Raum des 'Wirklichen' und Raum des 'Möglichen'.

Versuche zum Ausstieg aus dem 'Container'-Denken

Abstract

Must (social-)geography be re-invented? Both the political restructuring of the world after the end of the cold war and the third industrial revolution (underemployment yet over-production) have led to the disembedding of late-modern societies; people have become globalized and need to re-locate themselves (glocalisation).However, scientific efforts in geography are at the same time largely determined by differing approaches: the individual schools of thought (from empiristic-positivistic science and technical control to humanistic science and mutual understanding and realistic science and emancipation (Johnston)) have great difficulty understanding each other. Thus researchers and teachers require a subjective approach to the following question: To what extent has society changed spatially (Are people produced by history and places? or Do people produce history and place?), and how can this be explained epistemologically and operationally? The concept of dromologie used by Paul Virilio, the French researcher into modernization, describes the phenomenon of the global acceleration of information culminating in the real time and progressing de-spatialisation. The German sociologist, Gerhard Schulze, has, in his milieu-theory, made the pluralism of life styles and inclusive differentiation in late-modern societies empirically describable. The English sociologist, Anthony Giddens, has in his theory of structuration identified the ways and means by which subjects structure their world. The German geographer, Benno Werlen, has provided a theoretical concept with regard to day-to-day regionalization by the action(s) of individuals (using E. W. Soja’s term making geography). In addition, many other social sciences have concerned themselves with relational space (as opposed to space as substance or container): Michel de Certeau with his art of action and behavior in space(s), Michel Foucault with his other space(s)/heterotopes. Four practical attempts at a subjective approach to the way space as objectively placing reality into life through the possibilities of action (after the global internet crash and the collapse at/of the building sites in Berlin, both in August 1997, should make engineers, technologists and technicians reconsider their roles): Passages as substance and medium; making geography in the heterotopic design of the open space; the new shopping centres in Eastern Germany with their detrimental effects on inner-city development; the spatial and social qualities materiality of the diaphanous Convention Center in Manhattan and the materiality of the Japan Center in Frankfurt-on-Main as an expression of exclusive difference.