Sociology of Space - Marxist Approaches

Marxist Approaches

The most important proponent of Marxist spatial theory was Henri Lefebvre. He proposed "social space" to be where the relations of production are reproduced and that dialectical contradictions were spacial rather than temporal. Lefèbvre sees the societal production of space as a dialectical interaction between three factors. Space is constituted:

• by “spatial practice,” meaning space as reproduced in everyday life
• by the “representation of space”, meaning space as developed cognitively
• and by “spaces of representation,” by which Lefebvre means complex symbolisations and ideational spaces.

In Lefebvre’s view of the 1970s, this spatial production resulted in a space of non-reflexive everydayness marked by alienation, dominating through mathematical-abstract concepts of space, and reproduced in spatial practice. Lefebvre sees a line of flight from alienated spatiality in the spaces of representation – in notions of non-alienated, mythical, pre-modern, or artistic visions of space.

Marxist spatial theory was given decisive new impetus by David Harvey, in particular, who was interested in the effects of the transition from Fordism to “flexible accumulation” on the experience of space and time. He shows how various innovations at the economic and technological levels have breached the crisis-prone inflexibility of the Fordist system, thus increasing the turnover rate of capital. This causes a general acceleration of economic cycles. According to Harvey, the result is “time-space compression.” While the feeling for the long term, for the future, for continuity is lost, the relationship between proximity and distance becomes more and more difficult to determine.