The spatial turn. Conquest or fetish

Abstract

In the course of the eighties to the nineties of last century, the social sciences experienced an enormous diversity of interdisciplinary movements that initially had an openly emancipatory and political goal. Space was the key term in this process because it was presented as the concrete and physical milieu for the encounter among the different social sciences and, more importantly, the encounter between social agents and everyday life. This article outlines a possible parallel of that process in the field of architecture, which followed a very different chronology and produced achievements and failures displaced over time. The gradual and increasing interest of social scientists to space, and the harsh critical formulations against modern architecture argued by the critique of the everyday life, provoked a disciplinary self-criticism that led to different and even opposing fronts. Most recently, this complex cultural phenomenon has driven to a review of the premises that supported such critique. The goal is the search for complementary ways of re-politicization of architecture in order to counterbalance the absorption process to which the critique of everyday life is currently exposed.