Introduction: An invitation to spatial sociology

The social is spatial is relational

Socio-spatial relations and arrangements are foundational to the theoretical and empirical interests of sociology. Our research interests draw us to complex social phenomena that are rendered sensible through such rubrics as structures, assemblages, networks, cultures, etc., but of course, social phenomena also happen somewhere. The social world is experienced and rendered sensible by social actors in space. Divides of inequality are rendered physical in space, and space is made meaningful as it orders our ways of perceiving the social world as researchers and social actors. In what has now become a dictum of spatial theory, we agree with Edward Soja when he claims: ‘There is no unspatialised social reality’ (1996: 47, emphasis in original).

Relational spatial theory claims that ‘[a]n event or a thing at a point in space cannot be understood by appeal to what exists only at that point’ (Harvey, 2006: 124), that space is ‘the product of interrelations … always under construction’ (Massey, 2005: 9), and that differentiated spaces ‘have intricate relations. They co-exist’ (Mol and Law, 1994: 663). In other words, elements within space, space itself and multiple spaces are relationally constituted. To conceive of space relationally is to acknowledge complexity. To work with the tools of spatial sociology is to render this complexity manageable, to seek how spaces matter and the ways spaces are produced, and to what consequences. Rather than an ontology of what space is, sociologists research what space does, how it shapes and is shaped, how territories and other spatial units have effects through being relationally produced and constituted. In his ‘Manifesto for a relational sociology’, Mustafa Emirbayer uses the term ‘relational’ for ‘terms or units’ within a transaction. These ‘derive their meaning, significance, and identity from the (changing) functional roles they play within that transaction. The latter, seen as a dynamic, unfolding process, becomes the primary unit of analysis rather than the constituent elements themselves’ (Emirbayer, 1997: 287). Emirbayer calls for sociology to become relational, opposing a substantialist approach to treating the social world as composed of ‘self-sustained’ and ‘preformed’ entities (1997: 283). In ‘transactional’, i.e. relational thinking, Emirbayer describes ‘relations between terms or units as pre-eminently dynamic in nature, as unfolding, on-going processes rather than as static ties among inert substances’ (1997: 289). Such a relational approach might be more clearly understood in articulating three modes of conceptualising space. In absolute concepts of space, space and elements are independent, measurable and distinct. In relative concepts of space, the viewer’s perception of space determines what scale of relativity is used to measure and know space and elements. In relational concepts, dynamism and situatedness matter, not just for the relative perspective on space, but also for the very constitution of space.

Harvey makes a useful analytic move when he claims it is a moot point to argue that there is only one type of space, rendering the others irrelevant. He argues that absolute, relative and relational spaces are of significance to researchers. ‘The decision to use one or the other conception certainly depends on the nature of the phenomena under investigation’ (Harvey, 2006: 126). Harvey intuits a hierarchy, in which absolute space is only absolute space, relative concepts can illuminate the absolute, and the relational can ‘embrace the relative and the absolute’ (2006: 126). While he acknowledges this is a working hypothesis, we might take this in another direction, offering a brief thesis of these three spatial types. For spatial sociology, the formation of an absolute or relative space is an object of enquiry, whereas relational thinking is a mode of analysis. Absolute and relative spaces are of sociological interest, but the socio-spatial is best researched with relational thinking.

A history of relational space

Already early in the 20th century, space was challenged by sociologists as more than an absolute container of topographical coordinates, emphasising instead that space is constituted socially. Durkheim differentiated between space as a category of thought and spatial representations, as culturally specific modes of knowing, dividing and experiencing the spatial (Durkheim, 1915: 11). Durkheim’s questioning of space as fixed and universal is found in The Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim, 1982 [1895]), and further developed in Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915). Coming from a sociology of knowledge perspective, he is largely concerned with relativising space: ‘the space which I know by my senses, of which I am the centre and where everything is disposed in relation to me, could not be space in general, which contains all extensions and where these are co-ordinated by personal guide-lines which are common to everybody’ (1915: 441). Durkheim relativises an absolute plane of space, insofar as his emphasis is largely on the ordering of objects in space: ‘it is necessary that space in general be divided, differentiated, arranged, and that these divisions and arrangements be known to everybody’ (1915: 443). According to Durkheim, the totality of social relations are spatially distributed, and differ according to diverse ‘societies’ or ‘civilisations’, relativised in time and place.

We claim that space is both a category and lens. For Durkheim, the category of thought is our perception of space, tied to spatial representations that are commonly shared. As a fundamental category, we mean that space is a primary sociological category, such as time, class, gender, ethnicity, inequality, power, etc. But we also argue that it is a lens through which we look in research. Spatial sociology involves looking through the lens of space to see how and when the socio-spatial matters. It is not satisfied with the claim that ‘society’ simply takes place somewhere in the world, but seeks to understand how space is relationally produced and constituted, and when this makes a difference of interest for our research questions. Looking through this lens can offer new insights. This is not, of course, a new claim: Georg Simmel already planted the seeds for a relational approach to space.

In 1908 Georg Simmel provided a foundational text on space arguing similarly to Durkheim that space is indispensible for social life, a ‘conditio sine qua non’, without which social life does not exist (Simmel, 1997: 137). Space is the condition for the social. In an early text of spatial theory, Simmel opens the door (or, builds the bridge) for an understanding of space beyond coordinates in a contained topography of absolute space or space as relative to positionality. It is not absolute, topographical space or relative positions that produce social phenomena, instead Simmel shows how space is indispensible for understanding social life precisely because of the central importance of meaning-making in the formation of spaces and spaces in the formation of meaning-making. In Simmel’s words, it is the ‘psychological’ conditions and ‘spatial meanings of things and processes’ that render space significant (1997: 138). Human action produces meaningful space, for example in spatial exclusiveness as well as the dividing up of and processual institutionalisation of spaces.

In phrasing a question, Simmel draws attention to questions of what space means and how it is rendered sensible to social actors: ‘What does this infinite container around us mean, the container in which we float as lost dots, but which we imagine together with its contents, which is therefore in us just as we are in it?’ (Simmel, 1905: 52, emphasis in original). It is not without irony that he begins his sixth lecture on Kant with the image of the world as a container of lost dots, in order then to develop a critique thereof:

In view of the habituation of imagining ourselves and things within an existing space that above all is unique, it is a difficult thought that – to put it somewhat paradoxically and briefly – space is itself not something spatial; nor is the perception of red itself something red. (Simmel, 1905: 55)

In this lecture, Simmel presents his interpretation of Kant’s idea of space. His affirmation of many ideas is made clear by the insistence with which he emphasises Kant’s originality. He writes that infinite, empty space and the idea of a container is merely an abstraction. Socio-spatiality only emerges when perception is generated. Outside of human sensations, he argues, space has no meaningful reality; however, this does not mean that it is only subjective, relative or idealist, but rather he argues that human sensations form the world as it is experienced. ‘[S]pace derives all of the reality that can be spoken of in our cognition from the fact that it is the form and condition of our empirical perception. Spatial things are thus real inasmuch as they form our experience’ (Simmel, 1905: 57). For Simmel, space is a form, but it is a form that is lacking effect in itself that has no independent existence outside of both the material and social/psychological world (Simmel, 1905: 55). In other words, this is neither a radical form of absolute idealism, nor does Simmel argue for spatial determinism. By ‘space’ Simmel resists speaking of containers, preferring to compare the scientific abstraction of an infinite empty space to the forms that people give space and objects in perception. It is the latter that he takes to be of central concern for sociologists.

There have always been references to space in sociology, but theoretical investigation into the socio-spatial beyond absolute space remained relatively neglected for much of the 20th century. Curiously, it was not until the 1970s that significant attention was turned to spatial theory. At least in the German case, if not elsewhere, space was a symbolically polluted (Douglas, 1966) concept in the post-war era. Rudolf Kjellén, a Swedish political scientist who coined the term ‘geopolitics’, influentially defined space as land, territory, area and Reich (1914, 1917). During National Socialism space-as-territory was deeply political not only through the military but also in circulating and forming spatio-cultural concepts such as Lebensraum and Heimat. Power-political and strategic arguments were mobilised around the claiming of territory for nation and state; space was that which could be claimed. The knowledge production of social sciences was not absolved from responsibility. Social scientists were important for forming spatio-cultural concepts used for claiming territory (Gutberger, 1996). However it was not precise conceptions of space that were a priority for the National Socialist Party, but rather the promotion of an emotional urge and collectively shared idea of the centrality of space-as-territory. In the post-war era, at least in Germany, space was laden with conceptual, historical baggage. This problematic of state territory, power and knowledge seems to have also been at the root of the opposition experienced by Foucault when he began working on space: ‘I remember ten years or so ago discussing these problems of the politics of space, and being told that it was reactionary to go on so much about space, and that time and the “project” were what life and progress are about’ (Foucault, 1980: 150; see also Foucault, 2007: 177).

For decades, theorising of the socio-spatial dropped away from the priority list of social scientists, and at least in Germany this was due in part to space’s tarnished reputation as territory. It was not until the 1970s that space came back to the sociological imagination. Foundational texts by Henri Lefebvre (1992 [1974]) and David Harvey (1973), as well as the relatively forgotten contribution of Jean Rémy (1975), helped ushered in the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences. Geographers, long held as the social sciences’ in-house experts on spatial questions, were at the forefront of developing a new consciousness of space as that which is produced, not merely that which is already there and quantifiably measurable. New interdisciplinary research questions could be explored as spatial theory came to the fore (see Gregory and Urry, 1985). The spatial turn profoundly shaped social theory in the 1980–1990s, with influential texts and collections beginning to infiltrate the sociological imagination, particularly in Britain, where many of the most influential theorists turned their attention to questions of space (for a summary, see Sheller, this issue). In this article we emphasise a sociological imagination and refer to sociological research, but we do not aim to police disciplinary boundaries. That which is sociological is not always the product of sociologists. Sociologists are imagined to be the primary audience for this introduction, but the invitation extends beyond.

Instead of encoding the world into binaries of ‘here’ and ‘there’, as discrete units of spatial territory, the unfolding of the spatial turn of the 1970s into the present reintroduced relational thinking on space. In recent decades, the social sciences have taken up some of the challenges initially mapped by Simmel, exploring the socio-spatial as fundamental to social life. We argue that relational space ought to be a core frame of reference within the sociological imagination: a category we rely upon and a lens through which we look. Before outlining a more precise definition, it is worth briefly clarifying some misconceptions about socio-spatial theory, empirical research and concepts.

On spatial sociology’s theoretical territory

The spatial turn is firmly rooted in the ground-breaking work of Henri Lefebvre. This foundation offers a critical-materialist perspective on how space is produced and dominated through spatial practices, representations of space and representative space, primarily under capitalism (Lefebvre, 1992 [1974]). Using historical examples, he traces the emergence of space as dominated by capital, and generates ideas of how space might be produced outside of capital. As one of the strongest voices in spatial theory since Lefebvre, Harvey’s influence has developed new insights, moving with and beyond Lefebvre, uncovering the specific spaces of capitalism and cities as loci for anchoring surplus capital in space (Harvey, 1973, 2006). Political-economy approaches have shown how spaces are not merely an empty container to be filled by capital, but are relationally constituted through a dialectic of modes of production and space (Massey, 1978; Soja, 1980). This incredibly productive heritage of spatial theory and more recent debates about the analytic possibilities and limitations of spatial concepts such as territory, scale, place and networks have shown the continued importance of such an approach (Jessop et al., 2008). The legacy and the ongoing importance of such an approach should be obvious, and indeed this monograph issue reflects this priority (see Frehse, Yeoh, this issue).

While many empirical questions are best answered through understanding the political economy in the production of space, a central argument of spatial sociology is that not all research questions can be addressed by exploring the spatial effects of capitalism. We agree that a research question enquiring into how capital shapes the world will benefit from spatial analysis. Given the enormous influence and strengths of this approach, it might be difficult to imagine spatial theory without its inherent critique of capitalist space. But spatial sociology is not reducible to a lens of political economy and space. Research questions that do not directly explore political economy can still benefit from spatial theory and analytic tools. This invitation encourages ecumenical approaches to socio-spatial analysis. Debates such as that on urban space and ‘critical assemblage urbanism’ (Brenner et al., 2011; McFarlane, 2011a, 2011b; Wachsmuth et al., 2011) are vital for theory building, and it seems self-evident to us that the variety of theoretical traditions and ongoing debates among specialists provides evidence for the richness and relevance of spatial theory.

On spatial sociology’s empirical applicability

Specific empirical research fields have been key players in the development and deployment of spatial theory. Urban and regional studies, as well as research into the sociology of architecture (Gieryn, 2002; King, 2004), have been key sub-fields of enquiry in which socio-spatiality clearly offers analytic purchase. From the roots of spatial sociology in the work of Simmel on metropolis (1976) and space (1997), to Lefebvre’s work on cities (1996) and space (1992 [1974]), to contemporary research from Neil Brenner and colleagues on planetary urbanism (2013; Brenner and Schmid, 2015) and spatial theory (Jessop et al., 2008), not to mention the research of one of this issue’s editors (e.g. Löw, 2008, 2013), we inherit a rich history of thinkers developing theoretical and empirical research on both cities and space. The fruitfulness of this traditional linking of urban and spatial research has led to the curious perception in which spatial sociology might appear to be limited in its usefulness to specific sub-fields. Pushing beyond the pigeon-holing of spatial theory into regional and urban studies or research on the built environment, social scientists have habitually found spatial thinking and theory beneficial to concerns such as inequality (see edited volume by Lobao et al., 2007), gender (Löw and Ruhne, 2011; Massey, 1992), trade and finance (Sassen, 2001), art (Lange, 2007; Velthuis, 2013), education (Reutlinger, 2016), work and labour (Castree et al., 2004), social work (Kessl, 2009) and social imaginaries (Lash, 2012). The project of spatial sociology proposes that a wide range of empirical and theoretical perspectives benefit from the category and lens of relational space.

On spatial sociology and metaphor

Finally, there is a third misconception in which spatial metaphors are treated as spatial analysis. Arguably, the clearest example is found in the Bourdieusian notion of field as social space (Bourdieu, 1985, 1989). Bourdieu’s notion of ‘social space’ appears similar, on the surface, to Lefebvre’s notion of ‘social space’ as space that is produced through ‘meaning systems’ in which space is ‘not only supported by social relations, but it also is producing and produced’ (Lefebvre, 2009: 186). Forms of capital and the habitus seem to fit well here, as position-taking within a field involves such epistemological meaningfulness and processes of co-constitution. However, for Bourdieu, space is a metaphor, whereas Lefebvre offers tools to analyse lived-in spaces, embedded within the phenomenologically experienced world. Unlike his spatial analysis of the Berber house (1970), Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus of field needs not be grounded somewhere in the world. The concrete, lived-in and experienced space is rarely of substantive consequence to the arrangements of Bourdieusian social space. Using metaphors from topography, Bourdieu’s social space might be good to think with, but is decidedly not socio-spatial. Unlike the first two clarifications showing the strengths of the historical development of spatial theory and empirical research, spatial metaphor is not spatial sociology (see also Löw and Weidenhaus, this issue).

Bodies

Space is always embodied and experienced phenomenologically (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Setha M Low argues, ‘it is through embodied space that the global is integrated into the inscribed spaces of everyday life where attachment, emotion, and morality come into play’ (Low, 2009: 22). For Low a materialist analysis is helpful for understanding the historical formations of the political economies of space in which everyday life occurs. She proposes a constructivist approach to a phenomenological and political understanding of space:

The term social construction then can be reserved for the phenomenological and symbolic experience of space as mediated by social processes such as exchange, conflict, and control. Thus, the social construction of space is the actual transformation of space – through people’s social exchanges, memories, images, and daily use of the material setting – into scenes and actions that convey symbolic meaning. (Low, 2009: 24)

The ‘transformation’ of space from that which is absolute into that which is sociologically significant is a process that takes place through bodies.

In a methodological and theoretical article on the body relations in Praça da Sé, a central historical site in the heart of São Paulo, Fraya Frehse shows how relational historical time is relationally constituted within bodies in relational space. The symbolic meaning of this central site is formed through interweaving histories of this space, and it is in the bodily use of this public square that we see traces of history continuing to have sociologically resonant effects. Through a deep reading of Lefebvre, drawing upon an approach to body relations from Goffman, Frehse develops a methodology to show how social structures, physical spatial arrangements and time are physically embodied, reminding us of those erasures of the past.

This contribution shows us how the body is a medium between spatial arrangements and social structures (Bourdieu, 1984; Douglas, 1982). Moving and orienting (De Certeau, 1984), the body mediates space, embodies the experience of the meanings of space in relation to the physical environment. The patterned conditioning of space is crystallised into habits, learned and performed through shared, collective representations, and imbuing modes of appropriating space. Conversely, the body in socio-spatiality is shaped and formed, and can be re-shaped and re-formed through appropriating space. In an analysis of the structuring of gender through the structuring of space, Iris Marion Young argues: ‘the modalities of feminine bodily comportment, motility, and spatiality exhibit this same tension between transcendence and immanence, between subjectivity and being a mere object’ (Young, 1990: 32). The tension between embodiment and resistance shows that relational space must be located to be rendered sensible, and one such location is at the scale of the body, something Goffman (1971) calls the territories of the self. The spatial nexus of the body also becomes an ‘object’ in spacing, as key elements within the spatial arrangement of objects. Again, Young eloquently writes, ‘the body synthesizes its surroundings, moreover, it synthesizes itself’ (1990: 38).

As loci, bodies are not understood as passive and immobile, but as changing and dynamic. The placement of bodies in relational space is also dynamic; it generates, reproduces and challenges socio-spatial orders through perception and practice. However, the relationship between bodies and relational space does not imply unmediated agency: institutionalised spatial orders also generate ordered, disciplined bodies. They suggest orders of placement and contribute significantly to the experience of the body. Without bodies that are placed, no socio-spatialities are possible. In his article, Ronen Shamir shows how bodies are relationally constituted through spaces of illness and health. Upon entering a preventative illness centre, bodies enter the network of a space tasked with developing the subjectivity of ‘healthy patients’, that is, patients who are not ill, but nevertheless in need of care. Through the formation of what Shamir calls ‘osmotic spaces’, the body synthesises itself as this new subjectivity, moving through its spatial surroundings. The relational spatial meanings and orderings of the preventative illness centre must contend with and produce these bodies, guarding the borders between illness and health. Through articulating this space, how it is used, how it shapes bodies, Shamir shows us on-the-ground how transformations in the perception of health and risk management are experienced and rendered meaningful: through the relational space of institutions of preventative health.

Borders

The second thematic focus of this monograph issue is borders. With the development of relational theories of space, a question arises regarding the theorisation and empirical understanding of defining borders in terms of socio-spatialities. Borders in relational space appear to generate a dilemma. Spaces are understood as structural yet dynamic, generated through individual and collective practices, experienced as meaningful, but not timeless and fixed for all subjective experience. The dynamic and structured nature of space seems incongruous with relatively stable borders. Shifting from thinking in terms of more easily definable borders in Euclidean space, towards thinking relationally, does not imply that borders no longer exist or have effects. Nation-state border controls are tightening in many places, walls are built to prevent migration, just as the relational spaces of everyday life are not without borders, despite new forms of communication that transcend beyond immediate place. Borders and territories are used to stabilise and systematise inequality (Eigmüller, 2006) to render differences between us and them, between here and there, and to structure the granting and denial of access, as well as the political and economic processes of local and trans-local expulsions (Sassen, 2014). Relational borders are of special interest, as they become more complex when the history of territoriality and absolute space is drawn into question.

Bordering reaches us historically as a common practice of governing space. For centuries, territoriality was marked through three practices (Gugerli and Speich, 2002; Landwehr, 2007): the topographical survey, the growing usage of statistical analysis and cartographic detection, as well as the Enlightenment idea that territoriality was state produced (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991; Günzel and Nowak, 2012; Jureit, 2012: 22; Osterhammel, 2000; Raffestin, 1980). Strongly linked to European state formation, the space-as-territory model continued to be transported and implemented. It is to the clearly bounded territorial state and its primary expression in the nation-state that conventional theories of territory respond and upon which contestation is often enacted. Cartography becomes the dominant medium of spatial representation, with influences stretching into everyday notions of space, influencing perception and experience (Mignolo, 2012; Shields, 2013: 64).

With the enforcement of state territorial space as the prototypical space of modernity comes a tendency to homogenise that which is within the territory (Harvey, 1982, 1991: 155). Territories produce homogeneous areas within (playgrounds, pedestrian streets, old town areas, recreation areas, etc.), and this process eases us into familiarity with the notion that space is that which is contained. This idea of the absolute space of coordinates stabilises and provides a epistemology for a general idea of space (Inhelder and Piaget, 1975). Research practices, including methods, often continue to rely on this pragmatic definition of spatial dimensionality, resulting in spatial analysis being confined to cartographic description, mapping, or thin description of setting. Again, thinking about space as a container is not without its uses and validity, indeed absolute spaces are objects of enquiry, but envisioning space merely as a container restricts spatial analysis to a rather residual role, to provide context, rather than analysis (Baur et al., 2014; Löw, 2016).

Precisely because container space comprises such centrality in the epistemology of territory within the humanities and social science in the 19th and 20th centuries, it also dialectically lends itself to rendering visible new ways of thinking and analysis. In mathematics, and recent socio-cultural theories of topologies (Lash, 2012; Shields, this issue), the spread of non-Euclidean geometries brought about the development of concepts and theories of space that are relational. In the theory of relativity in the early 20th century, or for that matter Cubist and Expressionist art, the theatre of the absurd or Dadaist literature, relational space begins a rise to episteme prominence (Giedion, 1941). With the constitution of nation-state territory, global networking becomes strengthened, leading to Sebastian Conrad’s notion of ‘regimes of territoriality’ and ‘changing relations between nation and state, population and infrastructure, territory and global order’ (2006: 324).

In recent literature, borders in territorialisation begin to lose their absolutism. Historian Charles S Maier (2000) characterises the 20th century’s focus on territorialisation as coming into challenge around 1970. Osterhammel and Petersson (2012) observe a global historical change around the same year, developing with new media, the increasing prevalence and significance of transnational companies, a new reflexive concept of the global, the crisis of the welfare state and the erosion of the Soviet Union. Manuel Castells (1996, 1997, 1998) draws strongly upon the development and diffusion of new media in the late 20th century, diagnosing the present ‘information age’ as moulded by ‘communication power’ (2009). A spatial rupture occurs with the shift from territorial containers to a ‘space of flows’ emerging in the 1980s, decisively changing the structures of communication and increasing the complexity of social relationships.

Overall, an increase in global networking and exchange since the 1970s, understood as globalisation or transnationalism (Mau, 2007), was largely investigated through country-specific patterns of networks of contacts and exchanges and (against the idea of the uniform flow) was theorised as spatial concentrations of communications. Alternatively, Appadurai (1996) argues that the unity of culture and place have been dissolved and deterritorialised, now better understood as scapes that put territorial logic into question. Faist (2000) argues for the central importance of cross-border linkages, intensified during an era of increased migration (Faist and Ette, 2007; Glick-Schiller et al., 1992), forming its own socio-spatialities for small groups, diasporas and circulations. Through new media communications, transfers and political participation can be systematically maintained in the home country despite distance and mobility, which would not have been possible in the first half of the 20th century. A new transnational practice of permanency and continuous communication across multiple localities has become increasingly common (Pries, 2007). In addition to the circulation of ideas, practices and materials, the mobility of people in continuing migration and increasing professional and personal travel (Augé, 1995; Urry, 2007) offers a new lens for looking at trans-local subjectivities (Conradson and McKay, 2007) and assemblages (McFarlane, 2011c).

It is here, within the increasing centrality of global networks, trans-locality and borderless spaces in research, that relational spatial notions of borders become important. Theories of the relationality of space encourage thinking beyond territorialisation and absolute space. As borders are increasingly sites of crossing and contestation that are both territorial and deterritorialised, there is emerging a growing priority for new theorising of the relational space of borders and boundaries. In this monograph, Rob Shields argues that the border is crucial to understanding the spatial: that the border is an institution inside and outside a cultural topology. Rather than merely bifurcating the world into a here and there, borders are institutions that mediate, and in doing so have uneven effects. A truly spatial sociological imagination, argues Shields, recognises the border as producing and mediating difference. Calling upon sociologists to expand the sociological imagination beyond the spatial imaginary plaguing Mills’ classical statement (1959), Shields argues that the border does not lose its analytic centrality in times of virtual topologies overlaying the physical cartography of the global, but rather that the border continues to be a ‘frontier of the sociological imagination’.

The complexity of overlapping spaces and the international movement of bodies between nation-states in recent migrations of those escaping regions of war, particularly in Syria and Afghanistan, provides an example of the centrality of borders as actual dividing lines and symbolic social constructions. Through clarifying key concepts of relational space and clearly distinguishing between space and metaphor, Löw and Weidenhaus argue that borders present an epistemological challenge to theories of relational space, one that must be overcome in order to research lived-in and experienced spaces in the world. Borders, they argue, are relationally conceived as existing through and in relational to more than one space. The border is predicated on multiple spaces and relationality. The relational constitution of spaces through borders is a strategy and expression of territorialisation; in other words, absolute, territorial spaces are constructed relationally through the border.

Units

Relational space is predicated on the processual and changing nature of spaces. Objects, bodies and borders change, meanings shift, spaces are no longer what they used to be, are subject to contestation or can be reproduced and stabilised. Relational thinking lends itself well to the Heraclitean, envisioning the world in terms of processes. But this does not mean that ordering does not take place, but rather that ordering is the result of relations. Norbert Elias’s processual sociology argues that – due in part to language – we tend to explain complex processes in terms of stable entities or units, despite the fact that the river is not a fixed entity, but a flowing process. Language reifies ways of thinking that treat as fixed entities that which is really a figuration within a long-term process (Elias, 1978: 16–21; see also Elias, 1991). In the grammar of philosopher Alain Badiou (2007), we count-as-one that which holds together as a set; making the claim of singularity and stability is an operation that we do as everyday actors, social scientists, or in Badiou’s view, philosophers. As a fix to the ever-changing processual nature of our research topics, the useful concept of the immutable mobile offered by Latour defines an assemblage that holds together, becoming a unit that can be transported and implemented elsewhere (Latour, 1986). In more conventional sociological nomenclature, the act of social construction renders stability and meaningfulness; objects and concepts are strengthened when they are constructed and reproduced over time. Theories of the processes by which circulations and flows become rendered into stable forms emphasise that space is produced via assemblages conceived as ‘wholes whose properties emerge from the interaction between parts’ (DeLanda, 2006: 4).

The third thematic section of this monograph issue deals with spatial units. Units are not a priori discrete entities, but those spatial arrangements that are relationally institutionalised and reproduced: constructions that hold together. This section is founded on the argument that amid the circulations within and through relational spaces, we find formations. Spatial formations are institutionalised arrangements that are presented as units. These allow for claims to be made upon them, used by social actors to render stability in experience and perception. This process is political and negotiated. It can be classified as a specific political project of urban management, formed in top-down decisions by politicians and contested on the street. Yeoh Seng Guan’s historical perspective on the worlding of Kuala Lumpur shows how geopolitical concepts of the World Class City become crystallised and shape the negotiation of urban space. Drawing on Lefebvre, he argues that as the city takes on a new politically structured regime of cleanliness, the effects are not merely epistemological. The unit of the World Class City disrupts and displaces everyday political practices for feeding the homeless. With the formation of this unit, new modalities of ‘undesirability’ are politically established and spatial cleansing becomes necessary for the maintenance of the unit as structured by political elites, leading to new forms of contestation. The historical development of the space of the World Class City requires concerted, ongoing political effort to render this unit stable, and therefore it is more readily destabilised. This is a unit that Yeoh suggests can be pulled apart and recast as a new unit, as an ethically ‘worldly’ city, open to its denizens.

Looking at a nation-wide policy programme for housing units, Gautam Bhan argues that the efforts to produce residential units and a one-size-fits-all policy for ‘housing’ neglects the diversities of dwelling spaces in India. The variety of forms of the basti, the mode of dwelling of many income-poor residents typically not holding land title, has been a site of struggles for meaning-making and political legitimacy. A shifting of policy away from the basti towards nuclear-family housing units, implies a silencing of complex circulations of bodies and dwelling spaces. Furthermore, Bhan argues that it is through a relational theorising of space that we can understand the basti as a multiplicity of entangled meanings and politics, rather than a unilateral object worthy of praise as a solution or condemnation as a problem.

The production of meaning and spaces of dwelling is of central importance to Martin Fuller’s article on the active production of space in a new building in Berlin. Tracing the everyday activities of planning a multi-family residential building, this article shows the production of space in situ. Focusing on specific objects, their shared meanings and projected roles in constituting space, Fuller shows how unfinished forms and projects are constituted as meaningful units. Moving within the unfinished building, specific objects full of contested meanings are tamed and brought into coherence as discrete units that are symbolically charged for the constitution of a future community of dwellers.

In tracing the emergence of discrete units in relational space, these articles show the importance of socio-spatial research in understanding the institutionalisation of ideas and objects. The World Class City, the house of housing policy and the objects of a built environment are synthesised into unitary meanings, but this does not imply that they are uncontested. Social actors adapt to inconsistent, overlapping units, negotiating new spatial forms, generating practices within and against stable and instable spatial units. It is precisely these units that are subject to contestation. The construction and contestation of relational spatial units is multi-scalar and allows an understanding of the spatial in which units are the result of socio-spatial processes, and therefore central to the production and constitution of space.

Mobilities as spatial sociology

Finally, this issue concludes with an analysis of the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006) and the spatial turn, via an assessment of John Urry’s contributions. Mimi Sheller argues that space is more deeply integrated into a sociological imagination than is implied here, or more accurately, that interdisciplinary research into mobilities has pushed the spatial turn into new territories. Spatial sociology and the mobilities turn make for good bedfellows and indeed, if we want to look for an example of a deeply spatial sociological imagination, we can find it in the work of John Urry and the growing interdisciplinary field of mobilities research. Sheller shows us that it is not the sole intellectual property of sociologists to think spatially and sociologically, but that this imagination extends beyond any job-title. This is a well-suited conclusion to the monograph, challenging us to think sociologically and spatially, but without a dogmatic, uni-disciplinary approach. Indeed, contributors to this monograph issue on spatial sociology are not all sociologists, but all produce research that should be described as sociological. John Urry ceaselessly developed and extended his research interests, working with co-authors from various backgrounds, retaining his intellectual curiosity and offering transportable and useful concepts for sociological research. His contributions to spatial theory and the sociological imagination is a model, and Sheller’s article opens up arguments and debates within and beyond this monograph issue, and is a fitting tribute to Urry’s memory and influence.