ancient cities

320 Gottdiener, Mark
research focuses on the United States, its explicit
discussion of the ways to explain urban patterns
and processes facilitates comparisons with other
contexts. This entry explores Gottdiener’s influences,
research themes, and new theoretical formulations,
emphasizing the linkages between
ostensibly separate topics and the coherence of his
oeuvre.
The Social Production of Urban Space as
the Center of Analysis: Henri Lefebvre
In the 1970s, Gottdiener was already aware of the
philosophical and sociological ideas of Henri
Lefebvre. When preparing his first book, Planned
Sprawl (1977), he realized the weakness of the
dominant urban ecology in explaining metropolitan
growth patterns. However, Marxian political
economy, as developed by Manuel Castells and
David Harvey among others, also had limitations.
To achieve a better theoretical frame, Gottdiener
took the task of introducing into the Anglophone
debate Henri Lefebvre’s work on Marxism, everyday
life, and conception of space, a project that
culminated in The Social Production of Urban
Space (1985).
For Gottdiener, Lefebvre’s value as an urban
thinker lies in four areas. First, Lefebvre showed
that economic categories such as rent, profit, or
uneven development, which Marx and Engels used
in the study of industrial urban capitalism, can
also be applied in analyzing cities. Second, Lefebvre
valorized real estate investment as a “second circuit
of capital,” a partly independent area to make
profit and acquire wealth. Third, Lefebvre maintained
that space never is neutral background for
social activities but both the condition and product
of those activities, reproducing social relations and
the very relations of production. Fourth, Lefebvre
discussed the importance of government and state
actions in space.
Gottdiener develops Lefebvre’s theory, showing
how both the real estate industry and the state
conceptualize space through its abstract qualities,
such as size, distance, monetary value, and profit.
For people, however, space is the milieu of everyday
life. The uses and meanings of this appropriated
social space, for example, home and
neighborhood, may be undermined by real estate
projects and public plans, causing conflicts.
According to Lefebvre, the conflict between
abstract and social space is fundamental, ranking
with the separate and different conflict among
classes. Gottdiener notes that, with this view,
Lefebvre departed from the Marxian perspective,
which holds that class conflict is the basic force in
the history of capitalism.
In his engagement with Lefebvre’s thinking,
Gottdiener goes beyond a mere introduction: He
successfully operationalizes Lefebvre’s theory in
the field of urban analysis. By introducing Anthony
Giddens’s scheme of social structuration, where
the structures, institutions, and agency all play a
role, Gottdiener makes Lefebvre’s theory more
applicable. He maintains that space—its social
production and struggle about it—is an indispensable
element of contemporary urban analysis. In
The Social Production of Urban Space, he states
that “the contingent process in the production of
space must always be at the centre of analysis,
rather than focusing on the political economy of
capitalist development per se.”
This epistemological position has informed
Gottdiener’s work from 1970s till the present.
From the realist and materialist angle, he has
mounted a systematic critique of several contemporary
currencies in urban studies, especially ideas
of Edward Soja and the postmodern geographers.
Gottdiener rejects their “structurationist formulations
which deploy an abstract and nominalist
account of space circumscribed around a disembodied
signifier such as ‘spatiality.’” Gottdiener
claims that, on the one hand, every level of urban
social analysis has to be spatially embedded, and,
on the other, the underlying structures always
have to be analyzed as political, economic, and
cultural.
Understanding Signification as Culturally
Conditioned: Sociosemiotics
Like Lefebvre, Gottdiener is keenly interested in
the symbolic aspect of space. To complement the
new methodological frame needed to understand
contemporary metropolitan areas, Gottdiener,
with Alexandros Lagopoulos, tailored in the 1980s
a new version of semiotics. The approach is called
sociosemiotics. It draws together ideas from
Ferdinand Saussure, Algirdas Greimas, and Louis
Hjelmslev.