Social space

A social space is physical or virtual space such as a social center, online social media, or other gathering place where people gather and interact. Some social spaces such as town squares or parks are public places; others such as pubs, websites. or shopping malls are privately owned and regulated.

Henri Lefebvre emphasised that in human society all 'space is social: it involves assigning more or less appropriated places to social relations....social space has thus always been a social product'. Social space becomes thereby a metaphor for the very experience of social life - 'society experienced alternatively as a deterministic environment or force (milieu) and as our very element or beneficent shell (ambience)'. In this sense 'social space spans the dichotomy between "public" and "private" space...is also linked to subjective and phenomenological space'.

As metaphor, 'social space contributes a relational rather than an abstract dimension...has received a large variety of attributes, interpretations, and metaphors'. Such 'social space...i[s] an intricate space of obligations, duties, entitlements, prohibitions, debts, affections, insults, allies, contracts, enemies, infatuations, compromises, mutual love, legitimate expectations, and collective ideals'.

For Lefebvre, 'the family, the school, the workplace, the church, and so on - each possesses an "appropriate" space...for a use specified within the social division of labor'. Within such social spaces 'a system of "adapted" expectations and responses - rarely articulated as such because they seem obvious - acquire a quasi-natural self-evidence in everyday life and common sense': thus everybody consensually 'knows what he is talking about when he refers to the town hall, the post office, the police station, the grocery store, the bus and the train, train stations, and bistros' - all underlying aspects of 'a social space as such. an (artificial) edifice of hierarchically ordered institutions, of laws and conventions'.

Defining a stratified morphology as a series of 'discrete units embedded within one another in a definite order', one can see that a distinct 'morphology exists in social space - from the "room" or hut to the house and the building; from the building to the group of houses, to the village and the neighbourhood; from the neighbourhood to the city, the region, the nation, and the State...continent [&] planet'.

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