Social Interaction Across Urban Spaces—Contexts, Structures and Sustainability

Dear Colleagues,

The opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris revolutionarily embraced the city’s spaces. Did the city become the main actor of the event? Or was it merely a stage for the events to unfold. Does and how space create or shape social events? What is the relationship of the social sphere to space and vice versa?

On a daily basis, each of us encounters the spaces of places, cities, villages, organizations, schools, offices and workplaces, but we very rarely think about their spatiality. It seems, however, that one can see a growing dynamic of interest in space that is related to the “expansion” of space as a category of global, virtual or cultural space. At the same time, traditional spatial structures associated with divisions between sacred and profane, center and periphery and city and countryside are becoming obsolete or transforming their meanings. The concept of space is increasingly becoming an analytical tool for analyzing many phenomena including issues of social relations, inclusion and exclusion or sustainability. 

Following twentieth-century thinkers, the assumption can be made that space is a product of society, both in a physical (urban) and ideological sense. Henri Lefebvre assumes an interpretation of space as a social product, on the one hand of social practices and on the other of ideas about spatiality. Pierre Bourdieu assumes that space is always hierarchical in terms of social meanings and is shaped by social relations. The attribution of particular meanings to space is also referred to in the work of Michel Foucault, who developed the concept of “heterotopia”. Every culture produces “heterotopias”, that is, specific spaces where different fields of meaning intersect. Edward Soja, creator of the concept of “trialectics of spatiality”, states that social reality is not just accidentally spatial, it is ontologically spatial.

References to space in different cultures can be seen through the nature of human settlements; their arrangement shows attitudes toward space. In Eastern culture, houses are open to space and light, while Western architecture is characterized by the closure of private space, literally through physical boundaries.

The purpose of the Special Issue is a research exploration of the phenomenon of multidimensional urban contexts of space in social, arts, cultural, economic, political or ecological references. We are honored to extend an invitation to the academic community from all over the world to publish papers in the Special Issue. We invite scientists from different academic traditions and scientific disciplines from the East, West, North and South.

We propose the following thematic fields:

• Social relations shaping urban spaces and vice versa;
• Contemporary understanding and application of the concepts of Third places, Habitus and Heterotopia;
• Local and regional development in the context of space and social, technological, ecological and economic conditions;
• Social processes of placemaking, sense of place and place branding;
• Spatial references on social phenomena such as migration, inclusion, exclusion, social integration;
• Social spaces in the face of sustainability, climate change and urban ecology;
• Social entrepreneurship, activism, urban and social movements;
• Contemporary theoretical and practical space science, urbanism, planning and comprehensive development strategies for territories and societies.

Prof. Dr. Neil Reid
Prof. Dr. Piotr Pachura
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• social relations
• spaces
• urban development
• planning
• sustainability
• space shaping