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July 21, 2009
Henri Lefebvre in his The Production of Space makes a critical departure from the neo-Kantian and neo-Cartesian conceptions of space. Focusing on social space, Lefebvre argues that space is not an inert, neutral, and a pre-existing given, but rather, an on-going production of spatial relations. Lefebvre writes:
social space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather, it subsumes things produced and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity—their (relative) order and/or (relative) disorder. (p.73).
Lefebvre objects to the reification of space by rejecting the Cartesian model, separating “ideal space” from “real space.” Instead, space is a product of something that is produced materially while at the same time “operate[s]…on processes from which is cannot separate itself because it is a product of them”. Thus the slow course of historical (capitalist) development everything in terrestrial space has been explored and nearly everything has been occupied and conquered… the forests, lakes, beaches, mountains have been well-nigh completely ‘appropriated’” by capital.
Urban space has also been historically organized according to the specific requirements of economic institutions and the state:
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Victoria Square, Adelaide, 2009
We find ourselves situated within the city produced by pastoral and then industrial capitalism in the19th and 20th centuries; an urban form of the CBD and the outer suburbs with the habitual or repetitive movement of people to and from the donut centre.
Lefebvre writes:
The world of commodities would have no 'reality' without such [spatial] moorings or points of insertion, or without their existing as an ensemble,The same may be said of banks and banking-networks vis-a-vis the capital market and money transfers." It is only in space that each idea of presumed value "acquires or loses its distinctiveness through confrontation with the other values and ideas that it encounters there"; it is only in space that competing socio-political interests and forces come effectively into play.
On Lefebvre's account without grain elevators, canal boats, lake vessels, railroads and trucks that ship grain to and from them, there could be no grain trade in general, no 'daily bread' as it were. Urban space has been organized according to the specific requirements of economic institutions. Lefebvre writes:
The world of commodities would have no 'reality' without such [spatial] moorings or points of insertion, or without their existing as an ensemble. The same may be said of banks and banking-networks vis-a-vis the capital market and money transfers. It is only in space that each idea of presumed value acquires or loses its distinctiveness through confrontation with the other values and ideas that it encounters there; it is only in space that competing socio-political interests and forces come effectively into play.
Without such spaces, neither the economy nor the State are capable of maintaining, exercising or projecting (their) power. These are neo-liberal spaces with minimal public interaction and they produce a desire for change and its accompanying fear.
We sense both the limits of this neo-liberal urban form and what this corporate space denies and hope for the emergence of something different.
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For more on Henri Lefebvre and grain elevators, see "American Colossus: the Grain Elevator 1843 to 1943" (Colossal Books, 2009).
http://www.american-colossus.com