Every conventional space is brought about by the typical social conditions which are expressed in it without the disruptive intervention of consciousness. Everything that is denied by consciousness, everything that otherwise is diligently overlooked, is involved in its constitution. The images of space are the dreams of society. Wherever the hieroglyph of any image whatever of space is deciphered, the ground of social reality becomes manifest. (Siegfried Kracauer: “Über Arbeitsnachweise” [On employment certificates], 1929)
As if it is the most natural thing in the world, most sociologists assume that there is no human existence outside of space and time. There is not much to be said against this as long as space and time are understood as something that must be constituted instead of viewing them in essentialist terms. But it is astounding that with the same certitude with which time is interpreted as a social construction by means of which people organize the difference between past and future, space is conceived as a material substrate, territory, or place. Such noteworthy sociologists as Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966), Talcott Parsons (1977), and Anthony Giddens (1984) proceed in this way. The result of this understanding of space as a primarily material object is that in many sociological projects space is regarded as not worthy of any particular attention, at best as an “environmental condition” to be excluded from study. When Elisabeth Konau published her book Raum und soziales Handeln [Space and social action] in 1977, she spoke of “a neglected dimension of sociological theorizing.” Fourteen years later, in 1991, Dieter Läpple still comes to the conclusion in his much quoted “Essay über den Raum” [Essay on space] that the dominant social sciences are characterized by an obvious “space blindness” (Läpple 1991, 163).
This is slowly changing. Though it is still the case that the category of time is much more systematically discussed as a resource for the construction of social reality than is space—biography research is being established as a genuine science of time1—in recent years, numerous sociological papers on the topic of space have been published (e.g. Urry 1985, 2010; Gieryn 2000; Lobao, Hooks, and Tickamyer 2007a). In her book Kindheit, Geschlecht und Raum [Childhood, gender, and space], Ursula Nissen (1998) comes to the conclusion “that after a long period of neglect of the category ‘space’ in social scientific theorizing, in the past ten to fifteen years increased efforts have been made to overcome this situation” (Nissen 1998, 136). But the criticism remains that space as an analytic category is still under-theorized (Massey 2005; Malpas 2012).
This newly developed interest is a sign that our certitudes about space are in a severe crisis. Due to rapid transportation technologies, instant transmission of information all over the world, and finally, the new possibility of moving in virtual spaces, space in the sense of a material substrate seems to have become completely meaningless.2 Accordingly, in the mass media, there is much talk of the dissolution of space. The German weekly newspaper Die ZEIT, for example, regularly publishes articles with the tenor that the human being is the “being that has fallen out of its spatial dimension” (Guggenberger 1994, 43). The author and director Heiner Müller explains to Alexander Kluge in a TV production and in the subsequent publication that the worst thing is “that there is now only time or speed or the passing of time, but no longer space” (Kluge and Müller 1995, 80). The French architect and philosopher Paul Virilio advocates the often quoted proposition that “the populating of time supplant[s] the populating of space” by the human being (Virilio 2012, 159).
In fact, it is not that space is “disappearing,” but rather that the organization of proximity is fundamentally different when a letter takes weeks to get from Europe to the USA or an e-mail is conveyed in seconds. And although the development that allows for information to be transferred in progressively shorter time spans is not new, it now seems to be penetrating deeper into our consciousness thanks to newest technological achievements. Other social processes, too, such as the reorganization of urban spaces, the increasingly complex and individuated experiences of socialization—experiences that we could call “insularized”—and changing ideas of the body all contribute to the development that space is again being perceived as a problem.
In the German context, the temporal distance to the territorially based expansionist policy of the German National Socialists is making a gradual rapprochement to the category of space possible. In the post-War period, all reference to space was initially tabooed so as to repudiate any possible suspicion of argumentation in terms of politics for a “people without space” (Volk ohne Raum). Even in the nineteen-seventies, it was often held to be reactionary to concern oneself with space. Thus, for example, Michel Foucault, who throughout his scholarly work was concerned with space phenomena, depicts a typical dispute in conversation with Jean-Pierre Barou and Michelle Perrot:
I remember ten years or so ago discussing these problems of the politics of space, and being told that it was reactionary to go on so much about space, and that time and the ‘project’ were what life and progress are about. (Foucault 1980b, 150)
Moving time is deemed to be the topic of the future. Space is not only encumbered by the idea of rigidity, it is also reminiscent of geopolitical argumentation in the Second World War. In sociology, the negative connotations of the term “space”—far beyond the borders of Germany—result in a renunciation of theoretical analysis of the concept of space. Today, some authors logically demand that a renewed exploration of phenomena of space be coupled with a theoretical discussion of the concept of space (e.g. Läpple 1991; Gieryn 2000).
Because it was tabooed, the concept of space has hardly been elaborated upon in recent decades. Today, it can be observed on the one hand that spatial restructuring can be empirically studied as a social process, but on the other hand that the concept used in analysis leads to the conclusion that space is merely becoming abstract. Now we cannot help but pose the question as to whether the concept used still comprehends the social phenomena and the presumable conditions of its development.
Space is indeed sporadically listed as a basic sociological concept, for example in reference works such as Bernhard Schäfer’s Grundbegriffe der Soziologie [Basic concepts of sociology] (1995), but for the most part, the category of space is lacking in synoptic works such as Key Concepts in Sociology (for a very recent example see Braham 2013). It is here that the present work takes its point of departure. The underlying question of this book is how space can be specified as a basic concept of sociology in order to formulate a sociology of space on the basis of this conceptualization. The following discussion is intended to clarify the point that sociology cannot do without the concept of space since it is used to describe the organization of proximity. Microsociology needs the concept of space in order to describe those configurations that arise from the connection of various social goods and people with each other and, as such, structure action. Macrosociology, for instance, can use the concept of space to grasp relational links that arise as a result of technological networking or urban restructuring and as such influence living conditions.
To this end, it is not straightforwardly possible to take recourse to an already developed concept of space. Starting points could be the use to date of the concept of space in sociology or in neighboring disciplines. It will become clear that the use of the concept of space for territories or in the sense of a localization at places only grasps aspects of constitution. This also applies to the sporadic use of the concept of space in Kant’s sense as an a priori ordering principle.
Up to now, theoretical approaches to reconceptualizing space have rarely sought to systematically derive a set of analytic concepts, but rather have attempted to propose new perspectives on space. Since these works are mostly articles or short essays in books on another topic, the discussion, which cannot help but be brief, will usually remain unclear to the reader who lacks training in the theory of space.
Empirical social research has generated a number of studies on the social organization of spaces, but up to now, a theoretically consistent idea of the links between individual case studies is lacking. Thus, there are numerous empirical studies on, for example, possibilities for the use of built-up space, structural exclusions from public space, symbolic effects of spaces, and so on, but hardly any ideas on the interactions of the various factors: spatial structures, action, symbolism, and so on. Without a theoretical idea of how spaces develop and are reproduced—a process that is supposed to be made communicable by means of the concept of space—many empirical findings cannot be sufficiently explained, as shown in Chap. 6.
In particular, the conceptualization of space as place or territory cannot make the link among the various aspects of constitution since it does not grasp the process of constitution, but rather presupposes the result of the process—the emergence of places, limited territories, and so on. The individual aspects of the complex social process as a result of which spaces are developed or reproduced (and sometimes modified) go undetected since space as territory or place is presupposed as something already known. The image of space as territory is a tem...