Reading Socio-Spatial Interplay - Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i ...

R E A D I N G S O C I O - S P A T I A L I N T E R P L A Y P A R T 1differences – cf. his discussions of rhythms – and the celebration of urbanencounters and the presence of exotic foreigners as a ‘topic’ in contemporaryprocesses of socio-cultural urban neighbourhood transformation related toimmigration and gentrification.More important here, though, is in what way their theoretical approaches,their analytic concepts and the interpretative strategies they suggest, can bemade operative for empirical analyses by functioning:- as basis for programming the architectural analysis, by discussion ofwhich aspects of what kinds of interplay the architectural analysisshall be designed to grasp,- as a programmatic base for the analysis of socio-spatial practices, bydiscussions of what kinds of socio-architectural interrelations thisanalysis shall be designed to, and- as a analytic base for interpretations of interrelatedness within thesocio-architectural patterns of various kinds that I will investigate inthe empirical analysis.In Bourdieu’s Distinction, the individual (or more collective) practices whichconstitute and transform social space (the space of lifestyles) is restricted to(material and cultural) consumption. Neither urban practices, distinguishingpractices in urban space, consumption related to urban space or urbanlifestyles, the role of place identity in individual identity construction, nor thetopic of commoditization of urban space are issues in Bourdieu’s quiteexhaustive study of material and cultural consumption. My effort is toexplore possibilities and limitations related to integrating Bourdieu’s “spaceof lifestyles”-perspective into my own research design.Contrary to Bourdieu’s earlier structuralist studies – in which the materialworld was conceptualized as a socio-material structure – Bourdieu, in hislater works (for instance La Distinction, 1979) conceptualize the materialworld as an ensemble of objects. Bourdieu describes how the function,meaning and use-value of objects are produced through social practices andchoices related to consumption. Related to such a perspective: What are themost important similarities and differences in comparing the elements of anurban landscape and other kinds of objects related to consumption and tastein the perspective of producing (functional and symbolic) use-value? Andwhich aspects of architecture and spatial practice can be related to such aperspective?As discussed by Bourdieu, social space and lifestyle space representstructures of homologies and distinctions. Structures in transformation,according to intrinsic laws of transformation – which all circumscribe thedialectics of habitus. According to Lefebvre, social space is a structure of82