The origins of the term are in Rob Shields's 1985 Introduction to a Précis of Henri Lefebvre's La Production de l'espace.
However, Shields embues the concept with a sense of being a general, socio-cultural attribute, as in the work of Michel Foucault who makes one mention of the term but does not theorize it) rather than a spatial regime that is dialectically produced as part of a Marxist mode of production.
[citation needed] On one hand, spatializations are achieved, hegemonic regimes which place and space activities in sites and regions.
[citation needed] Spatializations are therefore both ways of fixing in place cultural values and important social meanings, but also change over time.
[citation needed] Spatialization offers a way of talking about how place-images and regional- and place-myths, cognitive mappings and so on are part of wider "formations" and come to have an economic impact by being put into practice, such as through the marketing of tourism destinations, and the way that the reputations of places and regions becomes a conceptual shorthand which lends credibility to claims and beliefs, such as the truthfulness of a scientific finding (e.g., "Cambridge" - whether USA or UK), the believability of a religious claim or an event (e.g., "Mecca"), or the trustworthiness of a product (e.g., "Swiss" watches).