On 15 March 1776, Sir Roger Newdigate, MP for Oxford University, noted in his diary that he had ‘walked to Ellicot, left watch to clean, over Blackfriars and Westminster Bridge to H[ouse of Commons]’.1 Whilst perfunctory, this account reveals much about the social and spatial compass of Newdigate’s everyday life in London but also about the broader connectivity of urban space and the interconnections between public and private. His walk drew together Whitehall, the City of London and Southwark; home, shops and Parliament; leisure, commerce and politics. London, like all cities, can be conceived at a grand scale: mapped on a single sheet, planned by a central authority and transformed by grandiose schemes of expansion or renewal. Alternatively, and arguably more productively, they can be viewed as a collage of smaller units, including communities, blocks, streets and buildings. Large-scale transformation then becomes the product of myriad many smaller changes driven by the everyday routines of city life that, in de Certeau’s words, ‘give their shape to spaces. They weave places together’.2 Newdigate’s daily perambulations linked people, places and practices – as did the daily routines of each of London’s thousands of residents. This mutual interrelationship between the actions of individuals and the form and structure of city spaces, and possibly even agencies of space, lies at the heart of the spatial turn in urban history. It represents an important shift in thinking about action and context. The chapters in this volume combine spatial and micro-historical approaches. They explore urban life in terms of practices and identities in the contexts of individual houses, streets and neighbourhoods. We apply micro-geography as a conceptualisation of these research practices. It indicates a combination of detailed empirical observations and certain specific methodological and theoretical positions within urban history. This volume furthermore aims at demonstrating the potentiality in this concept in terms of the many possible varieties of urban micro-geography approaches.
Spatial theory and the spatial turn in urban history
Traditional thinking has recognised two long-established schools of thought which define urbanity firstly according to density and proximity (the built form or morphology) and secondly as a way of life.3 Whilst different in their conceptualisation of the town, both definitions depend on intrinsically spatial understandings of urban. The notion of the urban as a distinct form underpins ecological models which represent the city as stable and homogenous (although subject to repetitive ‘waves’ of change), allowing the production of typologies and ideal types. This, in effect, presents the city as an ‘end-product’, created by a single perspective on the urban phenomenon and by narrative and progressive conceptions of history. The so-called morphology school, a label for different approaches to the study of the urban fabric, has its in research changing architectural styles and their relationship with urban form. Particularly in the French and Italian typomorphological tradition, dominated by the history of architecture, this is characterised by a focus on the urban built environment and its constituent elements and artefacts, not on the people experiencing them.4 This criticism is tempered by the British or Conzenian school of urban morphology which takes a more consciously geographical approach and pays far more attention to those who shaped the city.5 Yet even here agency is accorded to urban planners and builders rather than the people who lived and worked in these spaces. Indeed, Larkham and Conzen make a strong distinction between those who produce urban space – as a series of buildings, blocks, streets and neighbourhoods, and those who “consume” these spaces in their daily lives. Planning is thus conceived as a calculated intervention into urban space, a view that draws on modernist perspectives of the town as a unit comprising elements that can be rearranged to produce a different spatial and social order. The process is thus portrayed as rational and progressive, with the planners themselves seen as technocratic spatial engineers – part of the existing urban elite – or more occasionally inspired visionaries.6
Such an approach has been subjected to growing critique from the 1980s onwards, partly because it overemphasises the ‘prominence of professional planners, uncritically linking their work to a heroic narrative of progress’ and partly because it ignores the agency of people living and working in cities.7 This brings us to the second definition of urbanity – as a way of life – giving centre stage to the role of people in making the town. In many ways, the people were the town. This perspective turns on the pioneering work of Lewis Wirth, who forged a crucial link between place and way of life and gave expression to a set of practices embedded within broader urban culture. It is on this key tenet that current understandings of the spatial form depend, emphasising the role of human agency in spatial constructions but also recognising that those spatial constructions denote a particular set of practices.8 This is significant because it draws a fundamental link between practice/behaviour and space/place.
These ideas have been central to a growing recognition that space is socially produced, a perspective that involves a move away from the Kantian conception of space as an empty container of things and towards notions of space as process and in process.9 As Edward Soja puts it: ‘spatiality is socially produced and, like society itself, exists in both substantial forms (concrete spatialities) and as a set of relations between individuals and groups, an “embodiment” and medium of social life itself’.10 This argument links closely to the ideas of Henri Lefebvre.11 His central tenet was that space was socially produced and embraced a multitude of intersections. The conceptual triad that he developed, and which Soja has subsequently refined, reflects his attempt to overcome the traditional duality of society and space, material and mental, real and abstract.12 Within the so-called trialectics of spatiality, spatial practices – what Soja terms ‘Firstspace’ – link the geographies of individuals to the production of space through routine and routinised activities. It is through such routine spatial practices (visiting shops or journeys to work) that space is subconsciously (re)constructed and transformed. In its emphasis of the every day and its spaces, and in placing a value on knowledge derived from everyday practice, this overcomes the separation of concept and reality.13 In contrast, representations of space or ‘Secondspace’ are codified and subsume ideology and knowledge within practice; that is to say, space itself becomes ‘represented’. Effectively, this is the space of capital controlled by professionals or elites (such as the town planners and urban authorities) and consciously produced in accordance with their image of the city. Finally, spaces of representation are spaces of everyday experience in which the individual (rather than society) may be ‘represented’.14 Typically, these are associated with counter-spaces or what Soja calls ‘Thirdspaces’, which challenge or subvert dominant spatial practices and spatialities. De Certeau, for example, highlights the tactics of consumers which allowed them to reappropriate space for uses other than those for which it was intended. ‘Felt more than thought’ – it is through these lived spaces that people construct meaning for themselves through the use and interpretation of signs, symbols and icons.15
Historians have offered both theoretical and empirical responses to these ideas in a significant shift in the discipline often characterised as the spatial turn.16 In an introductory article to a special issue of Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2002), Peter Arnade, Martha Howell and Walter Simons argued for ‘making space a central theoretical concern’ in urban history and also raised the question what the notion of space will do to time, ‘that is, to historians’ assumption that causality resides in chronology, or in other words, that narrative is in some sense explanation’.17 This links to Michel Foucault’s controversial claim, made as long ago as 1967, that the 19th century had been obsessed with time, but that this was now being replaced by an epoch of space.18 Few historians would follow the hard-core assertion of a fundamental primacy of space versus time, preferring instead to think about the explicit links amongst space, time and action or, as Simon Gunn puts it, to analyse social processes ‘in space as well as through time’.19 For Gunn, this means that space should no longer be treated as a homogeneous neutral and given dimension: a framework for human action and social change. Instead, it must be conceived as something culturally produced and contested and as ‘a bearer of meaning in its own right’. There are several dimensions of space, and space is treated as itself an essential part of processes, interaction and change: events, actions and practices are always emplaced.20 Doreen Massey develops these ideas further, arguing that we need to rethink many of our assumptions about space. To elaborate our thinking about space, she makes three fundamental propositions: first, space has to be recognised as ‘the product of relations’, which means that it is ‘constituted through interaction’; second, it must be understood as a sphere of multiplicity and ‘coexisting heterogeneity’ where distinct trajectories coexist and overlap; third, it is ‘always under construction’ and thus is never finished and never closed.21
The challenges laid down by the spatial turn have been met by a growing number of historians. Gunn and Morris, for example, drew together a collection of essays that explored how space and identity were mutually constitutive, especially in terms of contested access and uses of space.22 A similar set of concerns were central to Katarina Navickas’s study of the strategies and meanings of urban protest, whilst Riitta Laitinen explored towns, houses and the urban community as material and spatial entities through which order and disorder were spatially produced and experienced.23 Applying spatial theory to a different set of concerns, Jon Stobart, Andrew Hann and Victoria Morgan examined how leisure and consumption practices were mediated through different urban spaces and shaped by the wider spatialities of social structure and social practices.24 The agency of space implicit in these studies is foregrounded in the analysis of cities as creative entities offered by Ilja Van Damme and Bert de Munck. Drawing on Latour’s actor-network theory, they overcome the dichotomy between the social and the material by arguing that creativity can only be analysed as the outcome of interaction between human and non-human agency (i.e., of people, artefacts, places and infrastructures) and by deconstructing discourses about the creative city as the product of the ‘reductionism and naturalisation of city life’.25
Others have been more critical of spatial theory and its usefulness to the historian. Ralph Kingston has questioned whether these theorisations are merely a ‘language game’ or whether ‘bricks and mortar matter’.26 For him, spatial theory forms another element of a broader cultural turn in which materiality gives way to meaning – an assessment shared by Paul Stock, who points to the risks of reducing space to representations and emphasises the necessity of considering the physicality of space. He urges historians to explore the interrelations between the physical and the representational, between matter and meaning, and between activity and ideology as a way of determining the true agency of space.27 Jerram goes further in his critique of Lefebvre’s theories.28 ‘In short’, he argues, ‘there is one system of people doing things, and there are two ...
