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Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2004, volume 22, pages 209 ^ 228

DOI:10.1068/d325t

Spatial phenomenotechnics: making space with Charles Booth and Patrick Geddes Thomas Osborne

Department of Sociology, University of Bristol, 12 Woodland Road, Bristol BS12 1UQ, England; e-mail: [email protected]

Nikolas Rose

Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, England; e-mail: [email protected] Received 21 January 2003; in revised form 19 May 2003

Abstract. There are many ways in which humans articulate themselves through their `spatiality'. One neglected aspect of a historical anthropology of spatial relations and modes of existence concerns the role of the human and social sciences. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's multifaceted distinction between `smooth' space and `striated' space, we propose some ways to analyse the logics of spatialisation at work in the social sciences. We take as case studies the writings of two `technicians of space', Charles Booth and Patrick Geddes, together with some of their contemporaries. The paper is intended as a contribution not to the `history of ideas' but to contemporary debates about human spatiality. Whilst some postmodern `affirmations' of space counterpose abstract disciplinary `striated' technologies of spatial regulation to nonabstractionist `smooth' modes of spatiality, we take a different perspective. In doing so, we suggest some non-`historical' uses to which we might put the history of the social sciences today. We also try to demonstrate some of the merits of an empiricist approach rather than a postmodernist approach to questions of spatiality.

``I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deep rooted: places that might be points of reference, of departure, of origin ... . Such places don't exist, and it's because they don't exist that space becomes a question, ceases to be self-evident, ceases to be incorporated, ceases to be appropriated. Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It's never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it.'' Georges Perec (1997 [1974], pages 90 ^ 91) Abstracting space There is something unsettling about space. Whether it is existential or historical, our spatiality seems to generate a persistent sense of unknowing that animates repetitive projects of abstraction. Space has to be marked, framed, mapped, subject to boundaries. In that sense, as Perec writes in his extraordinary catalogue of forms of spatiality, space is a perpetual doubt (1997 [1974], page 91). From this perspective, the abstraction of space is not necessarily a malign operationödisciplinary, rationalising ... öbut perhaps only a human one. At the most localised scale, we try to colonise our own spaces, our places of work, our desks, our tools, our chairs and rooms. Any science of `topoanalysis', wrote Gaston Bachelard, would have to recognise that the house is a ``tool for analysis of the human soul'', whether it is the ``houses of man'' (rooms, homes, offices) or the ``houses of things'' (drawers, closets, shells, filing cabinets) (1994, page xxxvii). Even such `eulogised spaces' as formed the object of Bachelard's own oneiric reflections thus appear as the products of the doubts we have about space. And the inescapable corollary is that the fashioning of ourselves as humans is accomplished, in part at least, by the fashioning of our intimate spaces of existence.

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How much more constitutive of doubt, how much more unsettling, then, must be that whole domain of what Bachelard called `hostile spaces', the open spaces, the crowded arcades, the cities, the deserts, the roads, the favelas, the slums, the prisons. No doubt one could see every architectural project, every attempt at `spatialisation' at the level of the room, the building, the street, the city, the region, or the nation as mobilised by such a doubtöas an attempt to prevent space from becoming hostile. But this is not to agree with those critics of `modernity' who uncover an aspiration to control, which is built into every building form or city plan. The abstraction of space is not an invention of a rationalising modernity. And the doubt inherent in space can be answered öand was in fact answered öas much by an aesthetics as by a panopticon. Nonetheless, something significant is marked by the technicians of space in the 19th century: the engineers, the doctors, the architects, the statisticians, the cartographers. As this list suggests, the novelty and significance here lie in the routinising of a new set of transactions between knowledge and space, transactions that concern the spatialisation of human existence as a matter of life itself. The doubt of space, that is to say, comes to be given a kind of vital or vitalistic formöthe spaces of illness, the spaces of birth and death, of crime and madness, of sexuality and domesticity, of toil and relaxation. And knowledge is to alleviate those doubtsöthe spatial form of the vicissitudes of existence is to be the object of a knowledge that is itself spatial. It is in this sense that the knowledge of space can be used to turn space against itselföto grid it with lines, to limit it with boundaries, to assemble technologies that will govern space, and to govern through space in the name of human life. In analysing these developments, many have found themselves drawn to a kind of binary thinking, where the human passions that space engenders are met with an impulse to control life through space. Thus Robin Evans argued that the ``cumulative effect of architecture during the last two centuries has been like that of a general lobotomy performed on society at large, obliterating vast areas of social experience. It is employed more and more as a preventive measure; an agency for peace, security and segregation which by its very nature, limits the horizon of experience ...'' (Evans, 1997, pages 89 ^ 90). And he called for another kind of architecture, one that does not submit to the impulse of control, but arises out of human impulses to sociality, passion, and carnality. Others, too, propose a similar kind of binary oppositionöa tension between a `will to order' space, and something, in space, that somehow escapes this will. That which escapes this will to order tends to be ascribed to an ineffable human capacityöthe fact that people live in space means they act inventively upon space. For Michel de Certeau, these living humans resist spatialisations; they carve out routes of escape for themselves; they invent counterspatialisations even with the existing spatialisations, even in very minor ways, even in the ways in which they negotiate the cracks in the pavement (de Certeau, 1984). This kind of binary between dystopian and utopian space, between a will to control imposed from above and a striving for freedom arising from below, is tempting. But we find it misleading. Both versions öspatial `control' and spatial `resistance'öare ways of seeking to conquer space, to cope with the generically leaky character of space, to manage space as doubt. To choose to negotiate the cracks in a certain way is to seek to conquer the space of the pavement and the powers it might hold. From our perspective, then, the relation to space in the apparent spontaneity and creativity of the tactical is not different in kind from the strategic relation inherent in the construction of a panoptic technology of surveillance. If we wanted to draw up a typology of ways of coping with space as doubt, an opposition between an abstract logic of spatialisation in architecture, design, and city planning, and a concrete, human, passional way of living in space does not help us.

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Nonetheless, this temptation is widespread. For example, it animates Wilhelm Worringer's epochal distinction between abstraction and empathy in aesthetics: ``Just as the urge to empathy as a preconception of aesthetic experience finds its gratification in the beauty of the organic, so the urge to abstraction finds its beauty in the life-denying inorganic, in the crystalline or in general terms, in all abstract law and necessity'' (1967, page 4). For Worringer, the abstractive impulse arises from a certain suspicion of space (page 15); whereas empathy, on the other hand, seeks to grasp the object on subjective terms. Empathy projects the subject ``into the things of the outer world'' instead of ``taking the individual things of the external world out of its arbitrariness and seeming fortuitousness'' (page 16). This presents us with the familiar binary codification of the either/or, with one term (here, empathy) coded positively, the other (abstraction) coded negatively. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's distinction between smooth and striated space, which builds upon Worringer's thinking, might seem, at first sight, to succumb to the same temptation. Like Worringer, their mode of thinking difference has a biological reference: smooth muscle consists of seemingly undifferentiated surfaces of single spindle-shaped cells whose contractions undulate and flow; striated muscles are regular, ordered, organised into strands of fibres forming a musculature which contracts and relaxes under voluntary control. Striated space, claim Deleuze and Guattari, consists of lines between points; smooth space consists of points between lines. Striated space consists predominantly of closed intervals; smooth space of open intervals. Striated space closes off surfaces; smooth space consists of `distributed' surfaces (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, pages 480 ^ 481). Now, these are not mutually exclusive `opposites', but intermixtures which constantly make use of elements of each other. ``What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combinations; how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces'' (1988, page 500). It is true that smooth space is the space of `flight' and becoming. Hence some radical followers of Deleuze and Guattari accord it a positive valuation, as opposed to striated space which seems to be the space of control. But, for Deleuze and Guattari, the two forms presuppose each other: they refuse a simple opposition between a `progressive' smooth space and a `regressive' or reactionary striated space. ``Never believe that smooth space will suffice to save us'', comment Deleuze and Guattari (1988, page 500). Rather, one has to describe the speeds and movements of the interchanges between the one and the other at different moments and in different contexts. Nor should one think of these spaces in terms of their degree of abstraction: both forms of spatiality are abstract, but in different ways. It is these differences that are crucial. There is no single form of abstraction but different styles or logics of abstraction. Both striated space and smooth space involve abstraction, but so does what Deleuze and Guattari call `holey' space, as does the kind of spatialisation that Deleuze described so beautifully in his analysis of `folding' space in Gottfried Leibniz (Deleuze, 1993). Abstraction, then, is not necessarily a negative phenomenon. Perhaps, from a particular perspective, one could diagnose productive abstractions and restrictive abstractions. But abstraction itself is not something that should, or could, be overcome. It is only a more or less inevitableöwhich is to say, human, anthropologicalömovement of thought in life. Once this is accepted, the notion of `abstract space' in the analysis of spatiality loses some of its critical purchase. Of course, the term can be purely descriptive. Peter Miller, for instance, has characterised the domains upon which accounting and management practices work as `abstract spaces', but he does not suggest that the making of such spaces entails some kind of loss of the richness

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of lived space. Mary Poovey, however, does seem to invoke such an opposition in her use of the term `abstract space' in her account of the different ways in which space is produced and organised in the exercise of power (Poovey, 1995). The apparently critical resonances of this opposition of abstract to lived seems to underpin her exploration of the representational assumptions made, the metaphors of space employed, the relations of materialisation or dematerialisation that are involved. These resonances take us back beyond de Certeau to the work of Henri Lefebvre. For Lefebvre, space becomes abstract only as a result of the crushing of lived experience and its vanquishing by concepts and representations (Lefebvre, 1984; compare Casey, 1997; Poovey, 1995, page 19; see now also the illuminating discussion in Biernacki and Jordan, 2002). But these contrasts between the lived and the represented, the experienced and the conceptualised, the abstract and the concrete miss the point. The spaces with which we are concerned are experienced as much as conceptualised, lived as much as represented. These spaces have a materiality which is not merely imagined but is realised: they are, to borrow a term from Nelson Goodman, ``irreal'' (Goodman, 1978; compare Hacking, 1992; Rose, 1999, page 32). Practices of spatialisation What type of analysis would be capable of producing the kind of open-ended inventory of spatial practices that we envisage? We do not think it would base itself on the suggestion that our contemporary world demands some grand theory of spatiality for its intelligibility. Rather, it would be a more modest endeavour, which would try to draw up a discontinuous inventory of the different styles of spatialisation employed in different spheres of conduct and at different times in history. And, for us, it would be best informed by a spirit of methodological pluralism, drawing upon different disciplines and approaches. One aspect of such an inventory might be psychophysical: it could draw upon the inspiring work of Marcel Mauss on the spatial distribution and local specificity of techniques of the body (1992). Another aspect might be phenomenological: here we could draw on the writings of de Certeau on spatial practices or Bachelard on the poetics of space (Bachelard, 1994; de Certeau, 1984). A further aspect, inevitably, would be historical. For instance, this would include work on spatial practices embodied in the history of architecture and building [as in the studies of Thomas Markus (1993); and Robin Evans (1997)]. But it would also involve work in epistemic history, research that explored the ways in whichöin the various physical sciences, for exampleöspace has been made amenable to thought and hence to both representation and intervention. This last point is important, for the sciences have been significant, and sometimes decisive, in enhancing what can be known about and done to space. This is not to say that the sciences can provide us with a realist understanding of space ö that our analysis of space must be grounded in the vocabularies of physics, anatomy, or geography. As Andrew Barry has pointed out, matters are best understood the other way around: ``these disciplines must themselves be seen as part of a range of technologies historically associated with the engineering of spatial relations'' [(1993, page 463) no doubt partly with Alfred Whitehead (1985 [1925] ) in mind]. But neither are we arguing for an `antirealist' or `constructionist' conception of space. `Space' may be a construct, but `spatial relations' must be real enough if they are to be engineered at all. So it is not a question of antirealism; rather, it is a question of the particular kind of realism one chooses to espouse (see de Landa, 2002). In any event, our inventory is not so much of space `in itself ' as of `practices of spatialisation'. To use Bachelard's term, space is subject to a range of `phenomenotechnical' operations: ``the true scientific phenomenology is therefore essentially a phenomenotechnics.

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It instructs itself by what it constructs ... . Science raises up a world no longer by a magical force immanent in reality, but rather by a rational force immanent to the mind'' (quoted in Lecourt, 1975, pages 76 ^ 77). For us, then, particular spatialisations are thus the products of such a phenomenotechnics ö of techniques and practices that try to conjure up in reality that which has already been conjured up in thought (Bachelard, 1949; also Osborne and Rose, 1999a). In short, whilst others might attempt an anthropology of space, our concern is with an inventory of phenomenotechnics of spatialisationöa project that would be concerned with documenting the variety of ways in which space is actualised by various practices and techniques (compare Osborne and Rose, 1999b). In The Birth of the Clinic (1973), Michel Foucault illustrates what we have in mind. In his examination of the shifts in medical knowledge which had given birth to clinical medicine, Foucault described a number of distinct spatialisations of the medical gaze. These were different spatialisations of the relations between disease, space, and the body. Each was generated within, and presupposed by a different practice of medicine. Thus Foucault suggests that medicine in the 18th century could be characterised along three axes of medical spatialisation. Primary spatialisation referred to the abstract, conceptual space within which the disease was understood: in the 18th century this was the table of classifications of species of disease (the `medicine of species'). Secondary spatialisation referred to the concrete space of perception of the disease: in the 18th century, while the disease was to be understood by its location in the table, it appeared in the sick person himself or herself öhence the doctor must know each of their patientsöa relation of proximity necessary if his or her distorting presence can be `subtracted' to reveal the disease. Tertiary spatialisation was the space of circumscription and division of the disease in the space of society, its distribution in all the apparatuses of investigation, incarceration, or cure: in the 18th century, disease would lose its identity in the artificial space of the hospital, and must ideally be locatedöobserved and treatedöin the natural space of the family. Foucault's three forms of spatialisation might provide a way of thinking about spatiality beyond the context of the medical gaze, in particular in the context of practices of spatialisation associated with the social and human sciences, which, as they took shape in the 19th century, also sought a `positive' knowledge and `knowhow' of individual and collective existence. Let us term primary spatialisation modelling. Practices of modelling concern the modalities according to which space is itself conceived, the ways in which space is distributed within the space of thought, and the array of concepts that divide it up, make relations within it, distinguish and associate points, planes, sectors, and territories. In social thought, an inventory of practices of modelling would attempt to classify the various ways in which space is conceived. In some cases, this spatial thought is explicit. That great sociological Kantian, Emile Durkheim, suggested that the categories of space were not as Kant had argued a priori but were social products. He believed that there were ``societies in Australia and North America'', for example, ``where space is conceived in the form of an immense circle, because the camp has a circular form'' and the divisions of space are determined by the divisions of clans (Durkheim, 1976 [1915], pages 11 ^ 12). For our purposes it is not important whether authors like Durkheim succeed in culturalising, sociologising, or historicising what Kant thought of as transcendental. Rather, our point is that all social and cultural thought presupposes a way of spatialising its objects even when that is not made explicit. Sometimes space has certain magical qualities in that there is a kind of interpenetration of space and that which inhabits it: certain things appear or are revealed only in certain spaces, particular spaces give rise to particular powers, the spatial order of life in some locales is radically different from that in others.

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Sometimes space appears as a two-dimensional grid, as a mere container for events and activities, for example, along the lines of the classical epistemic form that Foucault describes in The Order of Things (1970). Sometimes space is a three-dimensional volume with hidden depths, hidden laws, and determinants öspace, here, embodies some determinants of life, in a model that was characteristic of the epistemologies which Foucault termed `modern' (1970). And, sometimes, as in many contemporary conceptualisations of spatiality in social thought, space is conceived of as itself a kind of active force distributed not in depths but across flat planes, surfaces, relays, and flows (for example, Urry, 2003). Let us use the term realisation for secondary spatialisation. Practices of realisation concern the ways in which space is made thinkable, vision is spatialised, and space is materialised. Realisation is both procedural and inscriptive. Procedurally, in social thought, space is often rendered into thought in rather mundane ways: by tramping the streets, doing participant observation, interviewing, conducting surveys, and the like. Inscriptively, as Bruno Latour has now famously pointed out, space is materialised through a whole variety of inscription devices which make things stable, durable, comparable, and the like: notably surveys, maps, charts, and diagrams (1986). We will have much more to say about these practices of inscription later. We use the term demarcation for tertiary spatialisation. By demarcation, in social thought, we refer to the ways in which topographical fields are marked out and delimited as sites which have salience for investigation. A cursory look at the history of the social gaze shows the way in which it has delineated different topoi as the loci of investigations. Some are dispersed spaces whose borders must be imagined in order to unify that which lies within them: towns, regions, zones, ghettos, edge cities, metropolises, nations, and so forth. Others appear to have natural boundaries of enclosure: schools, factories, hospitals, asylums, museums, and now even shopping malls and department stores. An analysis of demarcation, however, is a matter not merely of describing these various zones and their delimitation and succession, but of trying to identify the problematisations within which these particular topoi have emerged. In the phenomenotechnology of social space, what accounts for the way in which social thought territorialises itself on the problem of the city in the mid-19th century, on the slum in the late 19th century, on the community after the Second World War? That is to say, the activity of demarcation refers to the way in which thought öin this case social thoughtöcomes to privilege particular territories or domains as a surface of application for the generation of problems, theories, hypotheses, and paradigms. In the remainder of this paper, we try to illustrate some of these logics of spatial actualisationömodelling, realisation, demarcationöin the specific context of the history of social thought. We take as our examples two kinds of sociological survey work, associated here, for the sake of convenience, with the names of Charles Booth and Patrick Geddes. This is not, however, an exercise in the history of ideas. Rather we use the names of Booth and Geddes as condensations of two more general orientations towards the actualisation of social space. Crudely, we could say that Booth stands for a kind of moral spaceöa fixed public order of conduct öwhile Geddes stands for a kind of ethical spaceöa self-regulating life of civic existence. But, in fact, different practices for the actualisation of space cannot be divided according to such a mutually exclusive, dichotomous logic. It is notöto return to the vocabulary of Worringeröthat Booth was a representative of an abstract social thought whereas Geddes was a proponent of a more empathetic, organic one. Both thinkers abstracted space, but in different ways. Deleuze and Guattari's distinction could be helpful: Geddes's spaces of sociality seem to us to have some affinities to their smooth spaces, whereas Booth's topography of civility accords more closely with a logic of striation.

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From striation to discipline Central to the work of both Booth and Geddes was, of course, the technique of the social survey. Today the survey appears an `obvious' device of the social sciences: surveys are just what social scientists do. But in fact the social survey should be seen as one of the great inventions of the social sciences: its role is akin to that of the telescope in the natural sciences (see the marvellous essays in Bulmer et al, 1991). The early social investigators did not take the idea of the survey for granted. For them, the survey was an aspect of an ethical commitment to map and to know the social world in particular ways. Booth initiated the technique of large-scale survey investigation in the studies reported in the many volumes of Life and Labour of the People in London (Booth, 1902 ^ 03; for Booth's earliest reports of the surveys of London see Booth, 1887; 1888). Booth is known largely for his findings concerning the urban distribution of classes, of types of labour, of vices and pauperism, but as important were his methods. His moral topographies are amongst the earliest examples of the technology of the survey. The beautiful, detailed coloured maps of the streets of London that were appended to his studies were the very means through which he produced his moral spatialisation. They represent what we might call the survey of surveillanceöthat is to say, the mapping of space represented an attempt to discipline and master it, to impose a kind of order upon it. As Mariana Valverde has argued, these early social surveys were often seen by their proponents as equivalents of the attempts to map darkest Africa, to ``fill in the blank spaces of the map'', and especially to locate those black spots which were held to betoken a ``miserable combination of poverty, vice, and crime'' (Valverde, 1996, pages 498 ^ 499). What are the practices of spatialisation embodied in Booth's work? Along the `primary' axis, modelling is moral. Booth's concepts of poverty and work were not themselves exactly spatial, and nor were his conceptions of the individuals that were poor or engaged in particular types of work. The space that he mapped out was a space of moral distribution and a space in which character and milieu were thoroughly linked together in a dynamic spiral. It was in these terms that Booth drew his social profile of London in its moral aspects. He focused upon the observation, spatialisation, explanation of morality, and its distribution and dynamic characteristics and implications. Booth was also fundamentally concerned with issues of belief, as his studies of religious life indicate. As he put it, he tried to view London life ``under the influences of education, religion and administration'' (Booth, 1902 ^ 03, final volume, page 200). This has led some revisionist historians to suggest that in many ways Booth was not really a sociologist at all (Englander and O'Day, 1995). But this distinction is anachronistic: for early social explorers, social investigation was a form of moral expertise. Second, realisation. Here, above all, Booth is an expert in the technology of the map [see on the epistemics of mapping generally the excellent article by E W Gilbert (1959)]. The poor are individuated in terms of their location within this spatialisation of morality in two dimensions imagined in the map, and opened up to vision through an ocular penetration that would also be the means of moralisation itself. Not only would the realisation of poverty in this way individuate problems of character; when made technical in various ways, it would act, at the very least, to stabilise and order immorality and vice, and at best would actually serve to reform them. Such practices of realisation are about aligning the gaze of the subject and the object of knowledge, aligning the viewer with what is to be viewed. They are about the making available of a visualisable space for thought, selecting out some kinds of information, focusing in upon others, providing a kind of scale of the space of thought itself. In analysis of enclosed spacesöprisons, asylums, hospitals, factories, and so forth öthis relation

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is evident. The norms of the institution are themselves a means of visualisation; the bureaucratic procedures of the institution produce all sorts of records; the walls of the institution seem to provide a natural spatial limit to the empirical gaze. But, when space is not contained in this way, the visual field is not immediately given. Where does one begin to look and how does one begin to see? As Valverde notes, authors like William Booth, who wrote In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), saw themselves imitating heroes like Stanley of Africa, cutting a way through the jungle and into unknown lands (Valverde, 1996; see also Mearns, 1883). Although the metaphor of exploration was real enough, the hint of imperialistic associations may be misplaced. Frederic Engels, no imperialist, had cut his way through the jungles of Manchester in the 1840s, sometime before W T Stead or Andrew Mearns or Boothöindeed, before Stanley. Many others were to take similar trips without desires for conquest, except perhaps in the sense that some `symbolic violence' is entailed by all acts of description. And the survey is not only a means of finding a way for oneself through space, but also a means of rendering space visible for others in a way that can be grasped by the eye in a single look. Of course, many kinds of inscription are possible. Even prose narratives are inscriptions, but a different temporality of attention is required by the kind of narrative that Engels used in The Condition of the Working Class (1887). Tables of numbers and statistics were also used by other social explorers before Booth. But the map has a kind of objective immediacy that makes it highly credible as a phenomenotechnical form. Indeed, social mapping became a great craze for the late Victorians [see Patrick Joyce (2003) for an exemplary discussion of this ethos at work in the mapping of Manchester]. Booth's maps exemplify the powers of this particular inscription device, disciplining the object of social thought in a spatial form. They appear to show directly the linkage between certain kinds of space and certain kinds of conduct. Of course, maps had been used before. One thinks, for instance, of John Snow's famous cholera map based on the spatial `clustering' of cases around the Broad Street pump (Snow, 1855). But Booth's achievement was to inscribe social relations into a visual form that was easy to appropriate at a glance. What was the linkage between population density and the uptake of education in different areas of London? One did not have to be told, one merely had to look to be able to understand. What was the relation between spatial location and relative wealth or poverty? Again, a glance at a map showed one the places inhabited by the very poor, the comfortable, and the well-to-do (Marsden, 1995). In fact, Booth's work both demonstrates and presupposes the centrality of location: one's situation in geographical space holds the key to one's place in social space. Thus the moral characteristics of population are rendered so as to be correlated to existing patterns of social spatialisation. The map distributes social space between enclosing linesöthe dynamic is one of a finer and finer enclosure. The map is thus a means of actualising a striated kind of space. Poverty is mapped onto a hierarchy of spatial forms: first on the form of the city, then on the forms of city streets, then down to city houses and dwellings (Bales, 1991). This chain of milieus provided the content for the entire logic of Booth's social thought. This brings us to the third form of spatial actualisation in Booth's worköhis practices of demarcation. In fact, in Booth's work, practices of realisation and demarcation are superimposed upon each other. His striated forms of realisation are dominated by visuality: they are associated with seeing in a literal or imaginative form; with plans, diagrams, maps, and so forth. Once produced, these concrete realisations of imaginary space stand in, in thought, for that which they realise; that is, they demarcate a `real' series of spaces. Once grasped through these images or plans, the features of these visualisations take on a life of their own, and are invested with powers which appear to allow the mastery of the phenomena they imagine or model.

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Of course, the striation of space may facilitate the exercise of power. This is why a writer such as Poovey can associate this sort of model with Foucault's notion of disciplinary power: ``Against an imaginary geometric grid, which was conceptually imposed upon people and behaviours as well as space, productivity became the measure of value, repetition made time stand still, bodies disappeared into labor power, and norms began to dictate the criteria by which individuals were evaluated'' (Poovey, 1995, page 31). Such striation facilitates practices of subjection. Booth himself, we should note, thought space could be a powerful technology of reformöhe advocated withdrawing someö especially members of his problematic Class Böaway from the tangled matrix of the city to labour colonies outside London, as an ``extension of the poor laws'' (see Hall, 1988, page 90). We know the ideals that lay behind the formation of these enclosed spaces of disciplineöschools, barracks, prisons, and hospitals. And, in such spaces, bodies are indeed marked off from the outside world, divided in space, and organised in timeöa seemingly external, independent, homogeneous, stable, and implacable timeöeven if the actual assemblage of bodies, spaces, and powers in such institutions owes as much to the micrologics of petty violence, bureaucratic convenience, and everyday survival as to the calm lines of striation in the plan. Such disciplinary striation certainly attempted to discipline a form of life by acting on the space in which it occurred, making space visible and managable by gridding it with norms, disciplining it. Historians of architecture have followed Foucault in suggesting that the dominant spatial logic here was one of moral striation (Evans, 1997, pages 93 ^ 118; Foucault, 1979; Markus, 1993; see also Biernacki, 1995). There is a spatial expertise of the school from the very beginning of modern mass schooling in the 19th century. The first experts of the enclosed spaces of the schools were not sociologists, but agents of discipline such as David Stow in the 1830s. A better example of a microtechnician of territory would be difficult to find. Stow designed schools with an eye to the moral observation of each child, introducing galleries designed to focus the children's attention on the teacher, and lesson posts with pictures attached, around which children and their monitors would cluster when not being taught in the gallery (Donald, 1992, page 34; Jones and Williamson, 1979; compare Hunter, 1988). These disciplinary enclosures operated in a wider spatial field: they were elements within a more general spatialisation of technical and regulatory thought. The schoolroom exemplifies this. The spatialisation of thought on the enclosed locale of the school arose from a particular way of problematising the population as a whole öor rather, the habits of the poor öacross the space of the towns. The division of London into police districts, the compilation of police statistics, and a number of other procedural and bureaucratic obligations all contributed to this moral mapping, as did the work of the 19th-century urban explorers. As Karen Jones and Kevin Williamson show, this entailed a complex linkage of elements: the wealth of a nation and the welfare of its labouring poor; the lack of domestic economy and the deterioration of the moral character of the population through the unbridled licence of the poor, especially in the towns; the shamelessness consequent upon neglect and ignorance of religion; the political threats posed by crime, insubordination, and the lack of the principles of integrity and prudence. The striated and enclosed space of the schoolroom would use this space against that wider space: it set the moralising space of instruction against the demoralising spaces of the towns and their milieu. One can certainly link the kind of striated space we see in Booth's surveys with the workings of disciplinary power. But we should be wary of producing a too negative conception of striated spatialisation. Striation always has reversible effects, and produces its own obverse: thus, in the locus classicus, disciplinary power produces not merely docile bodies, but also productive bodies, with the additional

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dangerous possibility that, from this time on, the capacities of the body itself might be set against the procedures that would discipline them (Foucault, 1979; compare Deleule, 1973). Similarly, from one point of view, Booth's striated maps are technologies of moral knowledge and moral intervention; yet, at the same time, they expose the intolerable state of poverty in the heart of the city. Whereas some critics would oppose the abstract space of the map to the concrete lived spaces of existence, for us the maps themselves are neither good nor bad: striated space has no inherent politics. Smoothing out striation Striated space is, however, if not static, at least fixed: organised, ordered; such space bounds, structures, frames, and locates action; and practices of discipline, regulation, subjection take place inside these spaces (compare Lakoff and Johnson, 1981). Of course, one can move in striated space, but movement here is `between' spaces rather than `through' space [see Booth (1901) on `improved means of locomotion' between spaces]. Similarly, time is detached from space. Striated space can enclose time as series or progression, but it cannot embrace time as movement. Striated space forms boundaries, places limits. It captures and distils a set of phenomena in highly powerful ways, but precisely because of this it is always failingöit always leaks. The enclosed spaces are populated by corrupt, venal, mischievous subjects; plans go awry; people get richer or poorer; they move or die; things change; spaces change. Striated spatialisation, precisely because it aspires to a certain rigour or rigidity, is vulnerable to forces that would turn its lines into points, open up its intervals, and redistribute its surfaces. What, then, of smooth space? Could there be such things as `technicians' of smooth space? Smooth space seems to lack ideologists or theorists of the ilk of Jeremy Bentham or Booth. Smooth space seems to invoke the decomposition of the rigid segmentarities of striated space; attempts to engineer smooth space would seem inherently paradoxical and self-defeating. It is true that, while smooth space may lack technicians, it does not lack advocates or even practitioners. We might include here a whole variety of personae: Walter Benjamin botanising the asphalt, George Orwell on the road to Wigan Pier, or Swampy and his fellow ecowarriors using the smooth space of the tree dwellers to oppose those who would striate space for roads and airports (Barry, 2001). But what would it mean to be a technologist of smooth space? It would not be enough simply to reflect upon the ineffable mobility of the lived, experienced social world. A technologist would be someone who would try to make such space, to use it, to instrumentalise it. A technologist of smooth space thus would have to be more than simply an intellectual of space. Perhaps Deleuze's term is appropriate: they would have to be a `mediator' or `intercessor' of the spatial field (1990). We suggest that Geddes, knowingly or unknowingly, was such a figure. If we regard Geddes as just such an intercessor we will be able to find something positive in his contribution to the history of social thought. For, at first sight, Geddes appears as nothing if not a failure. Who reads Geddes now? He comes down to us as a maverick figure, straddling many disciplines and causes: botany, biology, geography, civics, sociology, social reform, town planning. In the early years of the 20th century, Geddes was involved in the foundation of the Sociological Society, an advocate of what he called `civics' and the technique of the survey in contrast to the poverty-studies approach of Booth, on the one hand, and to the eugenicist approach of Francis Galton, on the other (Geddes, 1904a; 1905; for information on Geddes see Boardman, 1978; Defries, 1927; Mairet, 1957; Meller, 1990). But was Geddes a failure? Take the inaugural sessions of the Sociological Society, from 1904. These sessions, published in Sociological Papers (soon to evolve into the Sociological Review), were really the beginnings of British sociology as an academic discipline. Although quite widely reported in the press,

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Geddes's call for a sociology that would also be an ethical crusade, a concern for cities, and a branch of `civics' ultimately fell on deaf ears (Geddes, 1904b; 1905; both also collected in Geddes, 1906; Meller, 1990). Galton's eugenics pursued its own course, but the dominant tradition in British sociology was to be, broadly speaking, the poverty-survey tradition of Booth (Abrams, 1968; Jones, 1986; Kent, 1981). In spite of his extraordinary energy, nothing much came of Geddes's own concerns. These were not directed at the amelioration of poverty but at the ethical invigoration of conduct. ``It is'', he wrote in 1919, ``as with a shop: we have stocked it with goods: but where are the customers?'' (quoted in Boardman, 1978, page 300). But, before we disqualify this project as a failure, we need to be sure that we have properly understood what it embodied. Geddes seems to us, in however hesitant and confused a fashion, to be trying to invent a new problem space: to generalise the model of civics beyond the specific frame of the city itself; to turn the striated space of the civil city into the smooth space of civics as ethics. The Greeks, we are told, inaugurated a long-standing association of the city and closed space, contrasting the allocative space of the city with a more open space of distribution, the nomos: ``When the ancient Greeks speak of the open space of the nomosönondelimited, unpartitioned; the pre-urban countryside; mountainside, plateau, steppe öthey oppose it not to cultivation, which may actually be part of it, but to the polis, the city, the town'' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, page 481). We could understand what Geddes sought to do as an attempt to break the link between the city and such a closed allocative space. On the one hand, this involved turning the city itself into a distributed space. On the other hand, one had to dissolve the specific link between civility and urban space and to replace it with a more dynamic, open, ethical notion of civics. Geddes was aware that this project posed considerable practical difficulties: ``This civic self is still too inarticulate: we cannot give it clear expression: it is as yet mostly in the stage of a strife of feelings, in which pain and pleasure, pride and shame, misgivings and hopes are variously mingling, and from which definite ideas and ideals are only beginning here and there to emerge'' (1915, page 2). Thus, while Geddes undoubtedly saw himself as an intellectual, he realised that his role would have to be as much that of an intercessor of civic forms. Hence, unlike Booth and those who emulated him, Geddes was concerned directly with the civic project of intervening in the consciousness of citizens, in the name of `an active, experienced environment'. This, for him, was the significance of the survey and the reason for his extensive promotion of survey methods: `survey before plan' was Geddes's motto. This was also why he was concerned with the organisation of civic exhibitions such as, from 1910, the influential Cities and Town-planning Exhibition and was also the rationale for what one historian of sociology called the first sociological laboratory, Geddes's famous `Outlook Tower' in Edinburgh (Zueblin, 1899). Space, for Geddes, was not that which contains and delimits the possibilities of action and subjectionöon the contrary, space is itself made up of people's perceptions and experiences of the spaces around them. Hence, for him, to work upon one's spatial environment one has to transform those perceptions at the most minute, practical level. For Geddes, the fundamental fact about urban life was that citizens were not fully in possession of a knowledge of their world: what was immediately present before them in their immediate environment was not all that was present in their civic makeup. On the one hand, one had to factor in all the aspects of evolution, and aspects of the whole spatial and territorial experience of the citizens in question. On the other, it was necessary to give citizens resources for rethinking their environment, to enable them to gain an outlook upon their civic circumstances and the future. That is why Geddes sought to act directly upon communities and neighbourhoods through

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practical work. Civic exercises such as the Outlook Tower were one element. He was also engaged with various kinds of social assistance designed to transform the urban environment in order to give the disadvantaged the resources to take charge of their own evolutionary capabilities. This ambition was the rationale for his numerous notational `machines for thinking' designed to align different aspects of the world so as to act upon it with more effect. And the endless surveys or calls for surveys which were so integral to Geddes's vision were aimed at making citizens more conscious of the circumstances of their makeup, enabling them to act upon those circumstances and to shape their future course. We can make use of our three spatialisations to examine the means of actualising space in Geddes's work. First, we can ask how Geddes modelled space. His work here is strikingly distant from the spatial fixing of morality that animated the technicians of striated space, whether urban or disciplinary. Instead of modelling space in terms of morality, Geddes understood space in terms of an ethics of `outlook' (a favourite term of Geddes). The symbol of such an ethics, the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh, was a site where citizens could go. After surveying the city for themselves through the camera obscura at the top of the building, they would descend by stages through exhibitions devoted to the historical evolution of Edinburgh, to Scotland, to the Empire, to the world, and out again into the street (Meller, 1990, page 102). The striated moral codification of social space for someone like Booth was about governing the moral conduct of others. But, in the ethics of outlook, space was conceptualised in terms of the ability of each citizen to find his or her place in the course of evolution and to search out the best means by which to act upon the future. We could say that such an ethics sought to enable civic action by creating the conditions in which one could insert oneself as a point in smooth space. It was not a question of drawing up lines of striation in which one imagined oneself to be constrained. Indeed, even in his work on India, Geddes railed against the `engineering' models of urbanisation then in vogue amongst urban planners (Geddes, 1918; Hall, 1988, page 246). And whereas the moral codification of someone such as Booth in effect froze time, the ethics of outlook sought to open it out to the future. Instead of the homogeneous time actualised by striated space, smooth space opens up the idea of a kind of space ^ time assemblage. One is not monitored or processed according to a pregiven logic of series or development in smooth civic space. Instead, the civic activities of the locality, the neighbourhood, and the region produce their own time ^ space. In this sense, the Outlook Tower was meant to be both the symbol of such a smooth space ^ time assemblage and precisely such an assemblage itself in material form. How did Geddes attempt to bring such a smooth conception of civics to its realisation? Like Booth, Geddes was obsessed with the visual instrumentalisation of thought; with maps, graphs, and so on. But Geddes continually sought to find a way to go `beyond' the two-dimensional idea of mapping. He wanted to turn thought itself into an instrumentally aided technique of perception, above all with the use of notational techniques and diagrams. Hence his remarkable preoccupation with devising categories of notationöusually derived from his series of `place, work, and folk' ö which he would put to work in a delirium of combinations, folding into each other at the maximum speed, with maximum economy of presentation in order to generate as much distance and movement as possible. Geddes wanted to map the place ^ work ^ folk trichotomy onto a myriad of others, showing how they all interrelated, opening up a sort of three-dimensional space of thought. This is why Colin Mercer is right to emphasise that Geddes's work represents a `notational shift' in means of knowing the city (Mercer, 1997). Only with the right categories and the right notational logic given to those categories, Geddes thought, would a true civics beyond the city be possible.

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One might say, then, that the notations are to get one from lines to points, to open up distributed surfaces, to escape confined spaces of thought and conduct. The notations are not representations of the world, nor are they lines that are meant to subdivide reality; they are a means of technologising smooth space, actualising social space itself in new and unforeseen ways. Speed and condensation have their drawbacks of course. Geddes's condensed style of presentation has defeated all but a determined minority of readers. His fetish for developing systems of notation and classification has been similarly baffling to most. Geddes's second address to the Sociological Society is a particularly telling example of this (Geddes, 1905; Meller, 1990). Starting with the trinity of place, work, and folk that he had adapted from Le Play, Geddes insisted that place is not simply a topographic idea but has a conceptual zone of indeterminacy, intermingling with the category of work, such that we have a new category of place-work; that work is an aspect of folk thus leading to a new hybrid category of folk-work. And so forth, until the analytical trinity of place, work, and folk has been broken down into nine further elements. One ends with a classification, but hardly one that provides a clear perspective (compare Geddes, 1905, page 69; Novak, 1995, page 29). Geddes certainly strove for clarity and failed, but this way of thinking does not have its effects though generating clarity. For the ethics of outlook is not about finding some kind of fixed perspective: it is the construction of a sort of civics `machine' for actualising a way of living in smooth space. Geddes's strange lectures do not work as talks that were meant to be `listened to' or `understood'; but they do work as exemplifications of certain kinds of machinery for getting oneself from one point to another. They can be seen as little dramatisations of how to actualise and move about in smooth space. In other words, Geddes's message was performative. His work did not seek to impose a new and fixed means of achieving civility; instead, it exemplified a way of breaking out of striated conceptions of urban civil spatiality. For there can be no pregiven means for escaping striated space. One has to invent means and mechanisms for doing it oneself. Thus to be a technologist of smooth space is to be an intercessor, providing the means by which othersöcollectives, groups, neighbourhoodsömight do it themselves. Geddes himself played just such a role as mediator or intercessor in relation to the regional-survey movement that developed in Britain between the wars (Wells, 1935). This brings us to the third axis of our inventory of the modes of actualisation of spaceöthat of demarcation. For Geddes, the survey embodied a logic of demarcation that was very different from the social surveys that Booth exemplified. If one wanted to write a genealogy of his thinking ö its regional character which was opposed to narrow urban thoughtö one would go back to Le Play and the French school of social geography (Clark, 1973). Influenced by this movement, Geddes put the region at the very forefront of his concerns. Indeed, for Geddes, one simply could not know the city without having a sense of its regional environment. In that sense, the concept of the region is actually prior to that of the city in Geddes's thought. ``It takes'', says Geddes, ``the whole region to make a city'' (1904a, page 110). This is why we suggest that Geddes generalised civics beyond the form of the city. For example, in Cities in Evolution, Geddes proposes to limit the effects of urban sprawl by folding the space of the region into that of the city: to ``make the field gain on the street, not merely the street on the field'' (Geddes, 1915, page 96; quoted in Hall, 1988, page 147; also, for his later views, see Geddes, 1925a; 1925b). Meanwhile, Geddes's development of the idea of the valley section (see Geddes, 1925b), derived from the work of Elise¨e Reclus and Vidal de la Blache, is another example of the way in which he attempted to make the image of the city more than just the effect of mapping the city's presence, and to capture an

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idea of the city in its regional context rather than just in its own urban context. The valley section ö showing the different stages of development along a river, and through time ö conjures up, in pictorial form, an image of the city in its environment and in its development: ``As the river carries down contributions from its whole course, so each complex community, as we descend, is modified by its predecessors'' (Geddes, 1904a, page 106). Geddes pushed this regional thinking to its limit. Whereas the objective survey of the region came to be the norm in the town-planning movement, his concern was with regional studies as an aspect of civics. The regional survey, for him, was not merely a question of mapping a particular space: it had to be both historical and geographical in orientation. The kind of mapping that Geddes advocated was more three-dimensional than two-dimensional: it was designed to map the existing spaces of civic consciousness: ``The attempt to express the characteristic and essential life and thought of a given region in each period upon a series of maps is in fact the best method of understanding the everyday map at which we commonly look so un-thinkingly'' (Geddes, 1904a, page 110). In other words, not all maps are the same. Fundamentally distinct spatialities separate the flat disciplinary maps of people like Booth from the dynamic ethical, active spatialisations of someone like Geddes. For Geddes, then, the survey was not a mere cartography of social space, but nor was it a disciplinary technology: it was a groundwork for a movement from the past into the future as well as for a movement from one kind of space to another, from region to city and inversely. There is a certain performativity to all of this: it is the very activity of doing the survey that is important. Geddes was always rather disappointed that his ideas about regional surveys did not take off in quite the way he intended. He was certainly influential on the early town-planning movement in Britain, and especially on Raymond Unwin and Patrick Abercrombie (see, for instance, Hall, 1988, page 242), but they were certainly not as distant from the logic of striation as he was himself. Nonetheless, whatever the directions of influence, there was a convergence of moments of thought such that in the regional-survey movement, in Britain, the interwar years can fruitfully be associated with Geddes's name. The planning and survey movements in Britain were given impetus by the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909, which allowed local authorities to plan suburban areas and developments beyond the immediate space of the city (Hawtree, 1981). Wells described the regional survey as being not a single form of inquiry, but the `polygraphic' meeting point of a host of disciplines. In Geddes's own terminology, such a survey method would involve a dynamic `` `cinematograph' (rather than a still photograph) and a `polygraph' pursuing simultaneously many lines of inquiry'' (Wells, 1935, pages 3, 12 ^ 13). Undoubtedly, much of the work of the regional and city-survey movement in this period was in the tradition of Booth. But at least some of the impetus involved ideas with a recognisably Geddesian pedigree. In their Introduction to Regional Surveys, first published in 1924, Sybella Branford and Alexander Farquharson wrote that: ``A regional survey is a complete and scientific study of a region from every point of view, all the departments of the study being viewed in relation to one another, and presented in vivid pictorial map and diagram form, and all contributing to an understanding of the spirit of the place and its potentialities, and providing a basis for definite plans for its future development'' (1947, page 4). This was very much Geddes's view. Some of the surveys did indeed conform to this organic model. Industrial Tyneside by Henry Mess, for example, used the Tyne as a kind of valley section, setting out ``as clearly as possible the chief facts concerning the welfare of the inhabitants of the industrial area along the River Tyne'' (1928, page 17).

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This kind of survey was specifically contrasted with the more static pictures of researchers like Booth or Charles Seebohm Rowntree: ``These surveys may be compared to a photograph, perhaps ö to use a recently coined expression ö to a statistical photograph. The corresponding metaphor for this survey of Tyneside would be that of a cinematographic film ... a study of the area as it has changed over a period of about a century, but with a great deal more detail for the later part of that period. It is an attempt to show the forces which have shaped and are shaping its life. It is an attempt to show the strength and weakness of Tyneside, where it is making progress and where it is losing ground, to compare it with other parts of the country and with its own past'' (page 17). Similarly, The Social Survey of Merseyside attempted to provide a complete picture of a whole region, ostensibly owing more to Booth than to Geddes, yet still concerned to show not just the social topography of Liverpool but the civic or community consciousness of its citizens (Jones, 1934, volume 1, page 1). Indeed, in spite of their differences, it can be argued that most of the social surveys of this early period embodied the assumption that the survey was as much a performative event in its own right as a means to further ends to do with policy or politics. For example, even Ruth Glassöhardly a follower of Geddesöregarded the survey as an ethical as well as a scientific tool: ``We found that a scientific method of approach, far from keeping planning from the ordinary man and woman, in fact, brings it to their doorstep and identifies them with their plan and in this way can be said to be not only scientific but democratic'' (1948, page xiv; compare Glass, 1955). This was not, then, just a question of policy or even participation, but of awareness; the survey was to be an instrument for raising consciousness. It is not a matter of identifying direct linksöof personnel or ideologyöbetween the variegated work of the regional-survey movement and Geddes himself. This is not an exercise in the `history of ideas'. Our contention is rather that the ways of actualising space embodied in this movement belong to the same `moment' in the history of thought, one for which Geddes öperhaps because of his eccentricitiesöcan be taken as an exemplar. In this mode of spatialisation, survey work is itself performative: performative in the sense that surveying was to become a part of civics and ethics in themselves. It is performative, also, in that what was at stake was a civics beyond the confines of the city itself. Merseyside not Liverpool; Tyneside not Newcastle: smooth space not striated space. Yet the regional-survey movement, though related to Geddes's concerns, no doubt seems a rather diluted reflection of them. Certainly, there are few records of anyone actually taking up Geddes's suggestions in a more concrete way, although one can find isolated instances: Philip Boardman (1978, page 482) tells us that one William Mann used a Geddes diagram in a lecture on `Education and Citizenship' in 1946. This brings us back to the question of Geddes's `failure'. We have already said that it is difficult to be a technologist of smooth space, or even an intellectual who rationalises or theorises such a mode of spatialisation. But as a mediator, as one who attempts to push the actualisation of space into new directions, Geddes seems less like a dead end in the history of spatialisation. Indeed, in a sense, Geddes had to fail: his project, as he himself conceived it, was not one that could ever be realised. Was he, then, a kind of prophet of a new spatial consciousness? If so, he was a failure even as a prophet, not least because no one understood him. ``He seems to have talked rot in an insulting way...'' commented Edwin Lutyens in 1914. ``He talks a lot, gives himself away, and then loses his temper'' (Hall, 1988, page 247). This is why we prefer to see him as neither technologist, theorist, or prophet, but a mediator. As a mediator, Geddes joins

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those others who, in different ways and at different times, sought out the active, ethical component within social space, seeking to combat the logic of striation that pulls at all who try to actualise a certain spatiality of social life. There are many other candidates in the archive of the history of social thought who shared such an ethic of space: let us mention just two. First, there were the sociologists of the Chicago School. They were able to use the spatial infrastructure of the city as a kind of backdrop or precondition for an understanding of the moral morphology of the city as a whole: positing that the spatial zoning of the city had a corollary in a kind of moral zoning of neighbourhoods (Osborne and Rose, 1999b, pages 748 ^ 749). Of course, it would be odd to claim that the Chicago School of Sociology expresses an actualisation of smooth space. Perhaps, though, it exists at a point of intersection between the striated and smooth problematics of space. Take Robert Park, for example: ``The city plan, for example ... fixes in a general way the location and character of the city's constructions and imposes an orderly arrangement, within the city area, upon the buildings which are erected by private initiative as well as by public authority. Within the limitations prescribed, however, the inevitable processes of human nature proceed to give these regions and these buildings a character which it is less easy to control'' (1967, page 5). The unit of this spontaneity was the neighbourhood. Hence the task of the sociologist was to monitor the threats to an integrated neighbourhood sentiment: ``it is important to know what are the forces which tend to break up the tensions, interests and sentiments which give neighbourhoods their individual character. In general these may be said to be anything that tends to render the population unstable, to divide and concentrate attentions upon widely separated objects of interest'' (page 8; compare Burgess, 1967). Unlike the zoned infrastructure, these moral neighbourhoods are in an unstable, fuzzy equilibrium. The task of the sociologist is an active one: to restore their homogeneity; to allow the realignment of spatial and moral zones; to return the city to its promise of happiness. Perhaps we could also include here the proponents of community studies in Britain and North America, especially after the Second World War. It is true that their explorations of the sociality of the city lacked Geddes's concerns with spatial reflexivity as a component of ethical citizenship. No doubt taking their cue from Talcott Parsons's definition of the community as an ``aspect of the structure of social systems which is referable to the territorial location of persons'', practitioners of community studies came to focus on the spatial aspects of identity and sociality (see Bell and Newby, 1971, page 32). The problematic of spatialisation according to exemplary figures such as Peter Willmott and Michael Young was to get as far as possible into the ordinary aspects of the lives of their subjects. It is as if sociality is to be equated with ordinarinessö as exemplified, for instance, by the `home-centred' couple ö and as if the ordinary is itself an aspect of the location and habits of the spatialisation of persons, their surroundings and environment, their home lives, that whole admixture of spaces and interpersonal contacts that made up the idea of the `community' (Willmott and Young, 1960). Once more, we can see an attempt to move beyond striated space, or rather, to understand that striation is not the prerogative of the technologist of space, but comes about as a result of the microperceptions and habits that traverse the smooth, mobile spaces of ordinary life. Spatial empiricism In 1967, Foucault suggested that there had been a `spatial turn' in 20th-century thought: that whereas ``the great obsession of the Nineteenth Century was ... history... the present

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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'' (1986, page 22). But such dramatic epochal proclamations about the displacement of time by space are actually rather misleading ways to think about the relations between social thought and space. It is true, of course, that social philosophers often structured their thinking on the axis of time and by means of a kind of metaphysics of history: Burkhardt, Condorcet, Godwin, Saint-Simon, Comte, Marx, Durkheim all operate within a kind of historical a priori, not to mention the evolutionary sociologies of Herbert Spencer and the English sociologists of the early 20th century. It is also true that much of this temporal imagination was built into later, and more mundane, social and cultural writing: for example, in the themes of modernisation and modernity that run from postwar North American sociology to the more recent writings of Anthony Giddens and Stuart Hall (Woodiwiss, 1997). But if we turn from such quasi-philosophical deliberations, and look at the earliest `social' thinkers, we find that, as Foucault himself recognised elsewhere, they were `specialists of space' (1980, page 151). From at least the 19th century, the kind of thought that made experience thinkable in social form was spatial: it had to do with concerns ranging from the ``great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat'' (Foucault quoted in Soja, 1989, page 14). And this spatial social and cultural thought was not merely a way of representing its present and its predicamentsöit was a thought that was empirical and technicalöknowing human collectivities spatially was bound up with projects of intervening upon such collectivities spatially. This spatial thought was not merely at the margins, the ephemeral penumbra surrounding the real history of social thought. It was these technicians of spaceösocial statisticians, doctors, urban reformers, town plannersöwho, in making space thinkable, also make it practicable, and enable certain intellectual and practical authority to be exercised over human beings by acting on the spatial aspects of their existence. Space, then, is not a recent obsession of social thought: in its empirical moments it has long acted as a sort of `clearing' for thinking about the inescapable and troubling spatialisation of human individual and collective experience. And, we suggest, it is precisely these modest empirical forms of social thought that, throughout their history and in a whole variety of ways, have made the multiple spaces that those who live within their scope inhabit. It is true that much of that social thought embodied and enacted projects for the striation of space. But to characterise such spatial thought in terms of a perpetual aspiration to fixity, regulation, discipline, and order would be misleading. Similarly, the `smoothing out' of spatial thought does not require postulating some kind of romantic space of `otherness'. The kind of social thought that could actualise smooth space would need to turn towards the world itself and remain immanent to it. It would embrace not the subjectivism of a fake nomadism, but simply empiricism. Thus, rather than seeking a novel spatial philosophy required to underpin a new kind of social science for our contemporary world, we might learn more from recovering the numerous `spatial turns' that have long characterised social thought (compare Silber, 1995). While such historical work would be somewhat empiricist in method, its relation to the present and the future might also be thought of as `utopian' (Foucault, 1986, page 24). This kind of historical empiricism might enable us to escape Foucault's opposition between utopia as an unrealised space and heterotopia as an other space. For across the last two centuries at least, the multiple empiricisms of the spatialisation of striation have always been met with equally empirical and inventive activities that have sought to actualise smooth space. Yet, in every moment of smooth space, forces of striation operate and begin to stabilise

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