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The production of space at Nineveh

Space, or spatiality, has generally been relegated to the background by historians and social scientists (Soja 1989). The Cartesian worldview demands a separation between thinking and the material world, between mind and matter. In this view space is seen simply as something that can be objectively measured, an absolute, a passive container (Merrifield 1993: 518). An alternative view, propounded mainly by postmodern geographers, regards space as a “medium rather than a container for action”, something that is involved in action and cannot be divided from it (Tilley 1994: 10). Space is not an empty, passive container, but an active process that is both constituted and constitutive (Merrifield 1993: 521). So, in this view the social, historical, and the spatial are interwoven dimensions of life (Soja 1999: 263–4). History and society are not understood if space is omitted; there is, in fact, no unspatialised social reality (Soja 1989: 131–7; 1996: 46, 70–6). The philosopher Henri Lefebvre's concept of the social production of space plays an important part in this latter view of the active role of space in social processes. Lefebvre criticises the notion that space is transparent, neutral and passive, and formulates in its place an active, operational and instrumental notion of space (Lefebvre 1991: 11). He argues that it is the spatial production process that should be the object of interest rather than “things” in space, and that space is both a medium of social relations and a material product that can affect social relations (Lefebvre 1991: 36–7; Gottdiener 1993).