ancient cities

sciences to develop a concept of “sociocultural
space” in order to conceive sociocultural movement
or change or the location of sociocultural
phenomena. He suggested understanding sociocultural
space as constituted by a system of coordinates
reflecting the respective society and culture. This
relational sociocultural universe is a means of human
orientation in, and adaption to, the social world.
Although Sorokin understood concepts of the physical
spatiality also as socially imprinted, the spatiality
itself appears to have a presocial existence.
The more recent structural constructivist
approach on social inequality by Pierre Bourdieu
also applies spatial terms for social processes when
he defines social space as the societal field of social
positions. The term space here seems feasible
because Bourdieu understands the order of society
not, like most analysts, as constituted unidimensionally
along the line of financial income but as
multidimensional. Here, like Sorokin, space is conceptualized
as a reference frame, used to locate and
thereby order relations among positions. Social
position within social space is defined by the overall
volume of capital, by its structure, and by the
temporal dimension. Bourdieu extends the meaning
of the term capital and differentiates between
economical capital (financial property), cultural
capital (education), and social capital (networks).
Social space is constituted by an ensemble of relations
of relative positions and therefore has no
presocietal existence. Its “subjective” or constructivist
side is constituted by the position’s specific
perspective on the social world: Being socialized at
a certain point within social space involves the
incorporation of the power relations of this social
space and results in a specific habitus as a sense of
one’s place. Here, the spatial moment of Bourdieu’s
understanding of social structuring appears again
when he states that the perspective on the social
world depends on the point of view from which it
is taken. The habitus functions as a generative
scheme of inherited dispositions and appreciation
of practices, cognitive and evaluative structures
leading to specific lifestyles and a perception of
social space and the social world as “natural” and
“given.”
The usage of social space by Sorokin and
Bourdieu is purely metaphorical, thus sticking to
the duality of society and space. Bourdieu explicitly
argues that one has to differentiate between
Social Space
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social and physical space. Instead of extending the
relational understanding of social space on to the
material world (done, e.g., by Martina Löw and
Doreen Massey), Bourdieu and Sorokin sustain the
duality of the social and physical world, although
social space tends to inscribe itself in physical
space through the spatial distribution of objects
and actors, adding to the naturalization of social
conditions. In contrast to the already mentioned
spatial determinism of past human geography,
Bourdieu (more than Sorokin but together with the
behavioral geography) falls into the trap of social
determinism; that is, he projects the social onto the
geographic–spatial dimension, thus obscuring its
contingency rather than analyzing the sociopolitical
constitution of the material world and the
interrelations between physical and social space.
Dialectical Approach to the
Society–Space Relation
There are several approaches in social theory trying
to overcome the duality of society and space.
Already, before the spatial turn in social theory,
mainly in the French discourse, the society–space
relation was reconceptualized in terms of dialectical
approaches. This third usage of the term social
space refers to the production of spatiality in a
Marxist tradition, arguing that society and space
are integral to one another. In this view, social
space is understood as a cultural formation varying
in its societal and economical conditions.
Following the logic of dialectics and Karl Marx’s
concept of totality, it is not possible to understand
different interrelated parts of a whole without
understanding how the parts relate to each other
within this whole. The sociospatial dialectic contains
the fundamental premise that social and spatial
relations are dialectically interdependent, that
social relations (of production) are space-forming
and spatially formed. For example, in his book
The Production of Space Henri Lefebvre developed
a dialectical concept of social space trying to
overcome the duality of what he calls physical
space and mental space. By physical space Lefebvre
refers to the practicosensory activity and the perception
of “nature”; by mental space he means
theoretical concepts of space defined by philosophy
and mathematics. Space is, according to
Lefebvre, to be analyzed “trialectically” on three