Social Space

The past few decades have seen a renewed interest in space as a concept for social theory. This “spatial turn” has occurred at a time when ever-denser flows of goods, capital, information, services, and people around the globe have led to what Karl Marx called the “annihilation of space by time” or, to put it more carefully, time-space compression. This thinking is in line with the dominant strand of sociological thinking throughout much of the twentieth century, which has seen the process of differentiation of modern society being inextricably linked to emancipation from spatial factors. In a nutshell, theorists such as Georg Simmel and Émile Durkheim assumed that space would gradually lose in significance as abstract forms of social organization (Vergesellschaftung), such as monetarized exchange, ...