Past Read: Social Justice and the City

David Harvey. Social Justice and the City. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)

Harvey's Social Justice and the City (1973) is extraordinary. He introduces his topic with an in-depth discussion of the difficulties inherent in coming up with a theoretical structure and methodological template with which to examine something as complex as the city. What should be analyzed? Space, and the use of space, e.g., architecture and the "empty space" of the street? The use of space in terms of commerce and living arrangements, e.g., sociology?  The sociological tableaux that are played out in slums, high rises, urban sprawl? Going deeper, how does "personal space," in psychological terms, influence "human reaction to environmental design"(25), and how can human psychological need of types of personal space be integrated into analyses of the city?  Harvey points out that the:

distinction between the geographical and the sociological imaginations is artificial when we seek to relate to the problems of the city, but it is all too real when we examine the ways we think about the city. ...There are... those, possessed of a powerful geographical imagination or spatial consciousness, who fail to recognize that the way space is fashioned can have a profound effect upon social processes - hence the numerous examples of beautiful but unlivable designs in modern living (24).

In other words, the difficulty in analyzing the city is that there are multiple interfacing processes that combine to form city life. Harvey, building upon the work of earlier scholars, isolates three "basic categories of spatial experience":

1. organic space (e.g., "instinctive spatial orientation and migration, instinctive territoriality," etc.)
2. perceptual space (e.g., "the neurological synthesis of all kinds of sense experience-optical, tactual, acoustic, and kinesthetic. This synthesis amounts to a spatial experience in which the evidence of various senses is reconciled" leading to the formation of memory and learning which is also effected by cultural conditioning)
3. symbolic space (e.g. geometry and other "convenient symbolic language[s] for discussing and learning about spatial form [that are] not the spatial form itself"). Another way to describe this could be "meta-space." (28)

The point of all of this is that, despite the well-established fact that Euclidean geometry may be used accurately to analyze spatial forms, nevertheless "social space is not isomorphic with physical space" (29), and this because "[e]ach form of social activity defines its space" (30). Thus, Harvey argues, a philosophy of social space is required.