ABSTRACT
Understanding the social production of space is a useful starting point for an ethnography of space and place project. It is not the only way to begin, but the historical and political economic approach to space and the built environment offers an in-depth temporal and broad spatial perspective. The social production lens illuminates how a space or place comes into existence and opens up questions about the political, economic and historical motives of its planning and development. It emphasizes the material aspects of space and place-making, but also uncovers the manifest and latent ideologies that underlie this materiality.
