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Against the backdrop of China's socio-economic transition, there is a growing imperative to examine neighborhood renovation initiatives in addressing the emerging needs of residents. Developing Granovetter's classic work on embeddedness, this paper proposes a conceptual framework of spatial embeddedness to understand changes in the physical space brought about by neighborhood renovation, in order to explore how it affects residents' satisfaction in a dynamic temporal and spatial process. It presents whether and why residents' real feelings produced from their interaction with neighborhood renovation are (un)different, and how their feelings are shaped based on six months of fieldwork in a danwei neighborhood in Xi'an, China. The paper conceptualizes the relationship between the neighborhood space and embeddedness by adopting spatial embeddedness to capture the interplay of temporal, spatial, and social factors in the process of danwei neighborhood renovation. This framework not only integrates multiple perspectives and scales, but also reflects different levels of residents' satisfaction, trying to establish a connection between the abstract space and the renovation space. It suggests that spatial embeddedness should be considered as a response to the negative social impacts resulting from changes in the physical space in neighborhood renovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid the Covid‐19 pandemic, the food and grocery delivery sector became a multibillion‐dollar industry, making riders with squared backpacks visible in our urban landscapes. We explore the role of quick delivery platforms in spatial production—and especially the strategies platforms employed and the tactics of platform workers in relation to this production. By adopting a Lefebvrian perspective, we introduce the concepts of 'strategies of spatial abstraction' and 'spatial tactics of resistance'. We argue that strategies of platforms such as territorialization and digital Taylorism homogenize spatial relations, while platform workers use tactics to resist and to negotiate their everyday lives mediated by platforms. We draw on vignettes from Barcelona and Berlin to illustrate the spatial implications of these strategies and tactics. Territorialization anchors platforms to urban locations through physical infrastructure, while digital Taylorism utilizes algorithms to standardize spatial practices. These strategies contain contradictions: territorialization reduces worker atomization, while digital Taylorism catalyzes worker resistance tactics, especially logistical resistance around the platforms' dark stores and warehouses. This article contributes to the growing body of literature on platform urbanism, revealing the complex and often contradictory nature of platform‐mediated production of urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014 Toronto was named 'Youthful City of the Year' by the global Youthful Cities initiative. The ranking was supposed to be indicative of Toronto's progressiveness and as a place where youth are equipped to thrive. Toronto also ranked number one for diversity. Much of Toronto's celebrated diversity exists in the inner suburbs of the city. The homogenous framing of Toronto as captured by the Youthful Cities initiative neglects the lived realities of young people who live on the fringes of the city. This is heightened in a context of increasing socio-economic inequalities that is spatially concentrated. In this paper I examine how divergences in the city are spatially produced and navigated by young people that live both symbolically and geographically on the fringes. I argue that Toronto is differentiated along lines of race and socio-economic status that is reified through the socio-spatial division between the core of the city and the inner suburbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article follows the life story of Lety, an ex-maquiladora worker from the village of El Refugio in Yucatán, the south of Mexico, from the 1980s until the present in a "global intimate" account. Against the background of two cycles of capital accumulation (i.e., henequen fiber production and a maquiladora chapter), the cross-scalar and historical examination I offer here relies on discourse analysis of governmental reports and state development plans as well as ethnographic research. Operationalizing a feminist-Lefebvrean toolkit, I reflect on how the concepts of abstract space, everyday life, and differential space are challenged or complemented by the global intimate. Through this, the paper explores how the fabric of capitalist urbanization unfolded in the everyday: how it was created, re-created, and challenged. Three main things are highlighted in this analysis: (1) how the space of capitalism was produced at the intersection of materiality, discourse, and lived experience; (2) the contradictions that arise between abstract space and everyday life; and (3) the potentialities of what I refer to as intimate spaces of difference. I conclude with a discussion of how the space of capitalism was challenged by Lety through these intimate spaces of difference, reflecting on the importance of building more theoretical bridges between critical urban theory and feminist scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This photo essay can be read as a little impromptu itinerary of some of New York City’s still standing “Dirty Urban Landscapes”. It celebrates the streets of New York City as chaotic, anarchic palimpsests of overlapping cultural signs and traces of human enterprise. It celebrates the “messy vitality” (Venturi 1966) of everyday life in a city whose built landscape seethes with meanings.

William Gaddis' National Book Award winning JR is often read as a novel of 'entropy' or 'chaos,' and held out as an 'ur-text' (in Jonathan Franzen's phrase) of apolitical literary experimentation in late-century America. Yet JR delineates, in its obsessive interest with the built environment, the structural changes taking place at the height of American neoliberalisation. This paper recovers those structural criticisms by uncovering them – by considering the way the novel's wayward language blankets, fills, and changes space. I begin by delineating the structures that produce, house, or result from the novel's 'chaotic' language, arguing that the dominant discourse of this novel, rather than random, is a specifically 'neoliberal discourse.' I clarify the way neoliberal discourse reshapes space by relating it to Lefebvre's 'abstract space,' before considering the political possibilities Gaddis attributes to these spaces, as well as to experimental literature itself. This reading expands our understanding of the politics and formal strategies not only of this novel but of the period's experimental literature more generally, offering JR as an ur-text not of nihilistic difficulty but of a critical literary practice grounded in an experimental aesthetics that seeks to both capture and criticise emergent changes wrought by neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses extended implications of Lefebvre’s The Production of Space in the context of contemporary global neoliberalism, by focus on its presence in architectural space as lived space and spatial practice. The main discussion concerns Lefebvre’s concepts of abstract space, in relation to Felix Guattari’s three ecologies, and the Aristotelean triad of aisthesis, poiesis and techné. The focus here concerns material architectural space and its relation to modes of subjectivity, especially creative-productive versus consuming subjectivities. The argument begins by elaborating on an understanding of abstract space as present in material architectural space as pervasive processes of disassociation of materiality and labor, and proceeds to through these concepts discuss modes of subjectivity—the dependence of abstract space on subjects as consumers—and the way this relates to challenges of sustainability. It further points to the importance of architectural space considered as built material environment for creative-productive modes of subjectivity which challenge abstract space and in extension consumer society, by offering potential dispositions that set subjects in a different relation to the world.

This paper demonstrates the value of considering the lived experiences of abstract space makers as a way of exploring the micro-social and cultural dynamics buttressing capitalism's domination over space. In-depth interviews with real estate professionals working in a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, reveal how they view real estate as a realm of refuge and opportunity, view their work as a type of service to others and how some reconcile their sympathetic observations of renters facing hardships. I also describe how their discourse demonstrates the power of orthodox economic concepts to mask how the real estate market works as a mechanism for the inequitable distribution of social resources. Studying real estate professionals' lived space and discourse thus reveals some of the ways that capitalist spatial processes are reproduced as inevitable, acceptable and even needed aspects of urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author presents a critical reading of Hao Jingfang's Folding Beijing (2012), a work that deals with the dystopian future of Beijing and the city dwellers' living condition. Adopting the concepts of "abstract space" and "differential space" as theorized in Henri Lefebvre's work, the author argues that the alienation of urban space is manifested in the form of three abstract spaces, which leads to the homogeneity of landscape, human mentality, and the fragmentation of natural temporal cycle. Furthermore, Hao's depiction of future Beijing's urban structure is her inquiry into the social issues caused by the current technology-driven production method. The protagonist's metaphorical journey from Third Space to Second and First Space shows that people always struggle for a differential space filled with hope and love by transgressing and resisting the imposed borders and norms of their respective spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this article, we explore the antagonism between capital and labour from a distinctive spatial and connective perspective: by examining the tension between the production of digital abstract space in the context of machines and computational automation, and the powerful pushbacks of embodied labour struggles of gig-economy workers advancing alternative connective strategies. Our goal is to advance a spatial approach to digital labour practices capable of grasping the dialectical aspects of digital capitalism that are linked to digital and connective technologies. Contextualized within the recent debate on digital capitalism, we focus on a relational and organizational issue concerned with the logic of connection/disconnection, ambivalent connectivity, hybridization of people and technology, and machinic co-productive labour. We illustrate one of those possible alternative directions by examining the radical space generated by organized gig-economy workers. Pushing against the dematerializing force of Digitalized Management Methods, algorithmic management, and digital black boxes, we concentrate on the role played by workers in mediating principles of alternative connectivity against the general tendency of casualization of work in the gig/digital economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys discussions of abstraction in the sociological and political economic literature that tie it a relation to the material. This is developed from the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel. Under the rubric of the liminal, the diachronic interchange between these poles will be examined to better understand how the Abstract saturates the material. This entails not only the purely Abstract but involves Virtualities that are intangible, Ideal-Real. This lends reality an air of added dimensions, expanding the Real beyond the merely material into a non-Euclidean, 'abstract space'. This spatialization of abstraction is introduced within the work of Sohn-Rethel but has not been remarked upon. While this multidimensional topological space appears to have magical qualities, Turner's understanding of liminality is drawn upon to understand the dynamic quality of abstraction as a relation and process between the Abstract and Material. Liminality mobilizes the Virtual or ideal-real. Liminal rituals are epistemic 'sociotechniques' (cf. Krämer, Siegert) involving abstraction and the management of abstraction through simple ritual action. Abstraction does not pull away from as much as extend and configure the Real (Lyotard). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I introduce objections to Federico Raffo Quintana's paper "The Notion of 'Space' in the Young Leibniz Writings". Against Raffo, who considers that the Leibnizian conception of space as the universal place of things is an idea that Leibniz early abandons --Raffo says in 1671--, I will try to show that such a conception goes beyond the Leibniz's young writings and that it is because of some conceptual confusions in Raffo's survey that he, instead of seeing a harmonic continuity in Leibniz's theory of space, sees a rupture in its historical evolution, associating to it some disputable or spurious dichotomies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We prove that Fuhrmann's Theorem holds on every Ptolemaic space [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is concerned with the shaping, the framing and the fashioning of the discourse on urban futures in Cape Town, South Africa. I outline the multiple sources and diverse elements that feed into this discourse: specifically, metropolitan theory and local experience. Focusing on the praxis of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, I argue that there is a convergence between the language of crisis and the vision that comes across in policy and futurist scenariobuilding. I point at apartheid modernities and their recapitulation in utopian dreams for the post-apartheid city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines an emerging form of interspatial competition premised on attracting cargo traffic and value‐added logistics activities. Against the backdrop of economic globalization and the revolution in logistics, place‐based actors are increasingly vying to insert their localities into transnational supply chains. I explore the causes, conditions and consequences of this burgeoning growth strategy through a study of the dynamics surrounding the expansion of the Panama Canal, opened to shipping traffic in June 2016, and the consequent battle among North American ports to attract a new generation of oversized container vessels. The spatial practices of mobile actors in the logistics industry, I argue, represent the leading edge of capitalism's tendency to render places interchangeable—a condition I call fungible space. The abstract logic of spatial substitution, however, can never fully escape the concrete qualities of particular places, which form the very conditions of interchangeability itself. This dialectic of spatial fungibility and geographic specificity has intensified rivalries for volatile commodity flows and made logistics‐oriented development a particularly risky growth strategy for cities. What is at stake in these speculative ventures is the welfare of vulnerable communities and workers, who disproportionately bear the costs and risks of supply‐chain volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper questions the dominant representation of space (normative space) and its visuality in the case of spatial experience without sight. While the relationships between individuals and spaces are differentiated, normative space (re)produces the conception of one depersonalised and thus disembodied space and denies alternative conceptions of spaces. The aim of the paper is to present the process of independent experiencing of new spaces by visually impaired people. This experience is interpreted in the context of two theories: Lefebvre’s production of space and Butler’s theory of performativity. Our results are based on interviews with 16 visually impaired people and 2 people with knowledge about visual impairment from their profession. The interview partners learn two sets of spatial information: ‘information for communication with others’ and ‘information necessary for spatial mobility’. While the first set of information is required to become part of the visual world and reveal the performative (re)production of the visuality of space, the second set of information is connected to non-visual experience and thus makes it possible to look beyond the normative space, to see visuality as a norm, and to start to reflect on the political connotation of spatial conceptions.