The Social Becomes the Spatial, the Spatial Becomes the Social: Enclosures, Social Change and the Becoming of Places in Skåne

Abstract

Places and regions, however arbitrarily delimited, are the essence of traditional human geographic inquiry. Until recently, they have usually been conceptualised and treated in ways that selectively emphasise certain measurable or visible attributes of a circumscribed area during one or more arbitrary periods of observation. Thus, whether presented as elements within a spatial distribution, as unique assemblages of physical facts and human artefacts, as units interacting with one another in a system, or as localised spatial forms, places and regions have been portrayed as little more than frozen scenes for human activity. Even the ‘new humanistic’ geographers who see place as an object for a subject, as a centre of individually-felt values and meanings, or as a locality of emotional attachment and felt significance, in essence conceive of place as an inert, experienced scene.¹