Socioplastics 11894 Conflict Produces Spatial Units
Editorial status: Working essay; full historical marker definition requires source verification. Conflict can produce the spatial boundaries through which it is later described. AgonisticSpace examines how security, access and competing claims organise the relation between public and private space. A street may contain fences, security contracts, informal vending, residents’ claims and pedestrian diversions. Each intervention changes where people can gather and move, shaping the area that later appears as a defined site of conflict. Teresa Caldeira’s research on fortified enclaves and urban segregation shows how arrangements of fear and exclusion reshape public life. Mustafa Emirbayer’s relational sociology understands social actors through processes and relations. Their approaches help ask how conflict produces spatial units and how those units, in turn, influence subsequent claims. The analysis follows changes across time rather than treating a “conflict zone” as a stable container. A study could map the sequence of fences, contracts, informal uses, complaints and route changes on one street. It would record who installed each boundary, what justification accompanied it and how residents and passers-by adapted. Meetings and planning records could show where competing claims entered formal discussion. The resulting account would connect spatial changes with the actors, procedures and histories that gave them force. AgonisticSpace treats conflict as a spatial process with varied outcomes. It can open new forms of public claim and can also harden exclusion, depending on how authority and access are organised. Documenting those effects helps researchers understand how boundaries emerge and whose actions they enable. The working proposition remains subject to a check against the marker’s full historical definition before definitive publication.
REFERENCES
Caldeira, T.P.R. (2000) City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Emirbayer, M. (1997) “Manifesto for a Relational Sociology”, American Journal of Sociology, 103(2), pp. 281–317.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html