Sociology of space
It is concerned with understanding the social practices, institutional forces, and material complexity of how humans and spaces interact.
"[1] Nigel Thrift also defines space as; "The outcome of a series of highly problematic temporary settlements that divide and connect things up into different kinds of collectives which are slowly provided with the meaning which render them durable and sustainable.
Space is an outcome of the hard and continuous work of building up and maintaining collectives by bringing different things into alignments.
Only in the late 1980s did it come to be realised that certain changes in society cannot be adequately explained without taking greater account of the spatial components of life.
The theoretical basis for the growing interest of the social sciences in space was set primarily by English and French-speaking sociologists, philosophers, and human geographers.
[6] The latter provided the grounding for Marxist spatial theory on which David Harvey, Manuel Castells, Edward Soja, and others have built.
Also in contrast to Marxist concepts of space, British geographer Doreen Massey[8][9] and German sociologist Helmuth Berking,[10] for instance, emphasise the heterogeneity of local contexts and the place-relatedness of our knowledge about the world.
According to Löw, however, an ordering created through placings is only effectively constituted as space where the elements that compose it are actively interlinked by people – in processes of perception, ideation, or recall.
This concept has been empirically tested in studies such as those by Lars Meier (who examined the constitution of space in the everyday life of financial managers in London and Singapore), Cedric Janowicz (who carried out an ethnographical-space sociological study of food supply in the Ghanaian city of Accra), and Silke Streets (who looked at processes of space constitution in the creative industries in Leipzig).
The Marxist spatial theory was given decisive new impetus by David Harvey, in particular, who was interested in the effects of the transition from Fordism to "flexible accumulation" on the experience of space and time.
[19] He shows how various innovations at the economic and technological levels have breached the crisis-prone inflexibility of the Fordist system, thus increasing the turnover rate of capital.
While the feeling for the long term, for the future, for continuity is lost, the relationship between proximity and distance becomes more and more difficult to determine.
Lefebvre's spatial triad was then appropriated by different scholars, including Edward Soja and David Harvey, who carried on this new tradition in human geography.
[citation needed] Lefebvre introduced the concept of triadic representational spaces as a synthesis of mind–body dualism, as opposed to monism or phenomenology.
[24] Influenced by Paul Ricœur, J. N. Entrikin attempts to solve the mind–body problem of social space by presupposing Cartesian dualism to argue that narrative can be an intermediary between mind and extension.
In this vein, Helmuth Berking criticises theories that postulate the increasing homogenisation of the world through globalisation as "globocentrism".
He confronts this with the distinctiveness and importance of local knowledge resources for the production of (different and specific) places.
The routine may include the movement of office workers, the interaction of drunk teenagers, and the flow of goods, money, people, and information.
The images may be in different form and shape; ranging from painting to photograph, from portrait to post card, and from religious theme to entertainment.
People's lives across the globe have been re-scaling by contemporary economic, political, cultural and social processes, such as globalization, in complex ways.
People paid attention to how transnational corporations have 'gone global', how institutions of governance have 'become' supranational and how labour unions have sought to 'globalize' their operations to match those of an increasingly 'globalized' city.
There are some western thoughts that greater size and extensiveness imply domination and superior power, such that the local is often represented as 'small and relatively powerless, defined and confined by the global'.
For representing how the world is scaled, there are five different and popular metaphors: they are the ladder, concentric circles, Matryoshka nesting dolls, earthworm burrows and tree roots.
For the fourth metaphor concerning with thinking on scale, what French social theorist Bruno Latour argued is that a world of places is 'networked' together.
