Lefebvre's (1974) Spatial Triad
[Direct excerpts]
Spatial Practice, which embraces production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial sets of characteristic of each social formation. Spatial practice ensures continuity and some degree of cohesion. In terms of social space, and of each member of a given society’s relationship to space, this cohesion implies a guaranteed level of competence and specific level of performance.
Representation of space, which are tied to the relations of production and the ‘order’ which those relations impose, and hence the knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to ‘frontal’ relations.
Representational spaces, embodying complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to art (which may come eventually to be defined less as a code of space than as a code of representational spaces).
Spatial Practice: The spatial practice of a society secretes that society’s space; it propounds and presupposes it, in a dialectical interaction; it produces it slowly and surely as it masters and appropriates it. From the analytic standpoint, the spatial practice of a society is revealed through the deciphering of its space.
Representations of Space: conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers, as of a certain type of artist with a scientific bent – all of whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived. This is the dominant space in any society (or mode of production). Conceptions of space tend, with certain exceptions to which I shall return, towards a system of verbal (and therefore intellectually worked out) signs.
Representational Space: space as directly lived through its associated images and symols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’, but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a few writers and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe. This is the dominated – and hence passively experienced – space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects. Thus representational spaces may be said, though again with certain exceptions, to tend towards more or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs.
Citation/Reference
Lefebvre, H. (1974/1991). The Production of Space. Wiley-Blackwell.
pp. 33-39
