Spatial Transformations

Kaleidoscopic Perspectives on the Refiguration of Spaces

Angela Million, Christian Haid, Ignacio Castillo Ulloa, Nina Baur, Angela Million, Christian Haid, Ignacio Castillo Ulloa, Nina Baur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367477202
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000462777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003036159, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book examines a variety of subjective spatial experiences and knowledge production practices in order to shed new light on the specifics of contemporary socio-spatial change, driven as it is by inter alia, digitalization, transnationalization, and migration. Considering the ways in which emerging spatial phenomena are conditioned by an increasing interconnectedness, this bookasks how spaces are changing as a result of mediatization, increased mobility, globalization, and social dislocation. With attention to questions surrounding the negotiation and (visual) communication of space, it explores the arrangements, spatialities, and materialities that underpin the processes of spatial refiguration by which these changes come about. Bringing together the work of leading scholars from across diverse range disciplines to address questions of socio-spatial transformation, this volume will appeal to sociologists and geographers, as well as scholars and practitioners of urban planning and architecture.

1

NAVIGATING SPATIAL TRANSFORMATIONS THROUGH THE REFIGURATION OF SPACES

Angela Million, Christian Haid, Ignacio Castillo Ulloa, and Nina Baur

DOI: 10.4324/9781003036159-1

From “turning to space” to thinking spatially

Over the course of the past three decades, space and spatial research furthering spatial thinking have become increasingly popular both within and—though in a more nuanced manner—beyond academic circles. By and large, it has been a gradual process of recognition that, “as many people have been saying, ‘Space is hot’” (Bertsch and Sterne 1994; cited in Crang and Thrift 2000a, xi). Such weasel words eventually led to what came to be known as the “spatial turn,” which, rather than emerging in the shape and form of “intellectual magnificence,” put space at the core of critical analysis to shed light on economic, social, political, and cultural transformations to which the world is continuously subjected. Prior to the spatial turn, academic discourse typically affirmed space as an a priori external to human thinking and conceptualized space as a Kantian-absolute analytical category. As a result, jigsaw-like Euclidean conceptions of space emerged, underpinned by an understanding of space as a form of “outer sense,” whereby objects are represented as existing outside of us—that is to say, “in space.” Such static understandings of space were eventually rendered insufficient by the accelerating dynamics of spatial transformations such as globalization, progressively giving way to alternative approaches asserting that spatiality cannot be comprehended separately from its production. Moreover, humans do not just perceive and act within space as an immutable frame of reference; rather, by inhabiting, living, and all the while changing space, they render it relational (Lefebvre 1991; Massey 2005). In other words, far-reaching takes on contemporary phenomena must appeal to both social and spatial circumstances in order to move beyond the truism that “everything happens somewhere,” for it is, in effect, the where what allows the how to be fathomed—the inextricable fusion of context and causality (Warf and Arias 2009; Baur 2018, 329–356).

Furthermore, several disciplines—above all, geography—were stripped of their epiphenomenal status. Concurrently, initiated by the pioneering works of Anthony Giddens (1979, 1981) and Michel Foucault (1980), efforts to interlace, for instance, a (concrete and descriptive) “geographical” with an (abstract and explanatory) “sociological” imagination started to flourish (Agnew and Duncan 1989, 1). Accordingly, a shift from “a sense of space as a practico-inert container of action towards space as a socially produced set of manifolds” took place, indicating not only that space cannot be envisaged “outside the realm of social practice” but also that “the ecology of thought is no longer seen as somehow standing outside of the spatial” (Crang and Thrift 2000b, 2).

From the mid-1980s onwards, space has been reasserted and emplaced within a multifarious, inter-, and transdisciplinary purview covering (and thereby making relevant) aspects such as everyday life, identity, and human subjectivity, which are integral to a coherent analysis of social life and lived experience. There have been insightful attempts to integrate the diverse strands of existing academic work. Diverse disciplines—such as geography, architecture, urban planning, philosophy, sociology, political sciences, anthropology, historical sciences, communication sciences, and many more—have either constantly been or are increasingly dealing with issues of spatiality and, in this context, have discussed space in their own particular manner—whether metonymically (“spaces of language”), introspectively (“spaces of the self”), socio-politically (“spaces of agitation”), culturally (“spaces of modernity”), or aesthetically (“artistic and architectural spaces”).

Nevertheless, these preceding efforts to systematize spatial concepts have ended up indexing and, in consequence, replicating disciplinary boundaries. Furthermore, while the interest in space, spatiality, and spatial research has been steadily growing and spawning across fields of thought, there have rarely been any attempts either to identify convergences and intersections amid the variety of spatial conceptualizations or to synthetize modes of spatial thinking. Showing how fruitful intersecting and synthetizing would be is precisely the purpose of this book. More specifically, Martina Löw’s (2016) conceptualization of relational space offers a conducive approach that illustrates how assorted understandings of space and/or forms of spatial inquiry could be astutely brought together. According to Löw (2016), space may be envisaged as relational arrangements in which actors, objects, and technologies are both placing and being placed. These arrangements, moreover, are based on two analytically distinct social processes: spacing—in other words, specific practices of placing—and synthesizing.

Building on similar theoretical considerations as well as empirical outcomes stemming from a variety of disciplines engaged with spatial research and thinking, the aim of this book is twofold: opening spatial analysis and broadening the understanding of ongoing social processes as a whole. In addition, a long-term goal, whereof this book serves as an initial stepping stone, is to develop an empirically grounded theory of society that can best be defined as a “spatio-communicative figuration.” In this regard, moving from “turning to space” to “thinking spatially” plays a fundamental role in theory production, “not only in the ways that theory might apply to a spatially distributed world, but in the spatialities that allow thought to develop particular effectivities and intensities” (Crang and Thrift 2000b, 3). By concentrating on space as both the object and means of analysis and discussion, the book focuses on a key principle of the social order: exploring, first, various social transformations regarding their spatial dimensions and links; and, subsequently, restructured subjective actions, spatial knowledge, and spatial experience. On that account, spatial transformations are conceived not as abstract, unfathomable processes, but rather as processes of communicative actions and social practices embedded in people’s everyday lives. What people experience, want, believe, know, do, and how they interact in turn engenders new institutions and novel forms of localization, interconnectedness, and spatially shaped (self-)experience.

In order to clearly present how the refiguration of spaces operates as an analytical angle, the structure of this book systematically follows a set of subthemes and questions. The assemblage of chapters in this book reveals, by and large, not only that space does not constitute a neutral entity existing a priori as regards its conception, but also how it is possible to delve into spatial transformations pointedly and discern or even contend their inherent intricacies.

Spatiality and temporality

It has long been known that space and time are intrinsically intertwined and neither concept can be thought of and written about without reflecting on the other. For example, spatial constructions change over time; humans interact in space and in certain times; it also takes time to move in and through space; and so on. Therefore, the assorted contributions in this book purposefully focus on both “the spatial” in general and spatial transformations specifically.

In order to discuss the specific entanglement of spatiality and temporality, it is necessary to reflect upon temporality first. As process theory has shown, two key concepts—duration and temporal pattern—are central when thinking about time (Baur 2005; Norkus and Baur 2020). “Duration” (durée; Braudel 1958) or “time layer” (Zeitschicht; Koselleck 2018) indicates that social processes differ in the amount of time they need to unfold: Whereas some phenomena must be examined over a long period, others need a more precisely delineated length of time. Heuristically, three types of duration can be distinguished (Baur 2005; Norkus and Baur 2020):

1. Short-term social processes unfold in moments, hours, or days
2. Medium-term processes (“time of generations”) cover the memory of the living and usually cover years or decades
3. Long-term processes (longue durée) go beyond the memory of the living and cover centuries or millennia

In addition to a process’s duration, its pattern over time is also important. To this effect, three basic temporal patterns of social change can be identified from a heuristic standpoint (Baur 2005; Norkus and Baur 2020):

1. Trajectories are social processes that are patterned in a systematic way or develop path-dependently
2. Turning points occur between different phases of a process or after abrupt changes such as innovations or crises
3. Cycles describe social processes that are characterized by repetition

Against this backdrop, authors in the first section discuss how spatiality and temporality are entwined as well as what spatial transformations arise therefrom.

Besides the abovementioned, more abstract considerations about space and time, a more specific question is what type of spatial transformations can be empirically observed over the course of history. Empirical evidence suggests that social change and spatial transformations are interlinked. For example, Norbert Elias ([1939] 1997) has shown that in Europe, ever since the middle ages, civilizing and nation-building processes have been mutually stabilizing, driving each other along established trajectories with typical trends and countertrends. Accordingly, Elias (1986) coined the concept of “figuration” to express that different scales—namely the micro level (Elias [1969] 2002) and the macro level (Elias [1939] 1997)—are intertwined, co-develop, and, within this process, (re-)produce social inequality by including (“insiders”) and excluding (“outsiders”) people (Elias and Scotson [1965] 2002). Following this line of thought, in this book, Martina Löw and Hubert Knoblauch kick off the debate on spatiality and temporality by arguing that the second half of the twentieth century marked a turning point, contending that the specific pattern whereby social and spatial transformations are interwoven has fundamentally changed. Within this “refiguration of spaces” (Knoblauch and Löw 2017; 2020; in this volume), three processes unfold in parallel:

1. The relations of spaces as social contexts of different activities, forms of communication, and societal functions are turning into a polycontexturalization of space. This means that, at both a particular and structural level, different arrangements of space are simultaneously put into effect. Individual and collective actors are thus faced with the challenge of having to cope with different spatial logics at the same time; a condition that adds to, as Fredric Jameson (1991, 44) sharply asserts, “the incapacity of our minds … to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.”
2. Space is increasingly constituted in mediated forms spurred by hastily deepening advances in digital technologies of communication. Consequently, a mediatization—in the form of proactive and reflexive communicative acts unfolding on different scales and at different levels—arises and results in a simultaneity of digital and face-to-face interactions.
3. Humans, objects, and technologies are circulating more frequently, resulting in a translocalization and globalization of the economy, politics, culture, and everyday as well as urban planning/design practices. Hence, individual and collective actors and spaces, at variegated (geographically distant) locations, become progressively interconnected, coupled, and more interdependent alongside a prominent gain in the relevance of individual locations.

These processes in turn alter societies—and thereby typical patterns of social interactions—and, given that social and spatial changes are consubstantial, prompt spatial modifications (i.e. refigurations of spaces).

Therefore, Knoblauch and Löw’s (2017; 2020; in this volume) concept of “the refiguration of spaces” emphasizes the overarching theoretical assumption of this book, namely that social transformations become particularly clear by looking at the restructuring of spaces and combining the knowledge, purviews, and research outcomes of diverse spatial disciplines. By concentrating on the effects of mediatization, mobility, and social dislocation in spatial transformations, contributions by other authors also aim at deconstructing the notion of refiguration of spaces—as a specific interpretative vehicle to explore spatial transformations—from different theoretical and empirical angles.

A first general criticism concerning ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• List of contributors Page
• 1 Navigating spatial transformations through the refiguration of spaces
• Part I Spatiality and temporality
• Part II Spatiality, social inequality, and the economy
• Part III Digitization and visualization of space
• Part IV Imagining, producing, and negotiating space
• Index