The significance of space and place

Many contemporary writers have emphasized the fundamental role of the space–place distinction in contemporary life and globalization. For example, Giddens (1990) writes that in traditional societies, space and place largely coincided since social interactions occurred under conditions of ‘presence’. In contemporary society, with increasing interactions between ‘absent’ others, space is separated from place, and activities are coordinated without necessary reference to the particularities of place. The experience of the ‘here’ and ‘now’ is tied to and contingent on actors and actions at a distance. Such discussions have helped to refocus the political role on the ‘local’ and to emphasize the tensions that arise in the interplay between the local and the global.

Space and place serve as powerful metaphors to understand the global and the local, respectively, and the tensions that arise when social practices play out simultaneously in the global and the local. Schultze and Boland (2000) describe place in terms of its association with the sense of boundedness, localness and particularity, as contrasted to space and its sense of universal, generalizable and the abstract. The distinction between place and space can be conceptualized with respect to the meanings that people ascribe to locations – physical or imagined. Spaces serve as containers or receptacles for places whose meanings are shaped by what one does in them.