Refiguration: A More-than-Time Concept for Culture

The many ways in which culture is spatially structured and formatted through space, as well as how spaces become places of culture, is routinely explored within social sciences, and especially in the journal Space and Culture . Yet how culture itself changes via the medium of space remains a neglected topic. This persistent absence could be tied to the fact that social change itself is a thoroughly temporal concept. Although social science disciplines including urban geography, sociology, cultural studies, studies of time-space, architectural theory, ethnography, media and urban studies, or environmental studies refer a great deal to social change, it has not yet been possible to design the category of change in a way that the spatial structuring inherent to processes of change is clearly emphasized or examined. This special collection seeks to address this omission by exploring how urban culture is changing spatially. This is not a question of deducing how spatial arrangements are merely an expression of social change. Instead, the contributions in this collection start from the assumption that changes in these spatial arrangements instigate and implement wider and more extensive social transformation.