Social Geographies

Space and Society

Gill Valentine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317879374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Geografia

Most social geography undergraduate textbooks are structured around different social categories, splintering the discussion of gender, class, race and increasingly now sexuality and disability, into separate chapters. This has the effect, firstly, of making social relations rather than space (the raison d'etre of human geography) the focus of undergraduate books; secondly of ignoring the way that social relations are negotiated and contested in different space. Rather than reproducing this conventional social geography format the aim of this proposed text is to make space the focus of analysis. In doing so the intention is to make complex theoretical debates about space more accessible to students and encourage them to look at their own environments in new ways.

1 Space and society

1.1 About this book

1.2 Space and society

1.3 Boundaries and connections

1.4 Using this book

1.1 About this book

Social geography is an inherently ambiguous and eclectic field of research and writing. It is perhaps best summed up as ‘the study of social relations and the spatial structures that underpin those relations’ (Johnston et al. 2000: 753). While social geography’s intellectual roots can be traced back to the nineteenth-century French school of ‘la géographie humaine’, it was in the 1960s and 1970s that it developed rapidly as a subdiscipline. It was in this period of social and political turbulence, when civil rights protests were at their height, that social geography came into its own. Informed by the development of Marxist and feminist approaches, social geography engaged with social inequalities and questions of social justice (Harvey 1973). Subsequently, in the late 1980s and 1990s this subdiscipline was influenced by the ‘cultural turn’ in geography, leading to a shift in emphasis away from issues of structural inequality towards one of identity, meanings, representation and so on. It is therefore increasingly difficult to distinguish between social geography and cultural geography.

Although this book is entitled Social Geographies, it makes no claims to occupy a discrete intellectual space which can be identified or sealed off from other traditional subdisciplinary areas such as cultural geography or political geography. Rather, the plural social geographies which emerge here are a porous product – an expression of the many connections and interrelationships that exist between different fields of geographical inquiry. Indeed, they are perhaps more appropriately characterized by the subtitle: space and society.

Given the intellectual heritage of the 1960s and 1970s, social issues such as poverty, housing and crime, rather than spaces, have commonly provided the structuring framework for social geography textbooks, with social identities such as gender, race sexuality and disability each discussed within discrete chapters. Instead of replicating this format, this book adopts geographical scale as an organizing device to think about how social identities and relations are constituted in and through different spaces. Through this device it both addresses conventional social geography topics such as urban social segregation, class, fear of crime and so on, while also making more explicit the ways in which social relations and space are mutually constituted.

This chapter sets the scene for what follows by briefly outlining the ways in which geographers have conceptualized space and society, by explaining how ‘scale’ is employed in this text, and by offering some guidelines as to how this book might be read and used.

1.2 Space and society

Space is a central organizing concept within geography. As the discipline developed in the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the ways in which geographers have conceptualized space have become increasingly sophisticated.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries geography was concerned with the identification and description of the earth’s surface. Space was conceived by explorers, cartographers, and geographers as something to be investigated, mapped and classified (a process enhanced by the development of instrumental, mathematical and graphical techniques). Indeed, this understanding of space underpinned the subjugation and exploitation of territories and populations through the process of colonialism.

After the Second World War a recognition of the deficiencies of regional geography and the need for more systematic approaches to research, combined with geographers’ increasing engagement with quantitative methods, led to a shift in the focus of the discipline. The emphasis on the description of uniqueness was replaced by a concern with similarity. Specifically, positivist approaches to geography were concerned with uncovering universal spatial laws in order to understand the way the world worked. The focus was on spatial order and the use of quantitative methods to explain and predict human patterns of behaviour (Johnston 1991, Unwin 1992).

Within social geography attempts were made to understand the complexity of society and social relations by mapping and exploring spatial patterns. The emphasis was on scientific techniques such as social area analysis which used key variables (e.g. about occupation, ethnicity, etc) from the census to describe the characteristics of social areas; and factorial ecology which involved the uses of multivariate statistical techniques to produce areal classifications. These, and other such methods, were used to map patterns of urban social segregation, most notably of racial segregation. In other words, social differences were understood in terms of spatial separation. Some of this work and its legacy for the study of social geography is discussed in Chapter 4 and Chapter 7.

Within this explanatory framework space was conceptualized as an objective physical surface with specific fixed characteristics upon which social identities and categories were mapped out. Space was, in effect, understood as the container of social relations and events. Likewise, social identities and categories were also taken for granted as ‘fixed’ and mutually exclusive. The emphasis on understanding social relations in terms of the way they were mapped out in space also meant that those social relations (such as gender and sexuality) that were not easily studied within this spatial framework were overlooked (Smith 1999).

In the 1970s this positivist approach to human geography was subject to many-stranded critiques, of which humanistic geography and radical geography were two. Their focus on the theoretical and methodological limitations of positivism (see Cloke et al. 1991) also drew attention to the dualistic way in which society and space were conceptualized in this approach. Humanistic geography, for example, ‘rejected the exclusivity and pretensions to objectivity of positivist science, and proposed the importance of subjective modes of knowing. Geographical space was not simply an objective structure but a social experience imbued with interwoven layers of social meaning … In humanistic geography “social space”, not physical or objective space, was made the object of inquiry’ (Smith 1990: 76). Radical approaches, most notably those inspired by Marxism, sought to understand space as the product of social forces, observing that different societies use and organize space in different ways; and to explain the processes through which social differences become spatial patterns of inequalities (Smith 1990). In turn, geography’s subsequent engagement with postmodernism also produced a new sensitivity to ‘the myriad variations that exist between the many “sorts” of human beings studied by human geographers – the variations between women and men, between social classes, between ethnic groups, between human groups defined on all manner of criteria – and to recognise (and in some ways represent) the very different inputs and experiences these diverse populations have into, and of, “socio-spatial” processes’ (Cloke et al. 1991: 171).

Against this philosophical backdrop understandings of space and society have been reassessed. Social categories (such as class, gender, sexuality and race) are no longer taken for granted as given or fixed but rather are understood to be socially constructed. As such they can also be contested, resisted and (re)negotiated. These ideas are central to much of the work discussed throughout this book. For example, see Chapter 2, sections 2.2.2, 2.6.1 and 2.7, and Chapter 7, section 7.2.1. These sections show that ‘gender’, ‘age’, ‘disability’ and ‘race’ are social constructions rather than ‘natural’ or biologically given differences. Further, identities are now understood as always relational in that they are constructed in terms of their sameness to, and difference from ‘others’. For example, Chapter 2 examines how ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are defined reciprocally, while Chapter 9 draws on the work of Edward Said (1978), in which he shows how ‘the Orient’ as a social and cultural construction has provided Europeans with a sense both of ‘Otherness’ and of ‘Self’, to demonstrate how national identities are often defined not on the basis of their own intrinsic properties but in terms of what they are not. In such writings the ‘Other’ is simultaneously understood as desirable, ‘exotic’ and fascinating while also provoking emotions of fear and dread. In this way, the concept of otherness has helped geographers to understand why and how particular bodies such as the disabled, the homeless, those with mental ill-health and so on, are socially and spatially excluded (see, for example, Chapter 2 and Chapter 6).

However, geographers have also come under criticism for their tendency to focus on, and often to appropriate, the experiences of ‘others’ rather than to examine privileged and powerful identities. Derek Gregory (1994: 205), for example, questions ‘By what right and on whose authority does one claim to speak for those “others”? On whose terms is a space created in which “they” are called upon to speak? How are they (and we) interpellated?’ Such questions about positionality have in turn stimulated new interest in hegemonic identities such as whiteness (see, for example, Chapter 2, Chapter 7 and Chapter 8), masculinity (Chapter 2) and heterosexuality (Chapter 3 and Chapter 7). At the same time geographers have also woken up to the fact that class, race, sexuality, and disability cannot be examined in isolation – rather, individuals and groups have multiple identities, occupying positions along many separate lines of difference at the same time; indeed, people’s identities also develop in between the boundaries of social categories such as black and white (see, for example, Chapter 7, section 7.2.1). These ‘old’ fixed categories and identities can be, and are being, displaced by new forms of social identification – or hybrid identities – in which difference is no longer viewed in terms of social and cultural hierarchies.

Judith Butler’s theory of gender as a performance – outlined in Chapter 2 – has played a particularly important part in shaping geographers’ understandings of the production of identities. She rejects the notion that biology is a bedrock which underlies social categories such as gender. Rather, she theorizes gender (and implicitly other identities too) as performative, arguing that ‘gender is the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory framework that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’ (Butler 1990: 33). This approach has helped geographers to think about social identities as per-manently contested and unstable categories and has inspired work that looks at how such performances and contests take place in lived space (see, for example, Chapter 5).

Just as social identities are no longer regarded as fixed categories but are understood as multiple, contested and fluid, so too space is no longer understood as having particular fixed characteristics. Nor is it regarded as being merely a backdrop for social relations, a pre-existing terrain which exists outside of, or frames everyday life. Rather, space is understood to play an active role in the constitution and reproduction of social identities; and social identities, meanings and relations are recognized as producing material and symbolic or metaphorical spaces. Thus Doreen Massey (1999: 283) explains that space ‘is the product of the intricacies and the complexities, the interlockings and the non-interlockings, of relations from the unimaginably cosmic to the intimately tiny. And precisely because it is the product of relations, relations which are active practices, material and embedded, practices which have to be carried out, space is always in a process of becoming. It is always being made.’

Each chapter of this book focuses on how a space, from the body to the nation, is invested with certain meanings, how these meanings shape the way these spaces are produced and used, and, in turn, how the use of these spaces can feed back into shaping the way in which people categorize others and identify themselves. In other words, space and society do not merely interact with or reflect each other but rather are mutually constituted. To give an example from Chapter 7, lesbian and gay sexualities are inherently spatial in that they depend on particular spaces for their construction. For example, spatial visibility (e.g. in terms of the establishment of so-called gay ghettos or various forms of street protest or Mardi Gras) has been important to the development of lesbian and gay rights. In turn, these performances of sexual dissidents’ identities (re)produce these spaces as lesbian and gay spaces in which sexual identities can be, and are forged (Mitchell 2000). Likewise, in Chapter 8, section 8.3 explores the way in which rurality is constructed by both people living in the countryside and those outside it. Section 8.4 illustrates how the dominant image of the English countryside as a white landscape characterized by close-knit social relations and heterosexual family life obscures ‘other’ meanings and experiences of the rural, and how this, in turn, contributes to alienating social groups such as black people, travellers, and lesbians and gay men who feel uncomfortable or ‘out of place’ in these environments.

As this second example demonstrates, dominant sets of power relations often mask the complexities, multiplicities and ambiguities of the social activities, meanings and behaviours associated with the production of particular spaces. In some cases hegemonic discourses are literally inscribed in the landscape. Chapter 2, section 2.6.1 examines their role in creating socio-spatial environments which dis-able people with bodily impairments by marginalizing them economically, socially and politically. Likewise, Chapter 3 examines some of the ways housing designs are instrumental in shaping our everyday experiences.

Discourses can also be more invisibly imposed across space, influencing what assumptions, expectations and social behaviours are expected or deemed appropriate for particular spaces. By focusing on acts of transgression Tim Cresswell’s (1996) work has exposed the way that these normative landscapes are often ‘taken for granted’, only becoming apparent when they are disrupted. Chapter 6 examines how normative or moral landscapes are produced in public space. Her...