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Production of Space

Globalization has made it increasingly difficult to understand what is meant by “space” and “place” and how to delineate the two concepts. From a commonsense perspective, a region, a city, or a town may be seen as a “place.” But geographers have become critical of such an understanding. While physical geographers often work with a notion of absolute space, as if it were a merely objective, easily delineated and marked or mapped backdrop to life, in human geography there is a shift toward a notion of space as brought into existence by economic, political, and social relations.

This attention given to the social production of space by human geographers and the increasing popularity of this theme relate to globalization. Globalization brought about the idea that we have witnessed a time-space compression, a term introduced by David Harvey, who drew on Henri Lefebvre for the development of his arguments. Fast-travel possibilities, new media, and flows of capital and labor across the globe all affect the ways in which we experience and assign meanings to places as material sites.

Henri Lefebvre's Influence

Time-space compression stimulates the trend for different sites to become more alike (homogenization) and simultaneously also the need for distinction and specificity (differentiation). So instead of looking at objects and artifacts and even human beings in space, Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) developed a theory of the social production of space that has heavily influenced most scholars who have tried to work with the idea that space is not but becomes in dynamic ways. To Lefebvre, there was not one understanding of space but a whole range of struggles over the meaning of space, especially in the framework of capitalism. Space, to Lefebvre, was a commodity: It was not defined by its physical attributes but as a product of capitalism. While globalization according to Lefebvre meant that each and every thing becomes subordinated to the workings of the capital market, countermovements aim to establish alternative understandings of space, and hence, the result is an increasingly symbolically differentiated notion of space. Place, then, is a specific form of space produced through labeling and providing symbolic meanings.

This theme, developed later by geographers such as Doreen Massey, in terms of place making, and Anthony Giddens, as created space, thus criticized geography for taking space for granted and considering place as unproblematic. Now, many human geographers see places as those spaces produced by the lived experiences of people.

The social constructionist Perspective

Lefebvre, Harvey, and Massey worked on an understanding of space as socially produced, in relations and through inequalities understood through a neo-Marxist perspective. A second, albeit not fully independent, understanding of the production of social space can be traced in a sociological tradition influenced by social constructivism as developed by Berger and Luckmann. Especially since the 1960s, there has been an increase in attempts to analyze how urban meanings come about. The study of space as socially constructed has been central in cultural analyses that have focused on the city, as in Raymond Williams's work. Constructivism asserts that people make social life through their interactions. This is sometimes narrowly understood as verbal and nonverbal language. Often, it is understood more broadly as all patterns of everyday life and everything, including apparently “fixed” matters such as nature or the built environment and the meanings they have taken on, which are often taken for granted. Indeed, as Lefebvre maintained, practices and experiences create meanings just as much as does discourse. For the social production of space, then, this implies that the street corner, the plaza, and the urban neighborhood do not have meanings that are stable, obvious, and out there to be grabbed—for example, by the researcher—and that have clear-cut boundaries. Instead, they are seen as contested sites, where meanings are attributed through processes of appropriation.

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