Sociology of Space

This article examines gecekondus 2 in Turkey in the context of space factor by drawing upon the basic arguments of sociology of space. It shows the significant role of space in the integration of gecekondus into the urban area and analyzes the relationship between space and society within the context of gecekondu settlements. The main hypothesis of this article is that space, with its physical and social features, is one of the main factors that affects the reconstruction process of gecekondus and it influences the social and economic integration of residents of gecekondu neighborhoods. The argument of this study depends on a comparison of two gecekondu areas in the context of sociology of space. The first gecekondu district is called Kadifekale which is a deprived inner-city area, and the other one is called Gumuspala which is located in the periphery of Izmir. The data that are discussed in the article are collected as a result of a field research. The argument of this study is based on the conceptual frame of Henri Lefebvre's term the trialectics of being. The article discusses the consolidation of gecekondus by examining the relationship of space, society and time. As a result of the research, the article asserts that beyond time factor, space is one of the main factors affecting the consolidation of gecekondu neighborhoods into urban environments, while it is constructed by society.

Trata-se de uma expressão para a qual não existe uma definição unívoca, nos estudos urbanos. De fato, é historicamente datado o caráter das ruas referidas pela expressão "usos da rua" nos estudos urbanos, Assim, a expressão acaba por deixar em aberto qual o sentido de a bibliografia remeter especificamente a usos, dentre as várias relações possíveis dos indivíduos com esse lugar público.
À luz de tais ponderações, cabe mostrar que o uso de "usos" não é gratuito. Se explanações descritivas permitem determinar "sistemas fechados de referência empírica", e as interpretativas se baseiam nas relações das evidências empíricas com referenciais teóricos que permitem estabelecer "regularidades inerentes às condições de manifestação" dos fenômenos (cf. Florestan Fernandes em "Fundamentos Empíricos da Explicação Sociológica", 1959: 31-32), "usos da rua" aparece nas investigações, por um lado, com uma acepção descritiva, por outro, com uma acepção interpretativa de condutas corporais e de relacionamentos sociais nas ruas das cidades alcançadas pela modernidade. Em especial a dimensão interpretativa se viabiliza metodologicamente através do emprego, pelos autores, de três chaves analíticas. Estas retiram as condutas e relacionamentos de sua aparente superficialidade empírica, revelando um insuspeitado debate intelectual sobre os usos da rua.

Abstract:

Marta Cobel-Tokarska
Bezludna wyspa, nora, grób. Wojenne kryjówki Żydów w okupowanej Polsce.
[Desert island, burrow, grave. Wartime hiding places of Jews in Poland]
Warszawa: IPN, 2012, s. 304+aneks,
ISBN: 978-83-7629-354-7

My book presents the result of a research on spacial aspect of  hiding places in occupied Poland during The World War II, that have been used by Jews, both in ghettos (mostly during “deportation actions”) and on the Aryan side. This book shows personal experience of a specific hiding place from the point of view of environmental psychology and cultural anthropology.
Not to omit many interesting sources, I have  disregarded commonly used space division on the Aryan side and ghettos This is connected with the assumption about universality of the main shelter features, which do not depend on their location.
A collocation “hiding place” means a specific place  used by a man that needs protection. The features constituting a place as a shelter belongs to spatial order: placement, boundaries, size, constructions, structure. Therefore the space has been chosen as the key analyzing category.
The book is based on written reports from Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw (team 301) and from Yad Vashem as well as on both published and unpublished journals and memoirs that have been written during the fascist occupation or after the end of the war.
I analyze the sources from the perspective of social sciences: spatial  psychology, cultural anthropology and environmental social psychology.

In Chapter I entitled „Scope of the analysis; attempt at typology of hiding places by objective criteria” the typology of Jewish hiding places ordering the analyzed phenomena is presented.
Analysis of the phenomena of hiding places as social space and a description of individual perception of hiding place’s space is presented in Chapter II. The following categories are used: perception of space, environmental stress and body.
This part of the book describes a sensorial perception of a shelter space. Different ways of sensual reception are presented: visual, auditorial, olfactorial and tactile. Later the question of what was the impact of  congestion, violation of personal space and arduous environmental parameters on the hiding people and their levels of stress is tackled. Concluding the issue of “a body in a hiding place”, the basic experience of living in a hiding place was connected with the biological constraints that have determined social behavior and personal feelings.
Chapter III entitled “Meanings in the space of a hiding place” are devoted to anthropological analysis of the discourse reflecting the perception of the authors of the testimonies, i.a. metaphors used in the texts. The subject of this chapter is the space of a hiding place that is being explored by using classical categories of cultural anthropology. Jews in hiding have been using some metaphors in their diaries. I am analyzing those metaphors trying to match an appropriate pattern of interpretation to each testimony. I would like to unveil what kind of space was  the space of the hiding place as perceived by\ the hidden people: was it a desert island, have  they been feeling like Robinson? Was it a Noah's Ark? A burrow, where they felt like a persecuted victim? A besieged citadel? A grave, where they felt buried alive? Each of those concepts might be found in the elemental part of culture of our civilization. Finally I would like to mention a more universal metaphor of prison.
Chapter IV constitutes an analysis of the idea of home through sociological categories of exclusion, marginalization and homelessness. In there I reach the clue (aside from the basic function, i.e. saving lives ) role of hiding places in overcoming by Jews the social status imposed on them.
Publication Date: 2012

Archaeology, as the discipline that searches to explain the development of society by means of material remains, has been avoiding the big issues involved with its research agenda. The topic of social evolution is concealed by anxiety about previous paradigmatic malpractice and the primary archaeological division of the world in culture areas still suffers from the archaic methods by which it was established. Archaeological inference of developing societies is weighed down by its choice of particularism within agency approaches and overtly reductionist due to the prevalence of statistical, classificatory and biological approaches. This book addresses these issues through a perspective on the spatial analysis of the built environment. As one of the principal properties of our dataset, as well as being the first materialisation of sociality, such spatialities are suggested to be a fundamental key for enabling an understanding of the developing social identity of places, regions and ar...

This paper will focus on three types of structures: the tangible qualities of architectural structures, the intangible aspects of social structures, and the material and discursive elements in the literary structures of cookbooks. By triangulating interpretations of spatial, social, and textual structures, I intend to establish a framework for understanding interactions between people and the built environment, from the individual-domestic scale to the collective-urban scale. Though my analysis focuses on cookbooks and kitchens of the twentieth century, its applications are embedded within a continuous discourse on the relationship between domestic and urban spaces.
Cooking has long been an inherently gendered practice, and the kitchen is consequently a gendered space. Especially in the mid-twentieth century American context, the kitchen is also a racialized space, as racial differences shaped its functional and aesthetic development within the home. While I focus on suburban American kitchens from the early twentieth century to the postwar period, I intend to draw overarching parallels between individual, everyday experiences and collective, societal processes that are congruent to architectural and cultural shifts in the history or contemporary conditions of any given socio-economic, cultural, or regional community.

"Archaeology, as the discipline that searches to explain the development of society by means of material remains, has been avoiding the big issues involved with its research agenda. The topic of social evolution is concealed by anxiety about previous paradigmatic malpractice and the primary archaeological division of the world in culture areas still suffers from the archaic methods by which it was established. Archaeological inference of developing societies is weighed down by its choice of particularism within agency approaches and overtly reductionist due to the prevalence of statistical,
classificatory and biological approaches.

This book addresses these issues through a perspective on the spatial analysis of the built environment. As one of the principal properties of our dataset, as well as being the first materialisation of sociality, such spatialities are suggested to be a fundamental key for enabling an understanding of
the developing social identity of places, regions and areas. In order to arrive at a truly social inference of spatial datasets, archaeology’s usual analysis working from material remains towards socio-cultural interpretations needs to be inverted. The vantage point of this study consists of aprioristic social
theory. It constructs its arguments through an epistemological foundation comprising a selection of essential ideas regarding the three constitutive axes of developing societies: time, human action and human space. As it recognises the inherent position of these axes combined in the discipline of
human geography, a historical comparison of these two disciplines presents the angle from which plausible theoretical advancements can be made. The core of the book explores selected works of human geographers Allan Pred, Benno Werlen and Andreas Koch against the backdrop of theories
like structuration or systems theory, phenomenology, action theory, and to a lesser extent Actor Network Theory and autopoiesis. From this follows its own theoretical proposal called the social positioning of spatialities. On this basis hypotheses for methodological opportunities are discussed,
establishing a research agenda.

Firmly placing its efforts in current paradigmatic debates in the discipline, this study offers archaeological theorists an incentive to leave the safety of materially bound science and adapt an alternative perspective. It is an attempt to put archaeology back in the forefront of the social
theoretical debates it should contribute to."

With and against Carl Schmitt, the thesis of a third space revolution is developed - the space revolution through space travel and the corresponding taking of space. Based on this, the connection with globalisation is reconstructed and the significance of space travel for the constitution of world society in the sense of Niklas Luhmann's sociology is discussed.

Quinze ensaios, um poema, uma trilha sonora e várias
fotografias compõem este livro. Trata-se de uma contribuição
sui generis para a história das ciências sociais no
Brasil, que busca examinar criticamente as diferentes facetas
da sociologia produzida por José de Souza Martins,
um dos maiores sociólogos brasileiros em atividade, nos
seus mais de cinquenta anos de carreira.
Por ângulos distintos, especialistas brasileiros e europeus
em sociologia, antropologia, história, fotografia,
literatura e música desvendam um modo único de pensar
a vida social, que se destaca por valorizar as raízes do
humano expressas em detalhes aparentemente menores
do dia a dia de homens, mulheres e crianças no campo,
na cidade e na fronteira, no centro e no subúrbio, na casa
e na rua, na vigília e nos sonhos vividos no Brasil do
passado e do presente – em busca de futuro.
- The printed edition of this book is available via EDUSP, the University of São Paulo Press - eduspliv@usp.br and https://www.edusp.com.br -

In this paper I provide a critical examination of Marc Augé’s spatial imagination, from his anthropological studies of African village life in the 1970s to his more recent studies of everyday spatial practices in the contemporary West. Augé’s spatial imagination is apparent throughout his ethnographic writings, but I suggest that his most widely acclaimed book, Non-Lieux/Non-Places, is all-too-frequently read as a theoretical articulation of the changing nature of space in the contemporary West, rather than as a semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical ethnology resulting from one man’s encounters and wanderings in the spaces of contemporary France. I trace parallels between Augé’s writings on non-places and those of a number of other Anglophone and Francophone scholars since the early 1960s, before focusing attention on writings on theories of space and place, and the geographies and histories of globalisation, consumption and mobility, which have led commentators to draw very different conclusions about the sociality and spatiality of late twentieth and early twenty-first century life.

Die hier vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit der wissenschaftlichen Konstruktion des Raumes, zuerst im historischen Kontext und später ausführlicher anhand des relationalen Raumbegriffs von Martina Löw. Löw entwickelt einen eigenen Ansatz zur Konstruktion des Raumes, der relationale Raumbegriff. Das Ziel der Arbeit ist es, diesen wissenschaftlichen Beitrag zur Debatte rund um den Raum zu evaluieren. Löws zentrale Aussage ist, dass Raum eine relationale (An)Ordnung sozialer Güter und Menschen (Lebewesen) an Orten ist. Es wird festgestellt, dass sich Löws Ansatz auf diverse Aspekte vorangehender Konzepte stützt, ohne deren Schwächen zu erben. Das Resultat ist ein konsistenter, theoretisch gut fundierter und pragmatischer Ansatz, die Konstruktion des Raumes im sozialwissenschaftlichen Kontext zu denken. Folglich ist Löws Beitrag keine Neukonzeption des Raumes, sondern eine geschickte Syntheseleistung vorangehender Theoriebildung. Einschränkend muss festgehalten werden, dass Martina Löw ihren relationalen Raumbegriff bisher nur anhand von Sekundäranalysen in der empirischen Praxis getestet hat. Die von ihr durchgeführten Sekundäranalysen zeigen auf, dass durchaus ein Mehrwert über ein relationales Verständnis von Raum erzielt werden kann, jedoch fehlt es an Studien, die von Beginn an (Primäranalysen) mit Löws Konzept arbeiten.

ARCHITECTURE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
(Ph.D. Thesis)
Hossein SADRI
GAZİ UNIVERSITY
INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
September 2010
ABSTRACT
Today, one can observe that the capital oriented power relations have transformed the process of formation of space into a sphere of production; therefore space has also been transformed into consumption good and a means for obtaining surplus value. Space that is formed as a result of this understanding of production-consumption does not contain diversity and exclude vulnerable groups.
To prevent these exclusions and to guarantee free and equal life for all people in dignity, principles which include everybody during production and utilization of space should be determined and these principles should manifest human rights and minimum standards concerning those rights.
Based on Henri Lefebvre’s idea of the right to the city, this  dissertation attempts to explain in detail the right to appropriation and the right to oeuvre through rights of human beings regarding their living spaces in order to determine above mentioned minimum standards. A comparative analysis looks at different documents of human rights in the city in order to achieve norms of human rights regarding space.
All actors taking part in the process of production and utilization of space are responsible for protection of these rights. Among these actors, the architects’ role is vital, since they can affect the process of production and utilization of space both directly by their personal practices and indirectly by their collective activities. Therefore, an ethical code illustrating the ethics of the profession of architecture as well as the responsibilities of architects could guarantee the protection of norms of human rights regarding space.
It is possible to classify the documents of ethics of architectural profession into two categories in terms of their binding force. One category consists of codes of ethics that are binding, and the other includes declarations that are not binding.
The dissertation examines four different ethic codes and 12 different declarations that were published by the American Institute of Architects, the Royal Institute of British Architects, Architect’s Council of Europe and the Union of International Architects as case studies and evaluates these documents in terms of human rights related with space.
This evaluation illustrates that declarations in contrast with codes of ethics are sensitive to norms of human rights. However, it is observed that, human rights norms which are related to public space are not covered within these declarations due to apolitization of architecture in recent years.
The conclusion discusses the results of those evaluations on codes of ethics and declarations in terms of human rights norms related to space. It also suggests recommendations for developing codes of ethics sensitive to human rights related with space.
Science Code : 802.1.100
Key Words : Architecture, Ethics, Human Rights
Page Number : 227
Advisers : Prof. Dr. Nur ÇAĞLAR
Co-Adviser : Prof. Dr. İoanna KUÇURADİ

In the wake of a sociopolitically volatile era, which is increasingly
characterized by the intensive and extensive proliferation of borders,
migration- and border management are still commonly considered as
predominantly rational and dispassionate processes. Their functions
and filtering mechanisms, however, are underpinned by the instrumental
top-down exertion of affective power as well as by the cultivation of
emotional dispositions among political communities. At the same
time, compliance to- or contestation of these forces also manifests
‘from below’ through transgressive patterns of human mobilities and
mobilisations around borders, which are similarly affectively-driven.

This Ph.D. dissertation examines the impact of various actors’ affective
practices on the construction, enactment and contestation of affective
borderscapes in the southeastern Mediterranean and its Aegean
appendix, and explores how those processes manifest and link up at
multiple scales across space and time from a perspective that accounts
for the affective dimensions of border regimes aside from their legal,
infrastructural and political causes and consequences.

Through long-term ethnographic engagement with communities and
individuals that have been passing through or inhabiting several
locations along the much-fraught Aegean borders in times of major
socioeconomic and geopolitical upheaval, this thesis formulates
and puts forth the concept of affective borderscapes as an original
contribution to border and migration studies. Affective borderscapes
are liminal, overlapping landscapes that function as contact zones and
as charged fields of often unanticipated affective interaction between
assemblages of animate and inanimate actors. This concept bears great
potential for the acquisition and mobilisation of knowledge, as well as
for the design and application of policy and practice.

Christian topography and ancient city. The relation between christian churches and urban space in province of Achaea (4th - 6th c.)

This paper is about spatial relations between churches and urban space in a defined historical context. It includes synoptic definitions of theory terms, settlement analysis focused on urban evolution as also spatial, archaeological and topographical observations. Finally, it concludes with some preliminary conclusions about theoretical aspects of the given subject.

One of Foucault's main idea in this text is to provide a critique of how societies create heterotopias to provide as possible as close representations of their utopias very often at the expense of exclusions of those who do not fit the “dominating utopia”?
On the other hand, heterotopias for Foucault are not only spaces with several places of/for the affirmation of difference, but also as a means to escape from authoritarianism and repression: “if we take the ship as the utmost heterotopia, a society without ships is inherently a repressive one”.

This chapter critically addresses the historicity of the refiguration of spaces by confronting the “increasing mobility” hypothesis of the “refiguration of spaces” approach with the increase of homelessness in São Paulo from the 1980s. I apply a particular dialectical-cum-phenomenological methodology to the historicity implicit in patterns of the spatialization of bodily and materially mediated (non-)verbal interaction. By focusing on specific homeless pedestrians in São Paulo’s pre-COVID-19 downtown streets and squares, I depict what the underlying historicity model discloses about the production of public space in the city. These homeless pedestrians stand out due to their physical immobility therein on workdays amid their own mobility and the mobility of other pedestrians. Hence, what comes to the conceptual forefront is a historically at the very least bitemporal process of dialectical space (re)production. This model transcends the multilinear acceleration that implicitly underpins the refiguration of space and signals three contributions of this chapter to expanding the empirical plausibility of the “refiguration of spaces” approach.

Çalışmanın amacı “eşik”in bir olgu ve bir imge bağlamında değerlendirilmesidir.
Eşik bir mekân olarak; özel ve kamusal alanın ayrımında bir çizgi, güvenlik
noktası olan bir hudut, sanat ve edebiyatta bir imge, inançlarda bir simge, bir
aşama, psikolojik bir sınır ve aynı zamanda kararsızlık ve umut gibi durumların
yaşandığı bir yerdir. Eşik, bilimlerde de terim olarak kullanılagelmiştir. Eşik hem
ulaşılması gereken hem de aşılması gereken bir mekân olabileceği gibi
aşılmaması gereken bir mekân olarak da inşa edilebilir. Günlük hayatımızda sık
kullandığımız eşik kelimesinin fiziksel ve zihinsel boyutlarını ortaya koymak,
çalışmanın ana konularındandır.

Die Arbeit versucht eine analytische Verbindung der Theorie der sozialen Raumzeit und der Systemtheorie zu finden. Vordergründig wird sich hierbei des Formkalküls von Spencer-Brown bedient, um die die Unterscheidung konstituierenden zwei Seiten einer Beobachtung auszuformulieren und ein Kalkül der Raumzeit anbieten zu können.

This research examines the ways in which Bengali men and women " do gender " in the setting of north Kolkata's Indian Coffee House as a converging point of Adda, by expanding upon existing literature on doing gender, ethnography, and narrative interviews. The expression, conceptualisation and performance of gender is further studied under the light of an acclaimed modernity that is informed with and through a colonial identity, suspending the same into a limbo of nostalgia. This research also looks at how certain practices and modes of exchange get credited as ideals of masculinity through the conversations and activities in Adda, and how Bhadrolok masculine identities are produced and circulated in the same, against a constant establishment and re-establishment of the 'non-masculine' and feminine. The findings are based on attempts at capturing 'moments' through ethnography as well as photography.

The changing political and social meanings of space under conditions of advanced globalization point to the need to analyze security—or the deployment and management of violence—as a socio-spatial practice. This article draws attention to the " methodological nationalist' bias that has traditionally characterized mainstream security studies, and discusses its effect on how security issues are studied and conceptualized. Building on insights from political geography and sociology, the article makes the case for a " spatial turn " in the field. It demonstrates how a socio-spatial approach can help make sense of evolving state security practices, and presents examples of non-national spaces of security— including cities, cyberspace, and the global polity. Such spaces are increasingly objects of security practices, although the implications of this remain largely under-theorized in security studies.

Inspirado numa problemática de longa duração nas ciências sociais brasileiras - a das lógicas de apropriação de práticas sociais e culturais historicamente modernas no Brasil no decorrer do século XIX -, este livro se propõe a repensar criticamente o papel conceitual da cidade de São Paulo nesse debate hoje colocando em questão, na chave de uma sociologia da vida cotidiana que entrelaça de maneira sui generis contribuições em particular de Henri Lefebvre e de Erving Goffman, o urbano que é produzido em São Paulo pelo advento da modernidade, entre o início do século XIX e o início do século XX. Que sociedade urbana emerge nessa cidade no bojo desse processo histórico? Em busca de respostas, nada como uma etnografia das transformações histórico-sociais e socioculturais das regras de comportamento corporal e de interação social dos pedestres nas ruas do centro histórico de São Paulo entre 1808 e 1917, assumindo-se como referências empíricas imagens desse espaço produzidas por viajantes, (ex-)estudantes da Academia de Direito, ex-meninas de elite, jornalistas e fotógrafos de rua durante esse longo período. Com efeito, nesse ínterim as ruas do centro da cidade vão paulatinamente sendo tomadas pelo transeunte, personagem até então inexistente nas plagas paulistanas. Em meio a uma complexa dinâmica histórico-social que une, ao mesmo tempo em que separa, viajantes, (ex-)estudantes, ex-meninas de elite, jornalistas e fotógrafos de rua em torno da temática da civilidade, o corpo do transeunte é mediação reveladora de uma sociedade na qual todos os pedestres tendem a circular, mas suas formas de interagir nas ruas centrais mobilizam ativamente, ao lado da impessoalidade, uma pessoalidade historicamente própria de referenciais socioculturais estamentais. No espaço da rua, e no espaço que é o corpo do transeunte. Coisas do passado? Certamente não. Produtos de uma rua muito específica, em termos histórico-sociais: um espaço eminentemente cerimonial engolfado pela modernidade.

Ethno-Architecture and the Politics of Migration explores the interface between
migration and architecture. Cities have been substantially affected by transnational
migration but the physical manifestations of migration in architecture – and its
effect on streetscape, neighbourhood and city – have so far been under-studied.
This contributed volume examines how migrants interact with, adapt, and
construct new architecture. Looking at the physical, urban and cultural impact of
these changes on a variety of sites, the authors explore architecture as an identity
category and investigate what buildings and places associated with migration tell
us about central questions of belonging, culture, community and home in regions
such as North America, Australia and the UK.
This book makes an important contribution to debates on place identity and
the transformation of places as a result of mobility and globalised economies in
the twenty-first century.

Public space has been primarily considered as a theme in urban studies, but without acknowledging its inherent potential as a core field in cross-disciplinary urban studies. Inspired by the spatial epistemology of Henri Lefebvre, it is conceived here as relational counter space in order to imbue human-scale approaches in architecture and planning with an emphasis on humanist thought about space. Using dialectics to qualify the epistemology of public space as relational space, these insights are then transferred into different learning fields of urban education with a focus on public space. Are public spaces ideal vehicles to reconnect abstraction to its base, that is, spatial practice, and its inherent social relations?

Chapter 3 of 'Art, Design and Capital since the 1980s: Production by Design' (Routledge, 2019), pp. 60–77

https://www.routledge.com/Art-Design-and-Capital-since-the-1980s-Production-by-Design/Roberts/p/book/9781138313774

Chapter 3 considers Dusseldorf- and Los Angeles-based American artist Rita McBride’s sculptural interrogation of architecture, focusing on two significant instances of her work in public space, the sculptures 'Salford Arena' (2002) and 'Mae West' (2011). I argue that these public sculptures develop a critique of tendencies within contemporary architectural and urban design, and that, in so doing, they also mount a sophisticated critique of a nostalgic conception of artistic site specificity. In particular, they reveal the naivety of a prevalent tendency to presume the ongoing availability of a non-alienated relationship to space, amid its ‘de-localization’ within what the sociologist Manuel Castells theorises as today’s global ‘space of flows’.

Nearly fifty years ago, in 1974, Henri Lefebvre (2000a) became a forerunner for drawing sociologists' attention to the theoretical possibilities implicit in the simultaneous inquiry of the macro-and micro-social processes involved in (re-) generating space, which he defined as a "set of relations" between "things (ob

The Greek island of Lesvos has a centuries-old history as a site of departure, arrival, coexistence and resistance for the forcibly displaced. This migratory chronology, however, was overwritten by the unprecedented attention that Lesvos attracted during the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’. This paper examines vernacular aspects of bordering, specifically the practice of border crossers and other groups standing in solidarity with—or against—them, to inscribe messages on walls in and around carceral and public spaces, viewed as a process of constructing and contesting borders from below. Closely reading numerous inscriptions collected around Lesvos reveals how borders are constructed, enacted and contested from below through borderlanders’ discursive practices on some of the very walls that constitute the EU frontier’s material infrastructure. This study aims to advance understandings of the historical continuity of the Aegean borderscape as a complex landscape of border effects and affects that exceed borders’ legal, infrastructural and political dimensions, while also highlighting the persistence and importance of personal agency, self-authorship and identity reclamation by border populations even in the direst of circumstances.

Stark geprägt von den Eindrücken seines zweijährigen Aufenthalts im São Paulo der 1930er Jahre, wo er als Soziologieprofessor an der dort jüngst gegründeten Universidade de São Paulo wirkte, entwarf Claude Lévi-Strauss in seinem Memoirenwerk Tristes tropiques (1955: 107) ein bemerkenswertes Bild dieser Stadt: „Im Jahre 1935 waren die Paulistaner [die Bewohner von São Paulo] stolz auf die Tatsache, dass man in ihrer Stadt im Durchschnitt ein Haus pro Stunde errichtete. (...) Die Stadt entwickelt sich in einer solchen Geschwindigkeit, dass es unmöglich ist, für sie einen Stadtplan zu erstellen: jede Woche würde eine neue Auflage verlangen“. Ohne es zu wissen, wurde der Ethnologe so zum Sprecher einer Vorstellung, der ich immer wieder begegne, wenn ich mit Besuchern aus Europa auf den Straßen und öffentlichen Plätzen der Innenstadt unterwegs bin. Es handelt sich um die Ansicht, São Paulo sei ‚geschichtslos’. Denn die physische Materialität der privaten und öffentlichen Gebäude, der Kirchen, Straßen und Plätze wird dort so oft radikal umbestaltet, dass alles gleicherweise aktuell, ohne historische Tiefgründigkeit zu sein scheint.

Diese Repräsentation liefert einen geeigneten Ausgangspunkt für die methodologische Fragestellung, die ich in dem vorliegenden Beitrag behandeln möchte: Inwiefern kann eine um die Lefebvresche regressiv-progressive Methode bereicherte lateinamerikanische Stadtforschung einen Beitrag leisten zur Konzeptualisierung von Differenz in der gegenwärtigen städtischen Welt? Von diesem methodologischen Blickwinkel aus betrachtet beruht die historische Tiefschichtigkeit eines Stadtraums niemals nur auf der Materialität seiner Bauten und Pflaster. Auch die Art wie sich die historischen Zeiten in den sozialen Aktivitäten, die sich durch die Vermittlung des Raumes (re)produzieren, miteinander verknüpfen, prägt den Stadtraum. ). Insbesondere was das São Paulo Lévi-Straussʼ  und vieler europäischer Besucher angeht, lässt sich dieser zeitlosen Stadt nicht mehr trauen. An ihre Stelle tritt folgende Forschungsfrage: Welche anderen historischen Zeiten kann die analytische Fokussierung auf die Historizität sozialer Aktivitäten im und durch den Stadtraum São Paulos zum Vorschein bringen?

A preocupação metodológica com a chamada vítima, com quem está à margem
do sentido histórico que assumem os processos sociais respectivamente estudados
no Brasil, atravessa a obra de nosso autor desde os primórdios1A preocupação metodológica com a chamada vítima, com quem está à margem
do sentido histórico que assumem os processos sociais respectivamente estudados
no Brasil, atravessa a obra de nosso autor desde os primórdios. Partindo desse equacionamento de natureza metodológica, mais ou menos explicitamente
elucidado pelo autor em inúmeras publicações, mas de modo sistemático
em particular durante entrevistas, espero evidenciar neste ensaio que, do ponto de vista teórico, há mais em jogo, nessa categoria, do que uma referência
metodológica privilegiada para interpretar sociologicamente a sociedade brasileira.
Existe, eis o meu argumento, uma maneira de conceituar sociologicamente o
espaço no Brasil; ou seja, uma sociologia do espaço.