ancient cities

742 Social Production of Space
political agendas of citizen initiatives, churches,
social service organizations, varieties of social
movements, and nongovernmental organizations
in an effort to overcome segmented local patterns
of protest and to build organizational continuity.
They are also connecting transnationally with
urban activists in Latin America, South Africa, and
East Asia, who struggle against the same global
interests that privatize public infrastructures,
deregulate markets, and curtail labor rights across
the globe.
These novel movements and their effects have
barely been analyzed. The paradigms of urban
social movement research that emerged in the
1960s and 1970s and continued to influence the
interpretations of urban contestations cannot adequately
account for the fragmentation of, and tensions
within, the urban movement terrain and the
rise and fall of different strands within it. Whereas
early urban movements had been part of a broader
social mobilization in the aftermath of the various
1960s movements and were linked to rising expectations
and political openings, movement milieus
since then have confronted continuously maturing
neoliberal policy regimes with contradictory
effects. Neoliberalism has, in many ways, created
a more hostile environment for progressive urban
movements. Simultaneously, though, it allows for
the global articulation of urban protest.
Margit Mayer
See also Castells, Manuel; Globalization; Lefebvre, Henri;
Right to the City; Squatter Movements
Further Readings
Castells, Manuel. 1983. The City and the Grassroots.
London: Arnold.
Fisher, Robert, and Joseph Kling, eds. 1993. Mobilizing
the Community: Local Politics in the Era of the
Global City. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Hamel, Pierre, Henri Lustiger-Thaler, and Margit Mayer,
eds. 2000. Urban Movements in a Globalising World.
London: Routledge.
INURA, ed. 1998. Possible Urban Worlds: Urban
Strategies at the End of the 20th Century. Basel,
Switzerland: Birkhäuser.
Leitner, Helga, Jamie Peck, and Eric Sheppard, eds. 2006.
Contesting Neoliberalism: The Urban Frontier. New
York: Guilford Press.
So c i a l pr o d u c t i o n o F Sp a c e
There has been a renewed interest in space among
urban scholars, planners, practitioners, and activists.
The watershed of such a “spatial turn” can
be traced back to the publication of Henri
Lefebvre’s The Production of Space ([1974] 1991)
and his other, related writings. Inspired by
Lefebvre, both his critics and followers have tried
to go beyond the limited horizons of urban ecology,
political economy, or postmodern urbanism
in understanding the nature of urban reality. The
development of a new urban sociology, a critical
political economy, or a sociospatial perspective
illustrates such endeavors. The legacy of Lefebvre
now reaches far beyond the disciplinary boundaries
of sociology, geography, anthropology, architecture,
and urban planning. A growing number
of theoretical, empirical, and practical projects
elaborate on his ideas and apply them to emerging
issues, including globalization, the state, and
postmodern culture.
For Lefebvre, space is a social product that
shapes and is shaped by the social practices of individual
and collective agents in particular historical
conditions. Urban spatial form and its contents, and
urban spatial structure and its functions as well, are
the outcome of sociospatial practices that take place
in political, economic, and cultural spheres.
However, space as a social product is inseparable
from the process of its production. Knowledge,
technology, and technical expertise play a part in
the production of space, as do the means of production
in the process of commodity production. Like
any other production process, in addition, the production
of space proceeds in accordance with the
specific social relations dictated by political, economic,
and social power.
A critical understanding of space calls for attention
to the process in which space is actually produced.
To capture the dynamics behind the
historical transformations of space, Lefebvre develops
a conceptual triad in which the three moments
of space—spatial practices (perceived space), representations
of space (conceived space), and spaces
of representation (lived space)—are dialectically
interconnected. The spatial practices of various
actors structure the relationship between the representations
of space and the spaces of representation.