Space, Power: Spatial Turn On Community Research

From the 1990s, China's urbane life has been experiencing a fierce change. With the development of diversification of economy and further disintegration of Danwei system, together with the course of furthering reform and functional changes of the enterprises and institutions, the basic community's structure is being involved in a disintegration-and-reintegration process. As a result, the landscape of community is also changed. This change of landscape not only represents the adjustment of social relation, but also records and describes the living conditions of the people living there. The fact that landscape can somewhat reflect social life initiates my interest in exploring the relation between space and society. Therefore, this dissertation tries to analyze the production of urban community space from spatial perspective, based on the survey in Xi Chang Kou Community of Wuhan City, Hubei Province. And because space itself represents power structure, this dissertation can also be regarded as an analysis of the production of power in the community from spatial theory.The two main questions I try to answer in this dissertation are like this: the first, the background and logic of the space development of China's urban community since 1990s. The second, what kind of structure changes is urban community, as the living environment of urbane residents, experiencing? And what is the moving logic of these changes?In order to answer the questions mentioned above, first of all, we have to look on community from the aspect of the flow of economy, putting it into the background of structure reform and social transformation, or even more extensive global time-space background. Next, to discuss the interaction of allocative resources and authoritative resources inside community, a power container, we have to take such things into consideration: the moving logic of the resources, the space praxis of subjects, and the interaction of these two. In addition, the constructional differences and creating experimental facts during the community's spatial development are deserving of attention as well. Around the two main questions, this dissertation is divided into three parts. The first part is introduction. The content includes: the origin and importance of social spatial perspective, the introduction of related document and former research, the frame of the dissertation.Social spatial perspective is the ontology and epistemology emphasizing the unification of corporality, spirituality and sociality of space. This perspective focuses on the dual relation between society and space: on one hand, human have to behave in the space under the influence of social structure. On the other hand, human can represent their need and desire through creating and changing space.To research community from this perspective is superior to its traditional counterpart in these two points. Firstly, it compensates for the loss of community research from State-and-Society perspective. Secondly, it draws the fact of economy into the field of community research. However, the superiority of this perspective goes far beyond this. It provides an opportunity for varies of social theory to test their applicability in analyzing and resolving community problem through space.The second part is the theory of "the production of space". It begins with the analysis of the background, characteristics and importance of space turn of social theory. On the basis of the analysis, this dissertation re-interprets space, and draws the conclusion like the following: for ontology, space is represented during the course of creation and existence. It contains social relation, hides it as well. As for epistemology, space is natural, spiritual, and social; space praxis, the representation of space and the space of representation makes up the une diqlectiaue de triplicite. Following the conclusion above, I propose the research frame of this dissertation. That is, to analyze the production of community from the points of economy, government and society.The third part contains chapter three, four and five. According to the frame mentioned in part two, based on the survey, these three chapters analyze the production of community with the help of the une diqlectiaue de triplicite of space from the aspect of economy, government and society.Chapter three discourses how economy produces the space of community from three aspects: production, circulation and consumption. This chapter is mainly divided into two parts, the period of planned economy and the period of the disintegration of nation, market and society. During the first period, economy was integrated into the logic of politics, thus it could only produce and reproduce its space in the frontier space, which refers to street office and neighborhood committee. During the second span, economy spin community space off the space of Danwei by means of readjusting industrial structure, improving circulating environment and stimulating collective consumption. Consequently, the representation of community space is also changed.Chapter four discourses how government produces the space of community. This chapter is also divided into two parts, the period of planned economy and the period of reform. During the first part, the conception of uncorrupted government is represented in the space, thus the space of sub-district and community committee hides themselves into the representational space. During the second span, central government transforms at a different speed from their local counterpart. Therefore, government represents two suits of symbolic ordered structure. As subjects can choose the symbolic ordered structure more preferred, their praxis conflicts in the community. A new community order hence comes into being.Chapter five firstly clear which subjects belong to society on the basis of document collation as well as field work. Then, it analyzes the representation of space and the space of representation of the subject. Next, it discourses how the subject define themselves and their relation to others through praxis and how this praxis produces a real-and-imagined space.