Spatial Theory

“Certains naissent de façon posthume.”1 Some are born posthumously. Thus begins an article written for a French journal by Stuart Elden, a British political scientist and geographer and translator of the Éléments de rythmanalyse (1992) into English (2013). There have, in fact, been a series of works, new editions, and translations appearing only after Henri Lefebvre’s death in 1991. Yet as I will show in what follows, it would be somewhat one-sided to reduce Lefebvre’s (literary) afterlife to these publications alone, or to see, in his afterlife alone, his significance for and influence on the social sciences and cultural studies.

Religion and Urbanity Online presents important research contributions on religious change and the change of urban spaces and above all urban forms of life, practices and discourses on urbanness in Europe, the circum-Mediterranean region and South Asia. It provides historians, anthropologists, and sociologists of cities and of religion with research articles as well as overviews. Case studies on cities or urban networks or on specific phenomena and processes help to build a reservoir of knowledge on two overarching questions: What role do religious actors, practices and ideas play in the emergence and ongoing development of cities and “urbanity”? What role did urban actors, spaces and practices and the discourse on urbanity play in the emergence and ongoing development of religious groups and “religion”? The database is published by the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Religion and Urbanity: reciprocal formations”, which investigates the historical contribution of religion to urbanization and the long-term co-constitution and co-evolution of religion and the urban.

This study attempts to answer how the city and city management shape the cultural scenes of Tehran. This question relates to the status of urban culture on the one hand and to specify the role of urban governance in shaping it on the other. To answer this fundamental question, I described and analyzed the current status of theater and music as two entities with different experiences in the urban environment and policies. To this aim, the selection of art in general, and two branches of it in particular, was a purposeful and strategic choice. I viewed art as the manifestation of material culture and the most manifest sub-system of culture that can adequately represent the continuum of various cultural scenes. The philosophy behind the selection of theater and music as two instances of art was that they could provide a holistic view of Tehran’s art scene; the current status of other branches of arts, such as painting, photography, and graphics, is somewhat similar to theater, and cinema is by far equal to music. I begin this article by portraying a comprehensive account of Tehran’s theater and music transformation in recent years to brief the readers about Tehran’s art scenes’ abnormal and politically unbalanced status. Then, using Andrew Sayer’s theory about space, I shift the discussion to my primary focus, i.e., the role of spatial concentration in the formulation of art scenes. Spatial concentration is a prominent factor shaping and affecting cultural scenes in at least three ways: Disrupting the previous order, continuing the initial conditions, and establishing new orders. The analysis of the latter case leads us to Georg Simmel’s essay The Metropolis and Mental Life. By borrowing some of the basic concepts of that essay, I explain the characteristics and consequences of the current spatial-cultural relations and the rise of new orders. Finally, in light of the discussions regarding spatial concentration, I discuss the dual role that any policy can play in shaping cultural scenes.
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This article appeared in the following journal:
Khalilian, Mohammad. 2019. “The Influence of City and Urban Management on Tehran's Art Scenes.” The 2nd National Symposium of Social Sciences Students’ Studies. Tehran. 285-295.

This book offers a spatial insights on the social mediasphere in the context of digital shutdowns and reflects the dimensions of political economy and of social media in general. Internet shutdowns have been found to be more prevalent in developing countries than in developed countries, with India leading in Internet shutdowns in the world. Internet shutdowns have occurred in India for several reasons, mainly to hinder the spreading of information through social media – this is discussed in detail along with political motives behind this and how this can conflict with government policies, such as the flagship program “Digital India” which is ostensibly meant to improve the infrastructure and expansion of digital information throughout the country. This book suggests new dimensions in the digital spatiality. Furthermore, the digital space is defined and discussed, including its role and how this might be reflected in concepts around spatiality and spaces.

More concretely, the book considers the following questions: How is social media reflected in spatial sciences? How does the space differ from more tangible spaces, such as the hydrosphere or atmosphere? How do (computer/mobile phone) screens behave as a space/place in the context of behavioural sciences? How is this reflected in what is shaping and reshaping the spatiality of digital gadgets? Do digital gadgets change the socialization process that’s often considered a path towards how we develop in society? How do internet shutdowns affect the political economy and what patterns can be seen in how individuals, companies and the internet industry in particular react to these shutdowns in India?

This theoretical essay draws on the critical and spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord and the Situationist International, Gaston Bachelard, Mark Fisher, Max Weber, Deleuze & Guattari, Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, and others; alongside recent technoscientifc ethnography (Lisa Messeri) and cultural-architectural history (Fred Scharmen) within Space Studies; as well as the ideas of space-settlement  found in the work of Gerard O'Neill, Timothy Leary, and Freeman Dyson.

It proceeds and concludes by synthesizing these threads into a particular conceptual assemblage which makes spatial, political, and ontological arguments concerning strategies, tactics, and operations of/in praxis within the frame of the contemporary and everyday life, as well as towards long-term goals involving these topics with special focus centering the entwined foci of:

1) Critical Spatial Praxis and the Production of Space;
2) Revolutionary Postcapitalist and Cyborg-Posthumanist futures which reach out towards space settlement beyond the territory of the Earth.

The essay is also served with original digital art by the author/theoretician which juxtaposes samples of legendary Situationist graffiti gathered from the streets of Paris during the events of May '68 alongside exoplanetary, astro-cosmic, and galactic aesthetico-poetic visual themes.

[This is a pre-publication final draft and may visually differ from the final physical publication.]

Buy the (beautiful!) zine @ https://tinyurl.com/5c8wxb4n

Latin American Literature at the Millennium: Local Lives, Global Spaces analyzes literary constructions of locality from the early 1990s to the mid 2010s. In this astute study, Raynor reads work by Roberto Bolaño, Valeria Luiselli, Luiz Ruffato, Bernardo Carvalho, João Gilberto Noll, and Wilson Bueno to reveal representations of the human experience that unsettle conventionally understood links between locality and geographical place. The book raises vital considerations for understanding the region’s transition into the twenty-first century, and for evaluating Latin American authors’ representations of everyday place and modes of belonging.

*Included here are the front matter, table of contents, and the first three pages of the introduction.

The concept of space has been an increasing concern in literary studies with the advent of the ‘spatial turn’, which brought a new sense of the understanding of space in the mid-nineties. Theatrical space has often been considered as either ‘architectural’ or ‘scenographic’; however, dramatic space has a significant role in conveying the meaning in a play and can be a better descriptive component in the literary representation of space. In this context, my dissertation aims to investigate the dramatic space in Tom Stoppard’s plays in order to explore the representation of modern and postmodern British individual and social life in contemporary drama. Accordingly, I argue that space is responsible for social transformation in communities and enables a dialogue between society and the individual. This study benefits from the terminology of geocriticism—a form of literary criticism which suggests an interdisciplinary approach to the exploration of literature in relation to space and place, and refers to the theories of Lefebvre, Foucault, Augé, Harvey, and
Certeau in spatial studies, in addition to the Issacharoff’s study of ‘dramatic space’.
Proposing a multidisciplinary perspective, this study aims to analyze mimetic and
diegetic space in five selected Tom Stoppard plays: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead (1966), Travesties (1974), Arcadia (1993), Indian Ink (1995), and The Coast of Utopia
(2002). Stoppard’s plays from the 1960s to the 2000s portray varied spaces including
urban spaces, cities, landscapes, rooms and fictional sites, thus they can stand as exceptional textual sources in spatial literary studies. So far, in the first chapter of my dissertation, I have attempted to provide definitions of the space, place, spatial theory, theatrical space, dramatic space, and mimetic and diegetic space, which would present the proper setting to focus on the use of space in Tom Stoppard’s theater in Chapter Two.

From grassroots to mega-event level, the sport sector has long-relied on volunteers to function effectively. While the nature of sport volunteering varies, scholars have identified that volunteerism is built around characteristics (e.g. altruism, civic participation, acquisition of social capital, personal and professional development) that draw individuals together and contribute to a sense of community. In providing sites for life-skills training, mentoring, coaching, and/or leadership, volunteer communities in sport are also informal and formal learning environments. Notwithstanding research examining learning opportunities within individual volunteer experiences, work remains on articulating the ideological, structural and experiential complexities of volunteering as pedagogical terrain. To illuminate some of these educational nuances, this paper interrogates the experiences of a cohort of regional football volunteers in the United Kingdom. Drawing on spatial theory, we utilise a holistic framework comprising thought, production and action space to understand volunteer communities and opportunities for learning therein. We draw data from questionnaires, and focus groups undertaken with volunteers working in one of the UK’s largest provinces. We contend that football volunteerism comprises a potentially rich context in which an array of learning opportunities exist that can be nurtured and enacted upon over volunteers’ life courses. Educational characteristics of volunteering, or the creation of effective learning communities in the sector are not, however, always guaranteed. Rather, individual and collective investments may be required by both volunteers and supporting organisations. Furthering recent criticisms of the wider sport sector, and beyond affording greater appreciation of volunteer learning, we advocate for a rethink of organisation’s ethical responsibilities and resourcing vis-à-vis educational duties of care and sustainability.

Space truly becomes a place not merely because of the built and the unbuilt that design it, but also because of the way its users use it, behave around it, interact with it, and interact with each other in it. Space that surrounds every individual, in which an individual exists, interacts and performs, is known as “Human Space”. Organization of the Built environment around the users within their ‘human space’ is known as “Spatial Order” which is the key to formulation of non-verbal communication. Non verbal communication refers to the body language an individual adopts in order to convey a message to the fellow users of the space. This Non-verbal language subsequently becomes the basis of verbal communication that lays the foundation of Human Behavior within a particular spatial order.

In this chapter, we analyse the plurality of memories created as a result of confrontation between the past and the present time, individual and collective memory, but, first of all, as an encounter between space and memory. In the collection of short stories Genova d'autore , the urban structure of Genoa is perceived, described and lived through the individual memory of characters, which is closely connected to the collective memory. The collective memory of the city of Genoa features a complex and multilayered dynamics of different individual memories which converge in the space of social and cultural memory. Here, it is useful to remember Bertrand Westphal's words when he affirms that “[a]t the beginning of the twenty-first century, the coordinates of time and space must be correlated; certainly, they are inextricably meshed” (Westphal, 2011, p. 26). This intersection of the historical and personal events is the point in which the urban space becomes fundamental: It allows us to discover the transformation of Genoa, from a revolutionary and progressive city, where the social interaction was of central importance, to the city of urban alienation and depression. At the same time, it influences the attitude and the behaviour of its residents, which also change. In the chapter we address the question whether Genoa might be the specimen of any Italian city nowadays, while its residents the specimens of any human, in the representation of the individual and the collective memory. In this regard, of great help is Hana Wirth-Nesher's approach to the representation of the city in narrative which she presented in 1996 and in which she examines four aspects of the cityscape: the "natural", the built, the human and the verbal. The presence or the absence of these aspects in the delineation of the urban structure of Genoa will be at the centre of our attention in this analysis and will lead us to conclude how memory, the individual or/and the collective one, is connected to the representation of the space.

Andreas Predöhl’s career was typical of the careers of many prominent German academics in the post‐war period who had previously served the National Socialist regime during its rule. From 1934 to 1945, Predöhl was the director of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy; from 1949 to 1960, full professor in Kiel and Münster; and from 1964 to 1969, the first president of the German Overseas Institute, which is today the GIGA. This paper critically and comprehensively examines his relationship to National Socialism as well as his academic contributions, which consist primarily of studies on the following topics: a) development theory b) the theory of space‐creating locational factors against the background of the international discussion of global economic spatial structures c) new growth centers in the global economy and the tension between nation‐states’ interests and their steering capacities within the process of globalization. 252/2014 GIGA Working Papers Predöhl’s work provides ...

This paper explores the relationship of space and identity in the novel The House on Mango Street, written by a prominent Chicana writer San-dra Cisneros. Based on spatial theories and ethnic studies, the paper demonstrates how specific spatial characteristics interact and translate into the main character's identity traits. The spatial narrowness of homes and the isolation of Mango Street reflect a sense of social confinement, isolation, and subjuga-tion of Latino people in the U.S., predominantly Latino girls and women. As a minority people, they occupy the space on the social periphery where Latino and Anglo cultures meet. The spatial contact of Latino and Anglo-American culture generates de-territorialized, diasporic, and hybrid identities which are further compromised by gender issues in the Chicana case. In this setting, the main character Esperanza strives towards identity reconstruction which strongly relies on spatial and mental repositioning.

This essay discusses some key ideas and debates about urban studies in Brazil, considered histor-iographically, from the mid-1900s to the present. It presents the main components and particula-rities of what emerges as the Brazilian matrix of urban studies, interrogating the most influential work in the field with the country's own experiences of industrialisation and urbanisation. It discusses some key urban debates of the 21st century, namely new planning models associated with globalisation, global mega-events, public-private partnerships, inner-city gentrification, housing and city financialisation, rising forms of urban warfare and social control in slums (favelas), and new activisms and urban insurgencies. Through this analysis, we point to contradictions and tensions in relation to European and North American urban theory, calling for the need to formulate new categories and hypotheses to better understand the unequal and extreme processes resulting from violent expansion of capitalist relations over the entire planet, and comment on the new practices and forms of social mobilisation emerging from turbulent contexts.