Representational Structures as Stances: Examining Relationships to the City Under the Lens of Socio-Spatial Representations

This paper puts spatial cognition to the test of the social representations paradigm, drawing on insights from the positional and structural approaches of representation, to complement existing findings on social groups pre-constructed on the basis of an approach focused on the social cognition of space.1 We posit the hypothesis that different relationships to urban space and their underlying spatial representations relate to distinct social positions. To confirm this, we developed a quasi-experimental method based on a questionnaire inducing hierarchized mentions of places in Strasbourg, submitted to employees with different statuses in the same institution, the University of Strasbourg. Five spatial representations are identified using hierarchical agglomerative clustering and described in prototypical analyses. Relationships to urban space are also investigated using an analysis of the functional and/or evaluative dimensions of representations. The sociological characteristics associated with each type of representation support the general hypothesis of a structural homology between spatial representations and social positions. The structure of the representational content (places) of Strasbourg indeed varies according to the socio-occupational status, level of education and age of the agents of the University of Strasbourg. The relationship to space of members of the lower social classes is instrumental, whereas that of the most economically and culturally privileged is symbolic/aesthetic. The salient features of spatial representation and their functional and/or evaluative dimension are the cognitive components of a stance that inseparably relates to the individual’s social position