ABSTRACT
The socio-material realizations of cities, communities, and landscapes are based on very different, even competing and conflicting forms of knowledge and processes of discursive knowledge formation, circulation, and transformation. Although this symbolic dimension of space and spacing was emphasized early on by Robert Park or Anselm Strauss, for a long time sociological perspectives of knowledge and discourse analysis played a subordinate role in spatial and urban research. This has changed in recent years, but the potential of sociological and discourse-analytical approaches to the analysis of the knowledge-based symbolic realization of (socio-)material spaces is still only rudimentarily visible. This article introduces the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD) and discusses its suitability for the investigation of the symbolic and socio-material construction of spaces. The SKAD integrates theoretical traditions and concepts from US-American pragmatic sociology with the sociology of knowledge of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann and the discourse perspective of Michel Foucault. It provides a conceptual and methodological framework for investigating the discursive construction of (spatial) reality. This framework allows us to understand actors and subject positions, meanings, practices, and dispositifs or materialities in discursive processes and to analyze their mechanisms, dynamics, and effects.
