Historians’ space

di Luca Baldissara
in Memoria e Ricerca n.s. 22 (2006), p. 23

In history and social sciences the concept of space has seen like a pre-existent order in which the protagonists are temporal processes. Some geographers have pointed at centrality of environmental element in changing processes, but, until now, this suggestion has not been taken into account because of lack of dialogue between this two intellectual spheres. The necessary historical reappropriation of space also needs to fill up conceptual distance between the definition of space and place, divided in the historical dialect: place is the framework of the conflict, space in the frame of social control. The uninterrupted geographical expansion of capitalistic world-system leads to favourable places for lack of conflict and fragility of rules. These places assure the control of the space in relation to resources, working classes, markets.