ABSTRACT
Development, policy, planning, and governance are all directed at the public and claim to serve the public health, safety, and welfare. Yet, in these discourses, people largely appear in the form of bodies and abstract categories such as populations, publics, and the civil society represented through impersonal means such as statistics, maps, and ideologies. Questioning top-down approaches to housing, planning, and development, scholars and professionals have argued for grounded, bottom-up, community-based, and advocacy approaches. Yet our knowledge of the spaces ordinary people produce for and through their everyday activities and cultural practices is minimal. In Abdou Maliq Simone’s (2010a: 285) words, there has been a lack of attention paid to “the continued small and medium-level developments of residential and commercial districts . . . within cities for a long time.” This volume focuses on the spaces of ordinary people. Leading scholars of social space such as Henri Lefebvre (1991) and David Harvey (1973) have introduced us to a whole range of social spaces. Still the scholarly attention is almost exclusively devoted to absolute and abstract spaces: the “raw” physical space that is “out there” and the spatial structures produced by dominant social actors. A large majority of urban and spatial scholars-many implicitly-base their work on the belief that they have direct cognitive access to absolute space, i.e., “raw” physical space prior to definition, classification, and categorization into rivers, valleys, and built elements. In regard to socially produced spaces, literature largely focuses on abstract spaces, particularly the forms, structures, and processes established by dominant actors such as the state, corporations (companies), and the wealthy who hold power to both shape and erase spaces and histories of others. As the holder of formal political power to regulate activities and the physical environment, the state is the main producer of abstract space. Through programs, plans, laws, policies, and policing, states create, restructure, define, and organize space at neighborhood, urban, regional, and national scales. Standardization is a key
feature of statecraft (Scott 1998). According to Richard Sennett (1992), the ordered and standardized urban-form is mainly constituted of business-enterprise ideology, particularly the commodification of land and buildings. One of the main instruments,
[the] grid iron creates regular lots and blocks that are ideal for buying and selling. . . . They are abstract units detached from any ecological or topographical reality. They resemble a kind of currency which is endlessly amenable to aggregation and fragmentation.
