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life on Earth. There are four main senses in
which ‘spatiality’ has been used in human
geographyand allied fields, but these increas-
ingly interrupt and braid into one another:(1) Drawing upon existentialism and
phenomenology, and in particular the
writings of European philosophers Mar-
tin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Ed-
mund Husserl (1859–1938), Pickles
(1985) proposed human spatiality as the
fundamental basis on which ‘geograph-
ical inquiry as a human science of the
world can be explicitly founded’. Pickles’
primary concern was ontology: with
understanding ‘the universal structures
characteristic of [human] spatiality as
the precondition for any understanding
of places and spaces as such.’ Pickles
objected to those views that regard the
physical spaces of the physical sciences as
‘the sole genuine space’. This sort of
thinking was typical ofspatial science
but, in Pickles’ view, was wholly inappro-
priate for a genuinely human geography.
He urged in its place a recovery of our
‘original experiences prior to their the-
matization by any scientific activity’;
that is, a rigorous exposure of the
taken-for-granted world assumed
but left unexplained by spatial science.
One of its essential characteristics is
what Pickles called ‘the structural unity
of the ‘‘in-order-to’’’. Our most immedi-
ate experiences are not cognitive
abstractionsof separate objects, Pickles
argued, but rather ‘constellations of rela-
tions and meaning’ that we encounter in
our everyday activities – what Heidegger
called ‘equipment’ – and which are
‘ready-to-hand’. Such a perspective re-
veals the human significance ofcon-
textuality. For human spatiality is
related ‘to several concurrent and non-
concurrent equipmental contexts’ and
‘cannot be understood independently of
the beings that organise it.’ Spatiality
thus has the character of a ‘situating’
enterprise in which we ‘make room’ for
and ‘give space’ to congeries of equip-
ment. Put in this way, there are distant
echoes oftime-geography, but Pickles
is evoking an intellectual tradition anti-
thetical to the physicalism of Torsten
Ha ̈gerstrand’s early writings and which
fastens not on ‘objective space’ but on a
fully human, social space (see also
Schatzki, 1991).(2) Drawing upon structuralmarxismof the
1960s and 1970s, a number of Franco-
phone sociologists and economists sug-
gested that concepts of spatiality be
constructed to identify the connections
and correspondences between social
structures (modes of production) and
spatial structures. French philosopher
Louis Althusser (1918–90) had argued
that different concepts oftimeortempor-
alitiescould be assigned to different levels
of modes of production – ‘economic
time’, ‘political time’, ‘ideological time’- and that these had to be constructed
out of the concepts of the different social
practices within these domains. In much
the same way, it was argued that different
concepts of space orspatialitiescould be
assigned to different levels of modes of
production. Castells (1977) presented
the most detailed analysis ofcapitalism
in these terms, but insisted that it made
more sense to theorize temporality and
spatiality together and to speak of dis-
tinctivespace–times(see Gregory 1994,
pp. 94–5).
(3) Drawing upon the broadly humanist
Marxism of Henri Lefebvre (1901–91)
and his account of theproduction of
space, Soja (1985) used the term spati-
ality ‘to refer specifically to socially pro-
duced space, the created forms and
relations of a broadly defined human
geography’. ‘All space is not socially pro-
duced,’ Soja continued, ‘but all spatiality
is’. In the course of his work as a whole,
Lefebvre provided critiques of existen-
tialism and phenomenology and of
structuralism and structural Marxism,
and so Soja insists that his ‘materialist
interpretation of spatiality’ cannot be as-
similated to either of the two traditions
summarized above. For to speak of ‘the
production of space’ in the spirit of
Lefebvre is to accentuate spatiality as
‘both the medium and the outcome’ of
situatedhuman agencyand systems of
social practices in a way that, so Soja
argued, was broadly consonant with
structuration theory. Transcending
his earlier claims for a ‘socio-spatial
dialectic’(Soja,1980),Soja (1985) now
concluded that ‘spatiality issociety, not
as its definitional or logical equivalent,
but as its concretisation, its formative
constitution.’ And it is precisely this real-
ization, so he subsequently argued, that
was characteristic of postmodernism
Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_S Final Proof page 716 1.4.2009 3:23pmSPATIALITY