The View from Above

In mid-twentieth century France, term ( l'espace social) -- idea that spatial form and social life are inextricably linked -- emerged in a variety of social science disciplines. Taken up by French New Left, it also came to inform practice of urban planning. In The View from Above, Jeanne Haffner traces evolution of science of social space from interwar period to 1970s, illuminating in particular role of aerial photography in this new way of conceptualizing socio-spatial relations. As early as 1930s, view from above served for Marcel Griaule and other anthropologists as a means of connecting social and spatial. Just a few decades later, Marxist urban sociologist Henri Lefebvre called perspective enabled by aerial photography -- a technique closely associated with French colonial state and military -- the space of state control. Lefebvre and others nevertheless used notion of social space to recast problem of massive modernist housing projects (grands ensembles) to encompass modern suburb (banlieue) itself -- a critique that has contemporary resonance in light of banlieue riots of 2005 and 2007. Haffner shows how such views permitted new ways of conceptualizing old problem of housing to emerge. She also points to broader issues, including influence of colonies on metropole, application of sociological expertise to study of built environment, and development of a spatially oriented critique of capitalism

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Capitalism · Colonialism · Geography · Marxist philosophy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Social space · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · State (computer science) · Variety (cybernetics) · French Urban and Social Studies · Law · Philosophy · Metaphysics · Social aspects · Space