Spatial Dialectics Research Articles

The Spatial Awareness Behind the Naming of Social Groups and Geographical Areas in Mainland South Sulawesi

In the sociological paradigm of space, as a place whatever its form and name as long as it is inhabited or used as a base for human activity, it is not a passive natural entity but rather dynamic. This is made possible by the spatial dialectics and social reproduction that take place accompanying the development of a space along with the meaning of it which is always changing and dynamic. This paper examines spatial identity in naming social groups and geographical areas in Sulawesi using place identity theory, social identity theory, and identity process theory. This type of research is a literature review with a sociology of space approach that uses data and analysis descriptively from a number of relevant literature. The results showed that some social group names in Sulawesi are a representation of the geographical structure of a space, so that when mentioning the name of the group or its residential center, it will reflect its spatial identity. This fact is sociologically a spatial awareness that has been created in the long history of Sulawesi as well as can be categorized as local community intelligence

Urban Themes Constructed in the Persian Twitter

This study was conducted to investigate Persian tweets with urban content on Twitter. The main attention of this research is 22 city-related words applied to the tweets. The method of this research is to mine big data extracted from Twitter over the course of four weeks. The basis for analyzing is the text of tweets. The applied concepts and theories are borrowed from Habermas's public sphere theory, Lefebvre's spatial dialectic, and Manuel Castles’ space of flows. The results obtained from the analysis of tweets suggest that Persian Twitter users emphasize the central cities of Tehran and Isfahan when discussing the city. The space of flow theory is also visible without it contradicting the spatial dialectic of Lefebvre due to the spatial structure of Twitter, as users go back and forth between the urban space and the online space in an attempt to have a conversation with each other about urban issues. In Persian Twitter without historical and spatial logic, users write about the city and communicate with each other. Finally, despite the centrism mentality in Persian Twitter, it has challenged the possibility of forming a dialogue space for citizens.

Is Social Justice and the City still relevant? Some thoughts

ABSTRACT This year (2023) marks the 50th anniversary of David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City. At the time of its publication, it was viewed by many as a text that revolutionized thinking in urban geography. Since then, it has been subjected to numerous reviews and critiques. Each time, its intellectual strength allowed it to maintain its place in the geography canon. This paper describes my encounters with Social Justice; how I read it in 1978 as an African American woman graduate student in geography; and how I read it now almost 50 years on. I argue that, while Social Justice of the City demonstrates Harvey’s command of an extensive body of literature, it falls short in several ways. First, in its relative silence on the role of capitalism and the capitalist agenda, it lacks the political assertiveness (aggression) that the times required. Second, it fails to acknowledge a socio spatial dialectic or the importance of sociological variables (race/ethnicity, gender, and intersectionality) in planning. Finally, as a theory, it fails to anticipate the intellectual advances in the US and geography. This paper offers a brief synthesis of the ideas in existing reviews but is primarily a personal reflection.

How Far Does the Diverse Economies Approach Take Us?

How Far Does the Diverse Economies Approach Take Us?

Masculinities, spatial dialectics, and discursive strategies: reproducing gender inequalities at home – the case of İzmir

The spatial dialectics reveal themselves in gender relations, which reproduce and maintain gender inequalities. This article analyses meaning-making processes around the home space and masculine identities that focus on spatialized gender relations. This research was conducted in the relatively modern city of İzmir, Turkey. The study explores the negotiation of masculine identities at home. The analysis draws upon critical discursive psychology and identifies interpretative repertoires and subject positions related to men’s accounts of masculine identities, practices, and roles as men at home. Two interpretative repertoires were revealed that positioned men in two contradictory but complementary roles. Men were positioned as the primary responsible person for the home’s public space-related needs and as helpers for domestic chores. Moreover, the ‘help’ discourse was used by men, referring to modernization. Also, various discursive strategies men used to legitimise their limited contributions to domestic chores were revealed. The findings discuss what these discourses accomplish regarding masculine identities, wider power relations, and gendered social practices that maintain them. Such discourses have a substantial role in reproducing and maintaining gender inequalities in the home. Revealing these discourses is important for changing the traditional understandings of gender and everyday discursive practices since discourse and ideology produce each other.

In the garden with Lefebvre and Foucault: The cultivation of taste in spaces of food

Research on the conventional food system and alternative food networks has evolved largely in isolation from each other. This paper aims to narrow this gap by using a common theoretical framework to disclose the properties of spaces produced by both types of food systems. The theoretical tools used are Lefebvre’s spatial dialectic and Foucauldian analysis of discipline and governmentality. The results indicate constitutive differences in the nature of both types of spaces: while the conventional food system produces standardized relations and spaces, taking away attention from the food itself to other aspects of its sale and supressing knowledge about food provenance and ways of preparation, the diverse spaces of non-market production are shaped around the quality and “taste” of food. This means that the way out of the crisis-laden conventional food system may lead not only through frugality but also through the cultivation of “taste”, that is, the human interest to eat good food, whose taste includes the knowledge of ecological and social relations and cultures producing the spaces of food.

Immigration, employment, and new town initiatives in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT The forces that drove the birth of Kwun Tong new town in Hong Kong are not comprehensively understood. Previous historical narratives have magnified the impact of industrialization or laissez-faire liberalism. This article looks at the formation of Kwun Tong new town from the perspective of migration and employment, and reveals that employment acted as a catalyst to resettlement. The production of space theory and investigation of British colonial archival documents, proposal maps, and aerial photographs reveal that new town planning unfolded relative to spatial coding in Ngau Tau Kok and urban practice in Shek Kip Mei, showing historical continuity. The social and political dynamics of immigrants and how they interactively influenced the built-environment and resettlement are highlighted in this article. Under morphological analysis, critical changes in urban form provide other angles from which to understand how the new town was shaped. In addition, morphological analysis provides a spatial dialectics, filling the research gap of town planning in Hong Kong in the 1950s.

Specters of the Past: An Installation in the Times of Disquiet

This essay explores both the topological and historiographic dimensions of installation. Fully cognizant of installation’s transience, temporality, experiential character, or its political dimensions, the author wishes to add one more element to the current discourse: that is, spatial dialectics foregrounding contradictions in and of space, as elucidated by Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space. The essay takes the reader and the spectator through a recent exhibition/installation of Tadeusz Kantor’s objects and machines, Tadeusz Kantor: Widma/Specters, which the author co-curated at the Cricoteka, the Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor in Kraków in April 2020; and by briefly referencing Kantor’s artistic journey in order to show how this exhibition/installation acquires a new dialectical dimension in the times of disquiet. The essay argues that spatial dialectics brings a new dimension to the current discussions about the nature and function of installation. Installation’s transience, temporality, and its political dimensions encounter in Tadeusz Kantor: Widma/Specters a different materiality—an object in the state of unrest perturbing the contemplative attitude toward history and demanding that it be seen within the critical constellation that explodes its reified museal presence.

Missionaries and Borderlands: «The Mission Play» and Missionary Practices in Alta California

This essay takes up a core question of this issue of Pamiętnik Teatralny: how are we to think about historiography beyond a dualism, settled in time and reflective of the status quo? With respect to the California missions, historical treatments of colonization revolve around a dualism shaped by moral dimensions of the missionary enterprise—did the missions help California Indians or harm them? Theatrical representations, like the wildly successful early twentieth century pageant drama, The Mission Play, staged a version of mission history that argued for the former. As a representation of the mission past, the play conflated missions, as institutions, with the moral character of missionaries, thus edifying a fantasy and entrenching the dualism. However, attention to missionary practices, like keeping time using the mission bell, reveal how the missions were sites where indigenous and colonial realities were in constant conflict. Through practices, relations between missionaries and indios produced a space that was neither strictly colonial nor indigenous, and yet both—a borderland. As a mode of spatial dialectics, borderlands thinking can unsettle the duality underlying representations of the mission past to question how that dualism has come into being.

Creating an ethos for learning: classroom seating and pedagogical use of space at a Chinese suburban middle school

ABSTRACT The classroom is a crucial, everyday element of children's geographies with important socio-spatial characteristics that demand scholarly attention. This study ethnographically investigates the production of meanings in the classroom space through seating. Building on the conceptual framework of spatial dialectic (Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell), it theorizes that classroom space is a fluid process that shapes and is shaped by the everyday spatial practices of teachers and students. Specifically it draws on the fieldwork conducted at a suburban middle school in China's underdeveloped northwest region, exploring the process by which the hierarchical seating arrangements are used as a pedagogical tool for creating a charged space conducive for learning at the classroom level. The study reveals that the built space in the classroom has been transformed into a space imbued with moral terms, in and through which students are expected to commit themselves to schoolwork.

Spatial Dialectics of Public–Private Partnership in Russia

Spatial Dialectics of Public–Private Partnership in Russia

The Dialectic of Space

The spatial dialectic is an important familiar phrase in critical writing, but it nonetheless needs continued elaboration and more working out as a concept. This essay proposes some fundamentals for thinking a dialectic that is unrelentingly spatial and unapologetically material. It first seeks to spatialize temporal logics like contradiction through the Hegelian concept of “material contradiction,” which is outside of time, language, and consciousness. It then tries to ponder the built environment as composed of overlapping material contradictions, multiple sites of praxes—past, present, and future—whence a spatial dialectic issues.

Entanglements with offices, information systems, laptops and phones: How agile working is influencing social workers’ interactions with each other and with families

Agile working (flexibility about where and when practitioners do their work) is increasingly common across public sector social work, but there has been little research about how practitioners engage with it or its impacts on communication between social workers, their colleagues and the families with whom they work. This article presents findings from an ethnographic study of a children’s safeguarding social work team in an English local authority who were engaged in agile working. It draws on data from observations, local authority documents, semi-structured interviews, participant research diaries, participants’ photographs and the researcher’s photographs taken during fieldwork. An analytical frame drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of spatial dialectics and Wanda Orlikowski’s concept of sociomateriality is used to identify how agile working involves entanglements of practitioners and families with restructured office spaces, digital information systems and mobile devices such as convertible laptop–tablet computers and mobile phones. Innovations such as these are commonly understood as promoting more effective and transparent social work practice, but the study’s data show that entanglements between workspaces, digital devices and people in practice are having multiple effects, producing new hierarchies of belonging in space, shaping what can be communicated, and the ways it can be presented and received. The article argues for critical attention to the role of material space in digital and place-based innovations in social work practice.

Measured as the water flows: the striated and smooth in marine spatial planning

Marine spatial planning (MSP) now has a sufficient history for consideration of the way in which MSP processes are developing over time, gaining experience and responding to issues that arise. Rather than setting a study of this kind in the well-established framework of adaptive management, I choose instead a spatial concept that allows planning action to be more closely meshed with the nature of the marine setting itself, that of Deleuze and Guatarri’s notion of striated and smooth spaces. This suggests that there are two different manners in which space is produced, which are interdependent and interchanging and work together in making progress; this has certain resonances with the materiality of the sea. I use this concept in a reading of an MSP process with a relatively long pedigree, that of the Shetland Islands, Scotland, UK, focusing particularly on the development of aquaculture policy, through analysis of a sequence of documents. The study reveals that policy-making is suffused with striated and smooth spatialities, finding expression on the one hand in development criteria and other regulations, and on the other hand, in discretion, negotiation and opportunity-building, with the two yielding to each other and advancing together with their different types of movement. This suggests a more general manner by which MSP processes may progress, by spatial dialectic of this kind, in which those who practice MSP engage through their own reasoning of the natural and human structures and dynamisms of the coasts and seas and their responsive plan-making.

Spatial production and spatial dialectic: Evidence from the New Urban Districts in China

New Urban Districts (NUDs) are the important spatial carriers to promote urban expansion or transformation. Since the 1990s, they have been playing a more and more crucial role in China’s urbanization. For NUDs in the strict sense we found that: 96% to the east of Hu Line; 56% within the municipal districts; 64% within 36 km from their every city center and below the area of 423 km2. The regional distribution follows significant spatial difference as “Eastern Region (50%) - Central Region (42%) - Western Region (8%)”, and the provinces with the largest number of NUDs are Guangdong, Henan, Zhejiang, Liaoning, and Ji-angsu. Furthermore, their interesting constructed process highlights the typical characteristics of spatial production and spatial dialectic. This paper uses the theory of the production of space, and discovers that the growth of NUDs is a rapid ternary dialectical process of spatial production: “representations of space” is guided by the top-down governmental power; “spatial practice” is reflected in the hierarchical and regional difference of spatial elements, such as the type, pattern, distance and area of NUD; “spaces of representation” embodies the tension between governmental power and urban development rights, as well as the coun-termeasure mechanism. The extensibility of spatiotemporal sequences ensures the unity and continuity of spatial (re)production of NUDs. However, this is also facing a series of challenges like the management coordination of administrative division and the increasing unbalanced or inadequate development. Thus, critically rethinking the evolution of NUD is the key basis for achieving sustainable urban renewal and regional orderly development in the new era.

Placemaking and the right to the city of urban poor: a case studyin Sanandaj, Iran

Purpose This paper aims to present a critical analysis of placemaking by the urban poor based on the Right to the City, Henri Lefebvre’s influential theory regarding the production of space and placemaking. Design/methodology/approach This study reflects Lefebvre’s production of space and the right to the city theories and containing three main pillars including holism, the urban and praxis, and the use of spatial dialectics. Also, for collecting information in this research, along with scrutiny of documents and books, residents of the poor settlements of Sanandaj have also been interviewed. Findings In Sanandaj, urban poor who lack formal housing reclaim the Right to City by creating informal settlements. Such settlements, such as Shohada, Baharmast and Tagh Taghan, cover 23% of the city’s area but house 69% of the urban population. Originality/value This research seeks to understand placemaking in urban slums by low-income inhabitants using Henry Lefebvre’s critical theory of social production of space and the Right to the City. This case study examines the city of Sanandaj, Iran, where most residents are poor and live in cooperative informal settlements. It illustrates how the urban poor, as marginalized inhabitants, overcome the constraints of conventional planning and property ownership to creatively and cooperatively develop communities that reflect their needs. This indicates a schism between formal and informal sectors.

The Spatial Organization Dialectics of the City of Jeriquara/SP, Brazil

The Spatial Organization Dialectics of the City of Jeriquara/SP, Brazil

Spatial Dialectics: Pursuing Geospatial Imaginaries with Word Embedding Models and Mapping

Spatial Dialectics: Pursuing Geospatial Imaginaries with Word Embedding Models and Mapping

Abuja: Nigeria’s Spatial Economic Turmoil and Urban Development Disarray

Abuja, Nigeria as a befitting Federal Capital Territory, centrally located, without the defects of Lagos was spawned in 1975. The site was chosen for its location at the center of the nation, its small population and for political reasons. In the process, a Master Plan was developed. However, subsequent governments in Abuja abused the integrity of the Master Plan and that resulted in Abuja urbanization and housing inadequacy. The most vulnerable is that, the urban poor had to arrange, on their own, where to live and that resulted in shanty settlements, hence “spatial dialectics,” informal volumetric and unvolumetric combination now called the “spatial house”, “open house” or “house without limit”. This work aimed to document the problems associated with inappropriate implementation of the Abuja Master Plan that resulted in Abuja urbanization and housing inadequacy and proffers solutions to the Abuja housing problems. The authors adopted content based analysis, qualitative research method that involved data from primary and secondary sources. The Abuja Master Plan was elaborated to put in place, sustainable urban spatial environment for all groups and activities to be carried out in the Capital Territory. It provided low-income settlement areas, to be built by the government and occupied by the public servants; the private sector servants did not appear to be properly provided for. The current Abuja housing settlements are not integrated. There is need for the formal, informal settlements and the Abuja urban actors to be talking and link with the Central City infrastructure to create a diverse economy and economic empowerment of all.

Abuja, Nigeria, an Environmental Embarrassment: A Case of Spatial Dialectics

Abuja, Nigeria, an Environmental Embarrassment: A Case of Spatial Dialectics