Spatialization

Spatialization (spatialisation) can refer to the spatial forms that social activities and material things, phenomena or processes take on. This term related to geography, sociology, urban planning and cultural studies. Generally the term refers to an overall sense of social space typical of a time, place or culture.

Cognitive maps are one aspect of spatialization, which also includes everyday practice, institutionalized representations (i.e., maps, see cartography) and the imagination of possible spatial worlds (as in the visual puns of the work of the Surrealist painter, René Magritte). See also geographical space, Henri Lefebvre. The origins of the term are in Rob Shields 1985, Introduction to a Précis of Henri Lefebvre's La Production de l'espace. where social spatialization is proposed as an English translation of Henri Lefebvre's French term "l'espace". However, Shields embues the concept with a sense of being a general, socio-cultural attribute, as in the work of Michel Foucault who makes 1 mention of the term but does not theorize it) rather than a spatial regime that is dialectically produced as part of a Marxist mode of production.

Social spatializations are virtual but manifestly material, in discourse and as frames through which problems are understood. Following Foucault they are cultural formations relevant at many scales, from gestures and bodily comportment to geopolitical relationships between States (see also Critical Geopolitics). On one hand, spatializations are achieved, hegemonic regimes which place and space activities in sites and regions. But on the other hand, spatializations are continually in change as they depend on and reflect peoples' ongoing performative actualizations of these spatial orders or regimes. However they are contested and the focus of struggles over the meaning of places, or manners, or over the reputation of neighbourhoods.

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