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For years now, spatial analysis is no longer confined to disciplines that deal directly with the physical dimensions of social existence, such as geography, architecture and urban planning. Over the past half a century, space has infiltrated most of the social sciences and the humanities: sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, psychology and psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and legal studies. After historical analysis - following Hegel and Marx - has dominated these fields of knowledge since the nineteenth century, the time of space has arrived. As Foucault famously prophesized over 40 years ago:
The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. The nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermodynamics. The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein (1 986:22).
Foucault's prophesy turned out to be true. It was, perhaps, a self-fulfilling prophesy, since Foucault became extremely influential in so many domains of thought. His profound interest in the architecture, the spatial organization, the bodily practices and the material configurations of human interaction and social organization was not only illuminating in itself, but also inspired scholars in a wide range of disciplines to turn their gaze to the spatial dimension of human activities. But as the articles in this volume show, Foucault is but one among many thinkers - such as Henri Lefebvre (1991), Gaston Bachelard (1964), Michel de Certeau (1984), David Harvey (2001), Saskia Sassen (1991), Edward Soja (1996), and Iris Young (1990), to name a few - who have "discovered" space and used it as a crìtica! and analytical tool during the second half of the twentieth century. This volume includes historical and theoretical accounts of the spatial...