Sites, Global

Approaches to the Study of Global Sites

Throughout history, there have always been sites of great importance and name recognition (e.g., the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World) or sites of religious symbolism (e.g., Rome or Jerusalem for the Christian tradition or Mecca for the Muslim tradition). These sites can be thought of as still-existing antecedents of global sites; they testify to specific values and cultural contexts and fulfill different religious, political, economic, or social functions. However, reflecting on and theorizing places [Page 1548]and spaces in relation to society and, further, to globalization has only gained significance during the 20th century.

Georg Simmel was probably the first to have focused on a society's spatial proliferation in sociological theory. In the early part of the 20th century, Simmel highlighted the importance of space and places to a society in general, as their structuring and constitution have social meaning, and he identified the interactions and reciprocal processes between places, spaces, and social actions. In the 1960s, the coherence between spaces, places, and society was increasingly discussed, for example, in the writings of neo-Marxist analysts whose perspective focused on the social production of space as a system of exploitation.

Beginning in the 1980s and the “topographical turn,” social and cultural scientists, including those in disciplines such as the new global geography and spatial sociology, began to take into account the sustained importance of place in transnational space. This approach recognizes that a place or site not only forms the base on which individuals, cultures, or societies can develop but also is created and transformed by social actions and is thus malleable and versatile. Through this lens, one could look, for example, at the impact of increasing tourism on particular global sites and the responses of the local population to it.

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