Summary of all the articles which need to be read for the exam of Urban Studies, a subject given at the VU to anthropology students. Includes work from Lefebvre (2014), Low (1996), Certeau (2014), Freundendal-Pedersen (2015), Colombijn (2016), Jacobs (2014), Mitchell (2005), Datta (2014), Silver (2...
Henri Lefebvre – The Production of Space
Social space is a social product. Space has taken on the notion of a sort reality of its own, clearly
distinct from (yet also much like) those assumed in the same global process by commodities, money
and capital. Space is also ‘real’ in the sense in which concrete abstractions such as commodities and
money are real. Social space ceases to be indistinguishable from mental space (as defined by the
philosophers and mathematicians) on the one hand, and physical space (as defined by practico-
sensory activity and the perception of ‘nature’) on the other.
Social space contains (1) the social relations of reproduction (bio-physiological relations
between sexes), (2) the relations of production (division of labour). The emergence of capitalism and
the more ‘modern’ neocapitalism, has produced three interrelated levels that should be taken into
account: biological reproduction, the reproduction of labour power and the reproduction of the social
relations of production. These relations of production bring forth power relations, which also occur in
space: they are contained in the form of buildings, monuments and works of art.
1. Spatial practice, which embraces production and reproduction, and the particular
locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation. Spatial practice ensures
continuity and some degree of cohesion. In terms of social space, and of each member of a
given society’s relationship to that space, this cohesion implies a guaranteed level of
competence and a specific level of performance.
2. Representations of space, which are tied to the relations of production and to the ‘order’ which
those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to ‘frontal’ relations.
3. Representational spaces, embodying complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes
not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to art (which may come
eventually to be defined less as a code of space than as a code of representational spaces).
If space is a product, our knowledge of it must be expected to reproduce the process of
production. The object of interest must be expected to shift from things in space to the actual
production of space. Capitalism and neocapitalism have produced abstract space, which includes
the ‘world of commodities’, its ‘logic’ and its worldwide strategies, as the power of money and that
of the political state.
The texture of space affords opportunities not only to social acts with no particular place in
it and no particular link with it, but also to a spatial practice that it does indeed determine, namely
its collective and individual use: a sequence of acts which embody a signifying practice even if they
cannot be reduced to such a practice.
Michel de Certeau – Spatial practices
It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their
blindness. The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below,” below the thresholds at which
visibility begins. They walk –an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers,
Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without
being able to read it. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold
story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and
alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other. To
plan a city is both to think the very plurality of the real and to make that way of thinking the
plural effective; it is to know how to articulate it and be able to do it.
The act of walking has a triple “enunciative” function: it is a process of appropriation of the
topographical system on the part of the pedestrian […], it is a spatial acting-out of the place […]; and
it implies relations among differential positions, that is, among pragmatic “contracts” in the form of
movements. And if one the one hand he actualizes only a few of the possibilities fixed by the
constructed order […] on the other hand he increases the number of possibilities (for example by
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