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"City Sights/Sites of
Memories and Dreams"
[Lefebvre:
The Production of Space]
Provider:
Kate Liu / ¼B¬ö¶²
Lefebvre's triad --p. 6-7
space as process--as produced in inseparable, yet shifting physical and
social contexts. Lefebvre (1991) focuses attention on the production
of space by, among other things, constructing a model of various "processes
of assembly" (pp. 31-33). These include "representations of space,"
"spatial practices," and "representational spaces." The model tends
to distinguish professional practices such as planning (representations
of space) from spatial patterns of everyday life (spatial practices) from
the symbolic meanings enacted in spatial form (representational spaces).
Combining time and space--p.
7 Helen Liggett suggests in Chapter 9 that the constitutive
relations among various modes of assembly can be seen as modes of articulation
or ways of making sense. She relates the time/space of analysis
to the time/space of social production through the creation of photographic
images and narratives that re(enact) spatial patterns.
Helen
Liggett "City Sights/Sites of Memories and Dreams"
introducing Lefebvre
p. 245 A unitary theory of space as process--By unitary he means
applicable to all levels, .… By process, he means to see space
as continually being produced. In Lefebvre's thinking
Representational space
252 --process of assembly
Processes of assembly are dialectical, not discreet and oppositional.
. . .
The community is a representational space that encompasses the memory
of a time and place, a fulfilling way of life and also a dream for the
future.
Ligget's suggestion: 255
"Lefebvre's categories are the most powerful when they are used as tools
of analysis, not applied as mutually exclusive categories to be sought
out and observed. To ask questions such as, "Is this representation
of space or a spatial practice? . . is to reduce their potential
for the project of interpreting processes of assembly at work in the
social/physical space. Instead, and this is L's real gift to urbanists,
the three categories are a beginning from which to analyze space as
an activity and to ask questions about the dialectical relations in
terms of which space is formulated and functions" (255)
imaginary geography
Lefebvre is far from neutral
observer of spatial conventions. Against the fragmentation of
a number of disciplines that place space in the service of external
agenda, Lefebvre wants to recall the conditions of production.
This knowledge would, for him, "be expected to rediscover time (and
in the first place the time of production) in and through space" (91).
p. 256 Barthes (1986)
"The City is a discourse" (p. 92)
To move this statement from
being merely metaphorical to being useful for analysis, he suggests
conceptualizing the city in terms of signifying practices, the making
and changing of meaning. Space, then, does not stand for anything,
it is the development, play and interchangeability of signification.
The city depends on memories, it requires dream; that is, aspects of
life that representations of space exclude and some of what Lefebvre
wishes to capture in his insistence on spatial practices and representational
space are [sic: as] inseparable components of the dynamics of spatial
production.
Source
Helen Liggett. "City Sights/Sites of Memories and Dreams." Spatial
Practices: Critical Explorations in Social/Spatial Theory. Ed.
Helen Liggett & David C. Perry. London: Sage, 1995.
(external) 
Literary
Criticism Databank: Postmodernism and Urban Space ;
Postmodern Theories and Texts ;
Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Resistance Spring, 1999
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