The Imagination and Representation of Space in Everyday Experience

Abstract

This article examines the imagination and representation of space in everyday life from the perspective of social geography. Drawing on cultural theory, the article presents space as a multifaceted entity that is perceived, constructed, and reproduced through everyday praxis. It stresses on the situatedness and contextuality of the perception, construction, and representation of spatial categories and relations. To this end, three dimensions of space are discussed: (i) the representation of space in map form, one possible version of which is the concept of the route, founded on a topological representation of space; (ii) the scalar dimension of space, which involves the scaled representation of everyday space and the various socially, economically, and culturally determined scalar levels on which everyday experience occurs; (iii) the dimension of spatial continuity, which the authors discuss in conjunction with reflections on the ways in which space is represented, and next to the notion of space as an omnidirectional continuous medium they introduce a concept in which space is understood as a series of separate, meaningful entities integrated through mobile technologies to form a time-space network. This theoretical discussion is accompanied by an empirical section that draws on the spatial experiences of five users of power wheelchairs to describe examples of technologically and culturally conditioned imaginations of space.

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