ABSTRACT
Martina Löw uses her experience in architectural juries and planning workshops to address the question of how we can offer a sociological perspective on the quality of spaces in practical policies and actions. In her chapter, she looks at implicit assumptions of quality in social research and at the few explicated notions of quality found in both philosophical and sociological texts. She draws on relational socio-spatial theory complemented by postcolonial and topological aspects to develop a perspective for a sociological survey of spatial qualities. Her argument is that qualities reside in acts of meaning-making interacting with the effects of the stock of social goods and objects in the spatial environment as a network. She differentiates between qualities and quality, and between diagnostic qualitative survey (analysis) and evaluative assessment (judgment). Her conclusion is that condensing the evaluation of qualities into a quality judgment against a diagnostic background is one way of thinking about improving the quality of spaces.
