著者

水岡 不二雄

出版者

公益社団法人 日本地理学会

雑誌

地理学評論. Ser. A (ISSN:00167444)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.70, no.12, pp.824-834, 1997-12-01

参考文献数

5

被引用文献数

1

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Space and Society, a commission of the Association of Japanese Geographers, published in 1996 a reader containing the following seven seminal papers which had been published in the period from the late 1960s to early 1980s and had provided human geography with a new perspective on the conceptualization of space in society: A. Buttimer (1969), &ldquo;Social space in an interdisciplinary perspective&rdquo;; D. Harvey (1976), &ldquo;Labor, capital and class struggle around the built environment in advanced capitalist societies&rdquo;; D. Ley (1977), &ldquo;Social geography and the taken-for-granted world&rdquo;; E. Soja, &ldquo;Sociospatial dialectic&rdquo;; D. Gregory (1981), &ldquo;Human agency and human geography&rdquo;; D. Cosgrove (1984), &ldquo;Towards a radical cultural geography&rdquo;; and N. Thrift (1983), &ldquo;On the determination of social action in space and time&rdquo;.<br> In order to facilitate the understanding of the spatial conceptions contained in these seminal papers, which are significant for the future development of alternative (or critical) geography in Japan, this paper extracts some quotes from the above papers and lists them under the following basic tenets of spatial conceptions:<br> 1. Space is the objective, material existence which supports society and human subjects.<br> 2. Society and Humans are not passive in space. They positively subsume it to create new (humanized) space and to reproduce themselves.<br> 3. Socioeconomic relations or values produce space, and the spatial entity thus produced supports the stabilization and reproduction of the relations and values for a longer period.<br> 4. Space once produced ossifies itself into structure (the built environment), which reacts to control, differentiate, and transform social relations.<br> 5. Every subject must deploy an expanse of bounded space and a relative position for its action. The form of their deployment is specific to the social relations.<br> 6. A social structure on an upper tier of space produces territories on a lower tier, each of which forms a separate entity in the structure. This stratified configuration of space displaces social relations spatially, and alters the original relations in return.<br> 7. Spatial relations displacing conflict on a particular spatial scale can reify or modify the social relations on different scales.<br>8. Space and subject fuse together spontaneously to constitute a unique &ldquo;place, &rdquo; the focal point where subjects converge into a social structure, mediated with all of its embeddedness.<br> 9. The subject attempts to strengthen the embeddedness and resists its disruption. This place consciousness may obscure the consciousness of social relations.<br> 10. The distanciation and isolation arising from relative space make the subjects in proximity interact more intensely, giving rise to a localized social group.<br> 11. The spatial coexistence of heterogeneous elements of a society and their mutual sharing of the same built environment create social conflict.<br> 12. The built environment exerts a common coercive power over people to stabilize the modes of production and living over the long term.<br> 13. A social group is fragmented and its fractions formed according to the spatially uneven and fixed components of a spatial configuration and natural landscape.<br> 14. The range of subjective space is smaller than that of the objective thus rational behavior is not guaranteed since one obtains information imperfectly from subjective space.<br> 15. The modes of production and experience create collective absolute spaces, the most pivotal of which is the separation between the places for living and for work.<br> 16. It is essential for a social revolution to involve a revolution in spatial configuration.