Spatial Cultures update: May 2018 – now out in paperback!
Spatial Cultures: towards a new social morphology of cities is now available in paperback for much less money than the hardback version!
Spatial Cultures update: June 2016
Spatial Cultures: towards a new social morphology of cities was finally published on June 29th, 2016 – many thanks to all the contributors and everyone who has supported this project. In due course I hope to expand this blog to develop on the topics and themes it seeks to advance. Until then…
Amazon ‘look inside’ and book orders
Spatial Cultures update: April 2016
The book is currently in production and we are looking at a May 2016 publication date.
Information on the Routledge website
Promotional flyer with 20% discount!
Very best, Sam
Spatial Cultures update: February 2016
Ashgate is now owned by Routledge (Taylor and Francis Group) who will be publishing the book. As a consequence the promotional information available on the Ashgate site until last week is not available while systems are being integrated. I’ll post these up here once a new url becomes available. Publication is still on schedule for Spring 2016.
Very best, Sam
Spatial Cultures update: September 2015
I’m pleased to announce that a collected volume Spatial Cultures: towards a new social morphology of cities past and present volume, drawing on many of the papers submitted to the workshop is to be published by Ashgate in their Design and the Built Environment Series. The collection is edited by Sam Griffiths and A. von Lünen. It is currently in production and is scheduled for publication early in 2016.
Study Spatial Cultures at UCL
Readers may be interested to know that I co-lead an interdisciplinary module Understanding Cities and their Spatial Cultures as part of UCL’s BASc Arts and Sciences programme.
I also teach a postgraduate module in Spatial Cultures on the MSc Spatial Design: Architecture and Cities in the Space Syntax Laboratory, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture.
Key facts
- A one day workshop at UCL, Thursday, September 19th, 2013, 10:00-17:00 – flyer
- Principal contact: Dr Sam Griffiths [email protected]
- Convenors: Dr Sam Griffiths (UCL Bartlett), Frederik Weissenborn [email protected] (UCL Bartlett), Lasse Liebst [email protected] (University of Copenhagen)
- 3000 word papers for pre-circulation to Sam Griffiths by Friday, 6th September 2013
- Papers will be pre-circulated to speakers through a password-protected page of this site
- Papers are considered to be ‘drafts’ because it is anticipated that they will be further developed following the workshop.
Rationale
Scholarly interest in the relationship of society, space and place that has been a significant characteristic of the ‘spatial turn’ has always acknowledged the importance of movement in this context. However, its dominant concern with decoding spatial representations has tended to render movement-through-space in similarly representational terms, to the detriment of a more dynamic, temporalized notion of the spatiality of built environments. The aim of this one-day workshop is to explore the theoretical and methodological implications of approaching modes of movement, rest and encounter as constituting distinctive ‘spatial cultures’. Its contributors aim to articulate what often appears as the missing link between the description of the materialized infrastructures of social life in different times and places, and accounts of the practice and experience of everyday social life.
Spatial cultures do not only imply human movement. John Urry’s definition of the ‘mobilities paradigm’ offers a powerful way of addressing the increasingly sterile opposition of ‘space’ and ‘place’ by showing how the mobility of people, objects and information that is enabled by infrastructural networks calls the value of any inflexible distinction into question. Urry’s emphasis on network dynamics as socially formative raises important questions, both for more hermeneutically inclined perspectives that consider the material conditions of social life as secondary to – and certainly distinct from – their primary concern with subjectivities, and for organicist notions of social interaction as an integrative function of the social totality. It suggests the need for a fuller realization of what Bill Hillier refers to as the allocentric dimension of social experience – that is those qualities of life-in-society that extend beyond the individual body-subject – while remaining alert to the dangers of materialist determinism and cognitive reductionism. It requires the interdisciplinary development of concepts and analytical techniques able to address how different spatial cultures have emerged and been displaced.
Research in this field might choose as its starting point a particular example of a spatial culture or the work of those social theorists with a broadly-defined interest in social morphology, a diverse field that includes such figures such as Durkheim, Simmel, Lefebvre, Foucault, Giddens and Deleuze. In this case it should certainly involve demonstrating the value of theory in elucidating the qualities of spatial cultures in a range of socio-historical contexts, not least by informing the development of appropriate analytical concepts and methods in relation to the source material. Research in this mode would be unlikely to entail cartographic analysis in isolation but contextualize such ‘mappings’ socially and historically by considering mobilities infrastructures as agents in the production of time-space affordances that fashion the possibilities of particular spatial cultures.
Invited speakers should submit a paper of 3000-5000 words to [email protected] by Friday September 6th for pre-circulation to speakers through a password-protected page on this website. A précis or reduced length paper of 10-15 minutes (6 minutes for a ‘Pecha Kucha‘ presentation) should be presented on the day as the basis for a wider discussion at the workshop. Selected papers will form the basis for a publication, either a special edition of an appropriate academic journal or a book, on the theme of spatial cultures. Papers are therefore considered to be ‘drafts’ because it is anticipated that they will be further developed following the workshop.
This event has been part-funded by the UCL BSGS Space Group EPSRC platform grant EP/G02619X/1
Spatial Cultures 