Commentary Thinking spaces, differently?

This commentary responds to the discussion on the shifting ways that geographers approach questions of space. Questioning what is at stake here, this response asks whether the viewpoints of those involved in the exchange can be said to represent the range of possible positions taken on the importance of space and spatiality in theory. Keywords epistemology, key thinkers, ontology, theory Space, place and nature are often positioned as the three key metaphors which fire the geographical imagination (Gregory, 1994) but space tends to be privileged within this triad, having becoming ‘the everywhere of modern thought ’ (Crang and Thrift, 2000: 1) thanks to the putative ‘spatial turn’. Com-monly identified as having unfolded since the 1980s, in no small part due to the combined efforts of Harvey, Soja, Lefebvre, Jamieson et al. in reas-serting the importance of space in social theory (Warf, 2009), this spatial turn is noted to have challenged the privileging of time/history over space/geography in a diversity of disciplines, not just geography’s close relatives, but also its distant cousins. Its effects have been manifold, encoura-ging a multidisciplinary attempt to appreciate the spatial production of society, as well as the social production of space: During the last 20 years or so, a ‘spatial turn ’ has made its way across the social sciences and huma-nities. It has arisen from all kinds of theoretical and practical impulses, but its effect has been clear enough: the identification of what seems like a constantly expanding universe of spaces and territories, each of which provides different kinds of inhabitation... through an emphasis on the unremitting materiality of a world where there are no pre-existing objects. (Thrift, 2008: 140) As such, talk of space is now common not just in architecture, urban studies and planning, but also sub-jects as diverse as archaeology (Blake, 2004), histor