History of The Sociology of Space
Georg Simmel has been seen as the classical sociologist who was most important to this field. Simmel wrote on "the sociology of space" in his 1908 book "Sociology: Investigations on the Forms of Sociation". His concerns included the process of metropolitanisation and the separation of leisure spaces in modern economic societies.
The category of space long played a subordinate role in sociological theory formation. Only in the late 1980s did it come to be realised that certain changes in society cannot be adequately explained without taking greater account of the spatial components of life. This shift in perspective is referred to as the topological turn. The space concept directs attention to organisational forms of juxtaposition. The focus is on differences between places and their mutual influence. This applies equally for the micro-spaces of everyday life and the macro-spaces at the nation-state or global levels.
The theoretical basis for the growing interest of the social sciences in space was set primarily by English and French-speaking sociologists, philosophers, and human geographers. Of particular importance is Michel Foucault’s essay on “Of Other Spaces”, in which the author proclaims the “age of space”, and Henri Lefebvre’s seminal work “La production de l’espace”. The latter provided the grounding for Marxist spatial theory on which David Harvey, Manuel Castells, Edward Soja, and others have built. Marxist theories of space, which are predicated on a structural, i.e., capitalist or global determinacy of spaces and the growing homogenization of space, are confronted by action theoretical conceptions, which stress the importance of the corporeal placing and the perception of spaces as albeit habitually predetermined but subjective constructions. One example is the theory of space of the German sociologist Martina Löw. Approaches deriving from the post-colonialism discourse have attracted greater attention in recent years. Also in contrast to (neo)Marxist concepts of space, British geographer Doreen Massey and German sociologist Helmuth Berking, for instance, emphasise the heterogeneity of local contexts and the place-relatedness of our knowledge about the world.
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