Some social spaces such as town squares or parks are public places; others such as pubs, websites, or shopping malls are privately owned and regulated.
"[8] Within such social spaces 'a system of "adapted" expectations and responses – rarely articulated as such because they seem obvious – acquire a quasi-natural self-evidence in everyday life and common sense": thus everybody consensually "knows what he is talking about when he refers to the town hall, the post office, the police station, the grocery store, the bus and the train, train stations, and bistros" – all underlying aspects of "a social space as such; an (artificial) edifice of hierarchically ordered institutions, of laws and conventions.
[13] In precisely the same way, "a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner"[14] – a sequence of stratified social spaces.
Lefebvre considered globalization as the creation, and superimposition on nature, of "worldwide-social space ... with strong points (the centers) and weaker and dominated bases (the peripheries).
"[19] Education, formal and informal, might be described as in large part a process whereby the new recruit to the human race "must learn to represent the many dimensions of the local social space ... through the veil of degraded inputs, chronic ambiguity, and the occasional deliberate deception.