ABSTRACT
As we have seen over the past ten years, space has become one of the central issues for social theorists. We have seen the emergence of work from critical human geographers (Thrift 1983, 1996; Massey 1984; Gregory and Urry 1985; Harvey 1989; Soja 1989; Cooke 1990; Shields 1991; Zukin 1991; Jackson and Penrose 1993; Keith and Pile 1993; Gregory 1994; Pile and Thrift 1995), feminist geographers (Rose 1993; Massey 1994) and cultural studies analysts (Wilson 1991; Carter et al. 1993; Bhabha 1994) that puts space at the centre of questions of social theory. Much of this recent cultural geography draws on earlier theoretical interest in space to be found in French social theory in the works of Bachelard (1969), Foucault (1977, 1980) and Lefebvre (1991). In addition, anthropology, which, much more than sociology, has had a longstanding interest in space (see Durkheim and Mauss 1963; Durkheim 1971; Turner 1969; Douglas 1984), has started to have a wider impact on spatial theory.
