ancient cities

748 Social Space
the geographical territorial environment of individuals
or groups. In this traditional view, space in
general is understood as something natural, objective,
and antecedent of social formations.
In classical social theory the spatial dimension is
largely ignored and the social world is treated as if
it existed on the head of a pin. Most of the few
exceptions refer to space only as the place or the
container where social processes happen. One of
the few thinkers who were engaged with space
from a sociological point of view was Friedrich
Engels. But, also for Engels, “the great towns”
were only of interest as far as they were the place
to study the condition of the working class in
industrializing England. The historically new
degree of urbanization went hand in hand with the
dissolving of traditional social ties of the former
agricultural society based on origin and family.
The fast growth of the industrializing towns and
the concentration of people within these towns
were accompanied by bad housing conditions,
especially for the working class, a development
that Engels and many contemporary bourgeois
watched fearfully, connecting it to social and moral
decay. In Engels’s whole analysis, the spatial dimension
was never the center of his attention except as
the background or the frame of social change and
class formation. This understanding of space as
container and environment is also found in early
urban studies like the human ecology of the
Chicago School in the 1920s, according to which
town quarters were defined as “natural areas” of
the social groups living therein and, therefore, the
place of socialization and social integration.
So, although not always explicit and rarely at the
center of analysis, classical social theory was also
dealing with spatial phenomena using spatial categories
but without their explicit theorization. One of
the most “hidden spatialities” of the social science
mainstream is to be seen in the social–territorial
order of national states as the territorial manifestation
of national societies, that still dominates the
perception of the world.
In social geography this conception of space as
the territory of social units was dominant until the
1960s: The world was understood as divided into
separate territorial units associated with separate
social units. The concern was to study localities,
their history, and their specificity. Space, in the view
of science, is understood as the earth’s surface, the
immobile and the static, that can be measured and
mapped.
At present, the interventions of town planning
and urban social work are still largely based on
these assumptions of social space as the material
environment of social groups, connected to a certain
degree of spatial determinism. For example,
some strands of residential segregation research
see the spatial concentration of certain social
groups as the cause of their disadvantageous situation.
Popular examples in this tradition are the
debates originating from the United States on the
culture of poverty and the urban underclass. By
focusing on the spatial dimension, that is, the concentration
of the underprivileged social groups in
the U.S. inner cities and attributing this spatial
concentration with the inhabitants’ underprivileged
situation, the economic and political factors
are obscured and the victims are blamed for their
misery.
Connected with this view and based on the same
assumptions about the sociospatial relation, there
is, especially in urban planning, another, more normative,
understanding of social space as “good”
space in the sense of socially used and appropriated
spaces (e.g., lively public spaces). This understanding
is closely connected with the ideal of “urbanity”
as a way of life and image of the European city.
Here, a certain spatial formation—the European
city—is understood as the territorial material location
and constitutive spatial formation of a certain
behavior and a certain form of social integration.
As mentioned earlier, the concentration on the
material context and geographical “place” of
social phenomena risks ignoring their social, cultural,
economic, or political contexts and causes.
Extremes of this kind of spatial determinism are
the recurring attempts through history (e.g., the
community visions of the utopian socialists, present
forms of the new urbanism, etc.) to “build”
social relations by building their anticipated physical
environment.
Relational Setting of Social Positions
The second dominant thread on social space is not
directly connected to the physical world but
focuses on society and its order. Long before the
so-called spatial turn in social theory in the 1940s,
Pitrim A. Sorokin emphasized the need for social