university of nova gorica graduate school contested spaces and ...

Theoretical Frames: The Construction of Spaces and Places
Spaces receive their essential being from particular localities and not from ‘space’ itself.
Heidegger 1977: 332
One of the first (West European) 5 studies of spatial concepts in social sciences and humanities
dates back to the late 19 th and early 20 th century when evolutionists and functionalists such as
Morgan (1881), Mauss and Beuchat (1979 [1904]), Durkheim (1915) and early structural
functionalists such as Evans-Pritchard (1940) studied the interactive relationship between
people and their built environment. These earlier notions of space and society that were based
on a positivistic approach and coupled with functionalism were in 1970s critically rethought
by human geographers (Tuan 1974 and 1977, and Relph 1976) and behavioural geographers
(Lowenthal 1961, Brookfield 1969, Harvey 1973, Gould and White 1974, Gold 1980), and
later partly also by the “new” archaeologists (Ingold 1993, Tilley 1994). Space and society
were no longer postulated as separate and autonomous but as mutually related entities.
The neo-Marxist thinker Henry Lefebvre (1991 [1974]) analysed the space and its relation to
society. He defined space as being always produced, never separated from its producing
forces or the labour that shapes it. In his influential work The Production of Space (1991
[1974]), he conceptualized space as an interrelation between spatial practices (perception of
space), reproduction of space (conception of space) and representational space (lived space).
Moreover, Lefebvre suggested that space is always produced and representational. Therefore,
it can not be viewed as absolute or “a space-in-itself”; nor does the notion of space contain a
space within itself (1991: 299). He defined space as being inevitably social and cultural
process. There is a dialectical relationship between space and society which merges them into
a continuous, contingent and irreversible process. Instead of discussing what social space
actually is, he examined struggles over the meanings of space and considered how relations
across territories were given cultural meanings. In social relations various meanings are
hidden. They define spaces through social contestations, disputes and struggles. Such
struggles often lead to contradictory spaces, which were identified by Lefebvre as lacking
consistency between different representations of space. The contradictions of space are
inevitable and can evolve either into conflicts or may be resolved by “the rational organisation
5 The classical Greeks, the Romans, the Indus peoples and the Chinese developed diverse conceptualizations of
space millennia ago.
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