Abstract
Social demographers are pushing back from the totalizing norms of a-spatial theory. Population dynamics affect, and are affected by the attributes of geographic places at multiple spatial scales. Spatial analysis in demography has benefitted from methodological advances, and from new theoretical perspectives in which space as a simple container of social behavior has been replaced by relational thinking in which spatial units play a causal role in social and demographic processes. In this perspective, space is a relatively abstract term that lacks substantive meaning. In contrast, place and community are created when people organize space, give it meaning, and identify with it. As Jones and Woods (Reg Stud 47:29–42, 2014) have observed, places and communities have both material and imagined coherence. Their material coherence is comprised of social, economic and political structures while their imagined coherence is characterized by a sense of place, and emotional and behavioral attachments to place. Demographic behavior contributes to the production and reproduction of a place’s institutional structure, while demographic relationships spanning place boundaries contribute to economic, social and political interdependencies. Like other social boundaries in contemporary society, spatial boundaries have become increasingly permeable, and spaces of intense social, economic and political interpenetration. Accordingly, the utility of spatial binaries such as urban vs rural is called into question.
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Notes
- 1.
I have little to add to their discussion of the nature and history of social demography. Hence, I recommend that persons interested in understanding this set of issues read Hirschman’s and Tolnay’s (2005) original chapter.
- 2.
Rural sociology, including rural demography, is an exception to this statement. The Rural Sociological Society’s (1993) landmark analysis of rural poverty exemplifies this spatially oriented scholarship.
- 3.
For ease of exposition, I use” space” and “place” interchangeably in this paragraph, but they have different meanings in the social sciences. These different meanings will be developed in the next section.
- 4.
- 5.
In addition to spatial scale, social scientists also examine data aggregated into temporal, and thematic scales.
- 6.
In addition to spatial scale, gender scholars point out that households are sites of diverse social processes which play somewhat analogous roles to spatial units as contexts for social and economic action (Marston 2000). This is entirely consistent with the conceptual bases of multi-level analysis where households are included along with spatial categories as meaningful social contexts. In this sense, the focus is on the complex interdependent relationships linking households and their constituent members.
- 7.
Brenner (2001: 602) and others also contend that studies of the “production of geographical scale” are unreflexively reproducing “the intellectual terrain already covered quite thoroughly in the academic debates on the production of capitalist spatiality that were initiated over three decades ago by the founders of radical socio-spatial theory.”
- 8.
Collective efficacy refers to the ability of members of a community to control the behavior of individuals and groups in the community.
- 9.
The model I propose here was first developed in Brown and Argent (2016).
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Brown, D.L. (2019). 18 Social Demography, Space and Place. In: Poston, D.L. (eds) Handbook of Population. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10910-3_19
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