Science and Place 381With these comments, Lefebvre stakes out what he sees as the consti-
tutive role of spaces in the reproduction of social life. I certainly do not
intend to expound anything of the fi ligree intricacy of Lefebvre’s project,
not least because it has attracted many different readings, and critics have
not been slow to identify stresses and strains in its architecture. Moreover,
while Lefebvre’s take on the whole matter is resolutely materialist, I do not
consider that philosophical materialism is a necessary concomitant of the
perspective he develops. What appeals is the general idea rather than the
specifi c formulation, namely, that spaces must not be thought of as “giv-
ens,” as mere “containers” inside which human activities take place. No.
Spaces are to be thought of as social productions, that is, as constituted
by social life in such a way that “mental space” and “material space” are
elided. As he himself styles it, his design is to elaborate an account of
social life “which would analyze not things in space but space itself, with
a view to uncovering the social relationships embedded in it.”^11 Because it
signifi es “dos and don’ts,” space “is at once result and cause, product and
producer.”^12 Here we sense something of the dynamic reciprocity of the
spatial and the social, their mutual making, and their inextricable inter-
twining. Such a way of thinking stands defi antly against the dichotomiz-
ing of social space into spatial form on the one hand, and social action on
the other. Instead Lefebvre intends that this abstracted polarity is recon-
ceptualized dialectically as a single, mutually constitutive process.
For Lefebvre, the production of space is intimately bound up with what
he calls “spatial practices,” namely, the activities by which actors constitute
the arenas in which they participate. “Everyone knows what is meant when
we speak of a ‘room’ in an apartment, the ‘corner’ of the street, a ‘market-
place,’ a shopping or cultural ‘centre,’ a public ‘place,’ and so on” he begins.
“These terms of everyday discourse serve to distinguish, but not to isolate,
particular spaces, and in general to describe a social space. They correspond
to a specifi c use of that space, and hence to a spatial practice that they
express and constitute.”^13 Each of these arenas embodies a suite of perfor-
mances, or “spatial practices,” that are both cause and consequence of the
social formations that are appropriate to those spaces. In this way practice
is located at the very center of Lefebvre’s social theory of spaces. Thus, as
he observes, “Like all social practices, spatial practice is lived directly before
it is conceptualized.”^14 This immediately directs attention away from what
social actors say about their activities, from how they interpret them, and
from what they think about them, to how they act. As he puts it: “space
was produced before being read; nor was it produced in order to be read but
to be lived by people with bodies and lives in their particular context.”^15
The implications of these considerations for scientifi c enterprises are