container to be emptied or filled with objects anew. The processes of capitalist development are said to be materialized in space (thus allowing Harvey to claim an objective historical materialist perspective on the geographies of time and space), almost through a one to one correspondence to the built environment. Accordingly, spaces are appropriated as empirically observable regularities that allow Marxists to identify the deeper social forces (base) affecting surface events (superstructure). Haymes contends that this suggests a realist epistemology – one that quickly degenerates into a positivistic, causal logic. The turn toward positivistic discourse within Marxist geography reduces the autonomy of the urban form to “moments of capital” as the inherent assumption is that capital always subsumes space under its domination. Accordingly, most Marxists posit a direct relationship between the built environment and the political economy to be decoded through empirical analysis. Haymes argues that the hegemony of this sensibility in Marxist geography precludes awareness of cultural politics, and by extension awareness of the relationship between place and identity (1995). As an example of what is obfuscated in Marxist analysis, Haymes asserts that gentrification is mediated by white supremacist ideology, in that its attempts to reconstitute a vision of a “white city of orderliness” are in response to racial fantasies about the dysfunctions and pathologies of primitive blacks. As such, he contends that gentrification is more a matter of race than merely economics; as gentrification, in its attempt to popularize memory by controlling the representation of its own history, silences the everyday meanings that blacks give to their environment (1995).

These critiques of Marxist geography deliver us to a debate in contemporary spatial theory that evinces a critical turn toward spatially informed cultural analysis. What is perhaps most salient here is the notion that place and identity are bound together, and that “culture is the glue that bonds them” (Haymes, 1995, p.89). As Friedland notes, “place is the fusion of space and experience, a space filled with meanings, a source of identity” (Friedland, 1992, p.14). Similarly, Entriken contends, “places are significant not because of their inherent value, but rather because we assign values to them in relation to our projects” (Entriken, 1991, p.16; as cited in Haymes, 1995). Rosalyn Deutsche argues that the instrumental and technical logic that informs functionalist Marxist theories suggests that space has intrinsic uses, or an inherent meaning determined by the imperative to fulfill needs that are presupposed to be natural (1991). The dominance of this thought leads to a top down, rational and elitist perception of space that has typically informed the logic of city planners and developers. Space thus becomes fetishized as a physical, material entity – an independent object that exercises control over the people who produce and use it. Deutsche contended that this functional notion that the city speaks for itself conceals the politics of culture, the politics of everyday life, and the identity of those who “speak through the city” (1991, p. 160). In order to accommodate these theoretical concerns, we must move toward an understanding of the role of culture in the formation of urban geographies. We proceed to a review of the literature in cultural geography in the following section.

Toward Cultural Understandings of Geography

The debates discussed at the conclusion of the previous section are illustrative of a wider debate between the grand narratives of modernity and the fragmented localisms of postmodernity. Movements toward identity politics have been maligned as atomizing, defeatist, and hopelessly ideological by many theorists (Couldry, 2000; Eagleton, 2000; Harvey, 1990). The currents of postmodern critical thought however, inexorably press on in attempts to irrupt the primacy of monolithic discourse in modernist thought. A key emphasis in postmodernism is to bring an appreciation to the agency of cultural formations and localized meaning making processes, primarily by placing human practices and cultural logics at the center of discussions on globalization (Ong, 1999). Since modernity is about the experience of progress through modernization, the dominating theme in this realm has been on becoming rather than being in time and space. Scholars like Soja attempt to mitigate this dominance by bringing an awareness of the triad of space-time-being en route to unraveling the geographical puzzle. As a corrective, Soja offers the heuristic of a “multilayered system of socially created nodal regions, a configuration of differentiated and hierarchically organized locales” (Soja, 1989, p.148). As Dear notes, such a lifeworld encompasses many different scales, from the human body to the urban to the nation state to the social whole; “it is everywhere permeated with Foucauldian notions of power and authority” (Dear, 2000, p. 74). Under this framework, Soja deconstructs a city like Los Angeles as a “polynucleated” contemporary urban milieu within which territorial fragmentation has ensued in the face of global capitalism. His broad geographical analyses, however, are criticized for ultimately reasserting a Marxist analysis that privileges the economic over the political and socio-cultural spheres (Dear, 2000). Is so doing, Soja falls short of an appreciation for the notion of culture and fails to accommodate the insights of ethnography and anthropology.

What is conspicuously absent from Harvey and Soja’s work is the issue of human agency and its production of cultural meanings within the normative milieus of late capitalism. Recognizing the difficulty of fusing a political economy perspective with the methodologies of anthropology and an appreciation for culture, Aihwa ong seeks to introduce a strategy of linking cultural subjectivity not directly to the structure of production, but rather to systems of what Foucault calls “knowledge power.” Her move toward Foucauldian analysis opens up an appreciation for the ways in which everyday consciousness is shaped by discursive knowledge. In her most recent work Flexible Citizenship (1999), ong trammels un-apologetically over the myriad cultural forms and subject positions said to manifest from processes of globalization and transnationality, many of which she contends have actively reshaped both subjectivity and the strategies of the nation state. By privileging sites associated with the spatial struggles of elite Chinese subjects in their quests for such varied achievements as global visibility; flexible accumulation; freedom from oppressive state regimes; and the formulation of flexible/transnational family constellations; ong places the notion of culture directly on center stage.

Moreover, by contending that “globalization precipitates crises in subjectivity,” and by asserting that “the technologies of subject making are dependent on the material processes of capitalism,” ong protracts a more nuanced and sophisticated read of transnational cultural phenomena while maintaining an appreciation for the ways in which capital shapes everyday life. ong attempts an ethnography of transnationalism that seeks to embed the theory of cultural practice within, not outside of or against, political economic forces. Accordingly, she seeks to bring together the economic rationalities of globalization and the cultural dynamics that shape human and political responses to it. Tracing the global trajectories of subjects allows ong to explore the ways that diasporan subjectivity is shaped Moreover, by contending that “globalization precipitates crises in subjectivity,” and by asserting that “the technologies of subject making are dependent on the material processes of capitalism,” ong protracts a more nuanced and sophisticated read of transnational cultural phenomena while maintaining an appreciation for the ways in which capital shapes everyday life. ong attempts an ethnography of transnationalism that seeks to embed the theory of cultural practice within, not outside of or against, political economic forces. Accordingly, she seeks to bring together the economic rationalities of globalization and the cultural dynamics that shape human and political responses to it. Tracing the global trajectories of subjects allows ong to explore the ways that diasporan subjectivity is shaped by mobility in space. This allows her to capture the “horizontal and relational nature of the contemporary economic, social, and cultural processes that stream across spaces” en route to understanding the implications of transnationality (Ong, 1999, p.4).

In a similar vein, proponents of a revitalized cultural geography are seeking to advance the theoretical developments of cultural studies and social theory by informing these disciplines with a geographical sensibility. Arguing that geography is not merely incidental to cultural variation nor relevant only to the explanation of diversity but rather fundamental to the very constitution of culture, Peter Jackson asserts the following: “If social processes do not take place on the head of a pin, then we need to take spatial structure seriously, not least in the production and communication of meaning that we call culture” (Jackson, 1989, p.xi). Jackson’s work insists that culture is a domain in which political, economic and social relations of domination and resistance are contested, negotiated and resolved (1989). He further contends that culture is not merely socially constructed and geographically expressed but rather spatially constituted , thus it is vitally important to refrain from analyzing these domains in isolation. Such a conception lets on to an analysis of spatial manifestations of culture through a theoretically informed scholarship that places the relationship between culture, political economy, and space at center stage.

On a more local level, Stephen Haymes in Race, Culture, and the City (1995) argues for a pedagogy for the black urban struggle informed by a politics of place and a politics of location. Haymes argues that pedagogy must be linked to “how individuals and collectivities make and take up culture in the production of public spaces in the city,” with particular emphasis on how collectivities assign meaning to public spaces with unequal relations of power in an effort to “make place” (Haymes, 1995, p.3). His basic premise is that cultural images and historical images have as much influence on the spatial form of the city as economic forces. As such, he contends that a critical pedagogy of urban place “must take up how the manufacturing of urban meanings structures our perceptions about different living spaces and the political and ethical consequences of those meanings” on both spaces and the people that live in them (Haymes, 1995, p.3). Following the writings of Manuel Castells, Haymes argues that landscapes can be regarded as places where social, historical, and geographical conditions allow different cultural voices to express themselves. He notes that just as society is structured around conflicting cultural positions which define values and interests, “so the production of space and cities will be too” (Castells, 1983, p.xvi; as cited by Haymes, p. 3). Lastly, Haymes invokes Foucault’s notion of heterotopias as a useful heuristic for understanding the ways that cityscapes are constitutive of many different voices and living spaces. As heterogeneous and relational spaces, heterotopias are useful for understanding how some spaces are portrayed as normal and ordered at the expense of constructing others as abnormal and disordered (1995).

While Foucault’s influence is clear in the move to reassert discussions of culture in spatial analysis, this discussion cannot proceed responsibly without paying homage to Michel de Certeau and his seminal work, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). De Certeau’s work has been invaluable in the field of urban anthropology, as it provides a framework for micro-geographical analysis of the finely grained and variegated contexts of everyday life. Under de Certeau’s aegis, ethnographers bring forth an appreciation for the fact that social life happens at the street level, whereby human beings may be observed in the myriad actions that comprise the art of the everyday. Moreover, de Certeau’s work revivifies the emphasis on human agency, and in so doing offers an outlet to Foucault’s totalizing panopticons of power which virtually erase all hope for the human subject. As opposed to an emphasis on the production of spatial environments, de Certeau highlights the ways in which users consume space, most notably by mapping out the tactics, strategies and procedures that subjects engage in to escape the effects of power. Like Foucault, de Certeau focuses on microbe-like operations proliferating in technocratic structures, but in focusing on a multitude of tactics articulated in the details of everyday life to undermine them, he offers a response to Foucault’s panopticon by focusing on the innumerable practices through which users re-appropriate space. In bringing to light the “clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups already caught up in the nets of discipline,” de Certeau elucidates a collection of procedures or “guileful ruses” which themselves comprise a network of “anti-discipline” (de Certeau, 1984, p. xiv).

In specific reference to spatial analysis, de Certeau’s chapter titled “Walking in the City” stands as an exemplar of his most compelling work. He posits that walking in the city has its own logic, indeed its own rhetoric, that eludes the totality of urban planning discourse:

Urban life increasingly permits the re-emergence of the element that the urbanistic project excluded. The language of power is in itself urbanizing, but the city is left prey to contradictory movements that counterbalance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power. Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate; without points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to administer (de Certeau, 1984, p. 95).

De Certeau attempts in his writings to follow the multi-form, resistant, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline en route to generating a theory of the everyday practices of lived space (1984). He decries the fact that maps and rational representations of space cause a way of being in the world to be forgotten, in that those with the power to map are oblivious to the operations of daily users. only by salvaging the relationship between the spatial practices of users to the constructed order can we begin to know the networks of practices that are shaped out of “fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces” (de Certeau, 1984, p. 128). It is in the interstices of power, de Certeau notes, that we come to truly understand the human geographies of daily practice.

Ralph Cintron, in his book Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday (1997), takes de Certeau’s work directly into the realm of the ethnographic. Cintron focuses on practitioners who create textual representations of spaces (writers, mapmakers) as well as the practitioners who insert a host of poetic improvisations, appropriations and personal inventions into that text vis-à-vis acts of resistance and negotiation (readers, or walkers). Cintron, like de Certeau, views these re-appropriations of meaning in the act of negotiation as “poachings” or transgressions, formed in the presence of any normative discourse and generated by the resiliency, spontaneity, and subversive creativity in his subjects. Under this analytical framework, Cintron follows Latino/a culture to such representative sites as false documentation; graffiti; posters on the walls of an adolescent’s room as a spatial mosaic; spaces of gang culture; and discourses of spatial measurement. In his extensive analysis of car culture from the lowriders (traditional drivers of Chevy’s and Fords from the 50’s and 60’s) to “thumpers” (contemporary drivers of higher tech/modern cars with elaborate sound systems) to “Too Low Flow” (a subculture fascinated with hyperbolic imagery, hydraulics and immaculate car preservation), Cintron tracks the ways in which individuals generate respect by extending their “egos” into public space. His unique formulations of spatial analysis include literal, metaphorical, semiotic and rhetorical constructions of space, all of which he generates from his detailed analyses of everyday life in a Latino/a neighborhood (1997).

Cintron’s ethnography attempts to address the concept of “making” - a trope which encompasses the Cintron’s ethnography attempts to address the concept of “making” - a trope which encompasses the process of making; made things as cultural display or performances; exploration of the economic, social and political contexts of made things; and the circulation of such things through the imaginations of a community. He sets out to explore making at two separate levels; the first level is that of a critique of the making of ethnographic texts, while the second level concerns the ways in which people make and unmake themselves in space under conditions of systemic power differentials. While Cintron’s primary focal points are the rhetorics of public culture and the rhetorics of everyday life, it is his strategy of analyzing the “structural architecture” of documents, cultural practices, and styles of discourse that provide a way of spatializing his ethnography. In looking at “blank spaces” as sites upon and within which cultural meaning is generated, Cintron successfully and brilliantly elucidates the politics of everyday practices within a diverse set of semiotic spaces and physical geographies (1997).

Following the lead of spatially informed ethnographies seeking to conflate political economy with cultural analysis, Richard Lloyd sets out an analysis of Wicker Park, a postindustrial neighborhood in Chicago that has seen recent cultural transformations under the influences of global markets (2001). Lloyd’s work, titled “A Postindustrial Bohemia: Culture, Neighborhood and the Global Economy” (2001), documents the transformation of old industrial spaces and structures in the midst of what Jameson (1994) refers to as a heightened aestheticization of the economy in fin-de-siecle capitalism. By tracking the culture of “neo-bohemia” in Wicker Park, Lloyd exposes the ways in which old sites such as factories and warehouses become reconfigured as strategic sites for graphic designers, nightclubs, cafes, advertising agencies, and other “hip” occupations privy to image production and the vagaries of the “postmodern distraction factory.” At the intersection of economy (the aestheticized, flexible, global market) and demography (artists, graphic designers, architects, and others associated with design intensive media enterprise) stands Wicker Park, which has transformed from a dying postindustrial neighborhood to one of the most desired locales in Chicago. Lloyd argues that the culture of Neo-Bohemia that flourishes in Wicker Park is produced in the dialectical interplay between the structuring influences of local exigencies and global markets, thus allowing us to analyze the relationship between globalization and spatial outcomes at the local level. Countering Frederic Jameson, who posits a disjuncture between contemporary culture and physical space, Lloyd’s primary argument is that the economy of informational flows and signs circulating in space still requires and involves material space as a location for symbolic production. Recognizing that culture is co-extensive with the economy itself, Lloyd emphasizes the importance of the ways in which people actually live in and are shaped by the aesthetic economy, as both producers and consumers. He concludes by claiming that the aesthetic economy offers new organizations of everyday life, which in turn organize the reproduction and deployment of flexible labor for the new economy.

A separate exemplar of the new emphasis in urban anthropology on the relationship between space, culture, and political economy is Robert Rotenberg’s work on metropolitanism and the transformation of urban spaces (2001). Rotenberg is an historical anthropologist focusing on processes of building civic culture and class identity through landscape. He argues that metropolitanism in the 19 A separate exemplar of the new emphasis in urban anthropology on the relationship between space, culture, and political economy is Robert Rotenberg’s work on metropolitanism and the transformation of urban spaces (2001). Rotenberg is an historical anthropologist focusing on processes of building civic culture and class identity through landscape. He argues that metropolitanism in the 19 th century was a way of legitimating and authorizing asymmetries of power into the built environment. By tracing the histories of the affluent and powerful in their efforts to remake the representational qualities of space to reflect class values, Rotenberg exposes the ways that neighborhoods become sites for the production and management of knowledge and class-consciousness, as well as sites for the consumption and formulation of cultural identity. He illustrates how neighborhood boundaries become fixtures between those with the means to “consume” wealthy locales and those who merely have the capacity to look on with desire. At this juncture, Rotenberg draws parallels between the development of the colonial subject and the metropolitan subject:

Just as the colonial subject internalized the power differences in relation to the colonizer, the colonizer at home in cities internalizes a superordinate power relation and projects it locally, redrawing social boundaries to better demarcate class prerogatives. The need to bound the home of the metropolitan subject, like the need to separate with a window the object of desire from the one who desires it, leads to the recasting of boundaries in urban space. The boundaries of metropolitan privilege were about seeing the representations of bourgeois power, (and it is these) urban boundaries (which) formulate bourgeois power (Rotenberg, 2001, p.14).

While similar to Marxist geography in its emphasis on class and symbolic capital, Rotenberg’s ontological urbanism is a product of the revolutionary rethinking of the meaning of urban life which aims to understand the cultural dynamics of larger cities. He encourages urban ethnographers to ask questions about the qualitative differences people experience in their lives as a result of dwelling in certain neighborhoods as opposed to others; in addition to questions about how a neighborhood can be seen as a location for the production and management of knowledge.

As a final exemplar of the movements toward culture in spatial analysis, I look to urban anthropologist Alan Smart and his work on squatter settlements in Hong Kong (2001). Contrary to the Foucauldian preference for highly regulated spaces as sites for analysis, Smart takes a different approach by examining places that are much less effectively controlled: illegal or irregular settlements (i.e. squatter settlements). Analyzing what he calls “unruly places,” Smart explores how it is that irregular spaces of settlement exist and persist. He studies the policies and practices used to regulate squatters, as well as the ways in which the responses of squatters influence the outcomes of policy interventions - ultimately contributing to the formulation of new policies as a result. Smart contends that since spatially fixed and conspicuous illegalities such as squatter settlements cannot rely on underground invisibility (as much of the illegal activities of the informal sector can), explanations for their survival have to deal with both the nature of governmental interventions/non-interventions and the actions and self organization of those involved in the illegal practices. He asserts that it is primarily this tr ialectic between squatter area demography, social organization and government housing policy that generates and sustains a culture of illegal settlement. Smart concludes by suggesting that we should pay more attention to places and populations that succeed in resisting or subverting regulation, recognizing that these unruly places cannot be understood in isolation from efforts to control and regulate them (2001).

Conclusion: Toward an appreciation of Space in Social Work

As this brief review makes evident, recent transformations in the interdisciplinary climate of contemporary academia have resulted in the integration of a broad array of spatial theoretical perspectives from cultural geography, political economy, urban sociology, urban anthropology, and regional and city planning (Low & McDonough, 2001). The new emphasis on spatial relations provides insight into material, ideological and experiential aspects of the environment in compelling ways that can be of great importance to the discipline of social work. Spatially informed scholarship incorporates critical interdisciplinary approaches en route to advancing our understanding of space and socio-spatial relationships, thus providing insights that are integral to our knowledge of the growing inequality of the lives of marginalized groups (Low & McDonough, 2001). Simultaneously, this work addresses macro level processes such as globalization, commodification, and the new social order in the context of local environments while generating new understandings of the relationship between poverty and geography. It is incumbent upon social work to enter and assume a prominent position in these theoretical dialogues, as well as to advance an appreciation for the vector of space across the realms of practice, policy, and research.

 

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