social complexity and space

8/13/2019 Social complexity and space

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Social complexity and space

Vinicius Netto

PhD Candidate, The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies

University College London

Abstract

Social and cultural observers have recently observed a world of increasing complexity a problem posed

mainly by the growing production of possibility of information and communication, mobility and connectivity in a

world on the move. However, questions regarding the connection between social complexity and space seemstill unexplored. On the one hand, the society-space debate has not addressed the spatiality of bodily-mediated

communication as a key dimension of social reproduction. On the other hand, descriptions of an increasing

social complexity also seem to evade the spatiality of communication and, by extension, have ignored the role

of space in the production of complexity. This article puts the work of the sociologist Niklas Luhmann under a

geographical perspective in order to argue, firstly, that the problem of space in the communicative sociation of

practice and the problem of increasing social complexity are in fact deeply inter-related; secondly, that this

relation includes space as an active part of the way societies dealwith their own complexity. The article is a

speculation on the role of the urbanisation of space beyond a crucial element in the sociation of practice as

an active means to what Luhmann calls reduction of social complexity, a major problem faced by

contemporary societies.

Key words

Social complexity, urban space, communication, self-referentiality.

1. Introduction

Many researchers have asserted a perhaps risky idea that space matters to society. Such

assertions are part of paradigms that illuminate rather distinct aspectsof socio-spatial reality fromthe Marxist approaches of Harvey, Lefebvre and others to the currently fashionable actor-network

theory. But how do these assertions deal with the problem of a growing social complexity, a

complexity that seems to manifest itself mostly through the increasing production of information,

communication, and the connectivity between agencies and between places the constant

transgression of territorial boundaries through flows of mobilities of people, information and

objects? (see Castells, 1996; Urry, 2001) Space has indeed been included in the problematic of

social reproduction. The social consequences of a production system based on the fostering of

information and connectivity seem to require new theories (Law and Urry, 2002). I argue in this


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article that there is a dimension of this problem that goes mostly overlooked, and that such a

dimension could make a difference in the material understanding of a social reality of growing

complexity.

My aim in this paper is to identify the place of the city in these processes of social complexity: in the

production of vanishing social structures, instantiated at the moment of action, communication. I will

argue that space will be produced as pre-selections of agencies to whom we can interact there,

in the form of an urbanised space produced and structured essentially to stimulate, structure (and

unstructure) bodily-based communication and the recursive emergence of structures of action. The

paper will propose a concept of production of space as a localised form of reducing the complexityof social action. Let me explore this unusual hypothesis: the improbable role of space in social

complexity.

1) Concepts of action, communication, meaning, information and social complexity

2) The need to reduce complexity if social systems are to reach reproduction

3) Structure as a means to the reduction of social complexity (self, hetero)

4) Space and the structuration of space in the form of cities as a means to produce and

reduce/deal with social complexity.

2. Social complexity, structure and communication

[Luhmann himself ignores the role of space, focusing rather on timeas a key factor in social

reproduction, unable to see the environment of practice as encompassing social spatialities.

Nevertheless, I shall work the place of space from withinLuhmanns theory, that is, in a way to take

advantage of Luhmanns concepts in order to see space as part of social structuration and

complexity]. I shall attempt to draw the relation between new forms of social complexity and space

through a set of concepts: action and communication, meaning and self-referentiality, structure and

complexity. These concepts will nevertheless prove instrumental in this speculation on the relation

between social complexity and space. By social action I mean the things that one does that affectinteracting subjects and do so reciprocally, because they are acts, utterances, gestures or

productions of things (objects, texts, hypertexts) that are meaningful, i.e. communicable,

subjectively understandable and appropriated by other people, implying interactions,

agreement/disagreement, omission, reflection, production.1Such a notion addresses more

emphatically the poorly explored dimension of meaningfully mediated interactions that constitutes

the spatial fabric of social life. Luhmann has a particular take on action connecting it explicitly to

communication along with its usual connections to concepts like meanings, etc. Central to

Luhmanns theory are the meaningsproduced in our practice and communication, interpretation


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and mutual understanding. The actualisation of action implies communication, the irruption of

[vanishing structures of] inter-related actions in-the-world. Agencies constantly produce such

vanishing structures. Their reproduction in fact depends on meaningful actions, signs and objects.

Luhmanns connection between complexity, communication, action and structure. Luhmann sees

social systems facing a fundamental problem: they produce more possibilities of meanings and

actions that can be actualised as practice and communication. Roughly, he sees social complexity

as too many choices. Contemporary societies thus would need to reduce their own complexity.

Agencies produce more information and possibilities of action that can actually be realised. The

persistence of social systems requires both projecting new possibilities of choice [of action] andrendering choice sufficiently unproblematic through structurification (Strukturifizierung) (McCarthy,

1984:226 on Luhmann). Societies have to deal withtheir own complexity through selections and

actions. This is where he places his concept of structure. The production of structures as becomes

a way to overcome the complexity of possible actions.

A particular mode of existence of structuresin the social:that ofvanishing communicative

accomplishments. That is, structures would emerge, recursively or not, when the meanings of

words, images and objects produced are interpreted and transformed in the action of others,

sometimes far away in space and time. Now this definition somewhat equates action,

communication and structure, as it were, for such overlapping is in fact a necessity. There is simply

no discontinuity between them (cf. Giddens, 1984; see Luhmann, 1995). Nevertheless, structure

emphasises the social effects of action and communication, as these involve interacting agencies

across space and time. It also asserts that structures, as communicative accomplishments (and

thus always in the plural), exist only at the moment of interaction. They are signs not of an always

already working entity, an organism, a single, unifying structure, but of structural properties that

indeed permit social systems to stretch in space and time.

Social systems therefore areself-referential systemsthat produce and change their own

structures, as action relates to action in real-and-possible chains that go well beyond what is

actually experienced and cognised by agents into other agencies, times and spaces. Meaning is

always constructed self-referentially and therefore always includes reference to others as the way

to self-reference (Luhmann 1995:98).This is [the heart of the self-referentiality of meanings and

social action:] the form that social production and reproduction take, as social structures emerge

and fade away, constantly, as communication and exchanges across time-space].


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Social reproduction would imply selectionamongst possible interacting agencies through

communication, and Strukturifizierung). Luhmann calls this process reduction of social complexity,

i.e. when the complexity of all possible actions is reduced through selection and communication,

and through the recursive emergence of social structures, say in the form of institutionalised

practices and forms of social organisation. The notion of structure as communicative

accomplishments lying at the heart of human practice will be a key in a spatial incursion into the

problematic of a growing social complexity. It serves the purpose of understanding social

complexity as growing levels of production of information and variable connectivity between

agencies across time-space.

3. Space and soc ial complexity

How could space be part of all this? As everything that can be perceived assumes the form of

meaning if it is to attain any effect or connection in the fabric of the real, so it is with space. Of

course the idea of meaning in space is usual in geographical, architectural and archaeological

studies (e.g. Rapoport, 1982; Hodder, 1987; Simonsen, 1991), nevertheless supported by

hermeneutics, speech theory, phenomenological approaches and so on. I would like to reassert the

meaningful condition of space through the idea of practice and Luhmanns concept of self-

referentiality. Although I cannot go into detail here, space becomes meaningful mainly because, in

our actions, appropriation and experience of things, we cognise or attribute meaning, we interact

with them through their meanings to us and to others. Space is one of these things. Space as

materiality becomes meaningful throughpractice (see Werlen 1993:174; Rapoport, 1982;

Simonsen, 1991; Couclelis and Gottsegen, 1997; Hill, 2003). By being meaningful through practice

and its material qualities, space becomes able to be part of the self-referentiality of meanings,

things and actions. Roughly, that would happen as follows. The daily production of actions leads to

other actions and their consequences (events, utterances, objects and so on). These actions and

consequences will relate to those produced before, those ongoing in that moment, and those still to

happen in that place and in others places and times. In this perspective, sociospatial reality isnothing but fluxes of meanings embedding agencies and mobilities of signs and objects, 2filtered,

structured by space; penetrated, referred to, infinitely self-referredthrough space.

As we shall see below, that could only be the case if meaning structured space itself:if even the

rigidity of space would be structured as a structure of meanings. Such a indissoluble relation

between practice and space is in fact a dialecticrelation of phenomena that present themselves to

us through different materialities. Of course, the idea of a sociospatial dialectic is nothing new

but it has mostly addressed the dimension of production and capitalist relations. I will sustain that


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such dialectics could only be possible, at the level of reproduction, through meaningsshared in

practice and in space. However, all these schematic observations refer to a level of reproductionof

action. They of course do not show the whole story. How is space produced to become part of

fluxes of practice, information and objects? Would social structures, in order to emerge and fade

away again and again as communicative accomplishments, involve any particular spatial condition

apart from a meaningful space? In order to understand these aspects of production of action and

of space, we have to address the materiality of space what confers space its identity and quality

as a phenomenon to our senses, ideas and social existence. I will argue that the production of

action will reach deep into the symbolic, practical and also physical production of urbanised

spatialities into the depths of space.

New roles for the city in social complexity

I would like to address space as a problem in social reproduction as informational, meaningfully

mediated processes of action and communication. I sketched above a form of relation between

action and space that, while keeping their phenomenal distinctions, crosses their boundaries

through the self-referentiality of their meanings. That way we could see the structuring of space as

partof a cycle of production, structurationand reproductionof social action. I develop below a form

of relating these stages. That cycle would assume a self-referential form that crystallises the city as

an active material counterpart of the production of social reproduction, as Luhmanns self-

environmentof socialities. I would like to discuss the following hypotheses:

a. Urbanised space as a form of information and social knowledge,thereby increasing the

ability of agents to know and engage in actions that constitute a lifeworld.

b. The city as a form of projection of possible and actual agencies that furthers interactions

and thus the production of meanings (utterances, objects, texts, etc.), increasing social

complexity.

c. The production of space as location of agencies and a materialisation of possibilities oftheir relations (say as intra-urban and urban-regional interlinkages and accessibilities)

consists of a pre-selectionof actions in its own right; a form of rendering the

interconnection of actions sufficiently unproblematic, produced to converge social,

material and immaterial flows.

d. In Luhmanns terms, cities would therefore consist as a form of reduction of social

complexity, presenting itself to practice as a constellation of most possible agencies.

e. Finally, cities as a fundamental part of the self-referential cycle of reproduction: a form of

projecting,increasingand reducingsocial complexity paradoxically, all at once.


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3.1. Space as information and projection o f possibilities

Let me start by asserting urbanised space as a form of information. Meaningful spaces and spatial

experiences may be seen as information about possible actions (see Krafta, Portugali and Lemos,

1998; Faria and Krafta, 2003). But beyond that, spaces are forms of learning about society. They

are in their own right forms of knowledge of how to enact everyday life: knowing spaces means

knowing practices and organisational forms that are institutionalised and constitute a lifeworld (see

Douglas, 1971; cf. Habermas, 1984; Werlen, 1993). This socially reared, individualcollective

learning process seems to include the heuristic formation of a practical knowledge of actual

activities location, and of an intuitive knowledge that activities may find patterned locationsstructured by accessibility cores say, that we may find shops downtown or in certain local streets.

In social contexts where such an information is costly (an inevitability whenever human action

cannot be detached from the economy, whenever material reproduction involve consuming

energies in communication and action co-ordination, and whenever the material world is not a

frictionless reality), urbanised space becomes an always already source of information about

practices, communication and social transactions, and a valuable way of minimising time, energy

and materials. The structuration of space in the form of cities (i.e. the concentration of possibilities

of action in an intelligible distribution of symbolic, practical and physical spaces) increases agents

capacity to observe their social reality, and to selectivity of actions. Structuring space in the form of

cities potentialises the access to action, and the co-ordination of actions.

A step further, space becomes a form of projection of social complexity: the complexity of possible

actions and convergences is there manifested spatially to the lifeworld, a symbolically structured

material realm thus made addressable to practice.The capacity of projecting a largely vanishing,

changing, immaterial social world into a material world is not a mere projection of macro

structures, e.g. class structures or relations of production. Such a projection also happens in a way

to allow social action to emerge creatively and unproblematically through the projection ofmeanings of practice as a constellation of slowly-changing places, which filters, structures fluxes of

meaning that are at the heart of practice, communication, mobilities of agencies and objects. There

relating these agencies in possible interaction is the structure of accessibilities: systems of public

spaces (streets) and built forms like a tentlike distribution, a distribution that seems to offer the

benefit of minimising internal distances within the city and from the inner city to the region, thus

minimising effort and costs in interactions. One may also speculate about what Soja called tentlike

structure as a spatial manifestation that presents itself as a generic physical projection of possible

interlinkages a structure simple and flexible enough in its form and rigidity to support changing


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interactions. That is, the tentlike distribution cannot favour a specific set of interacting agencies

for that would freeze that social system although certain agencies may benefit from (and indeed

compete for) internal connections eased by that tentlike distribution in a certain historic moment.

Thus the relation between our practice and urban space is much more complex than any centre-

periphery relation even if considered in multiple scales. It seems rather a cacophony, almost chaos:

a symbolic-practical-physical spatial structure that allows for variety of practice while keeping a

structure. The rigid, physical aspect of such tentlike structures seems in fact to offer both flexibility

for social change, and stability for exchanges, from personal relationships or daily consumption to

institutional organisation.

But the unproblematic projection of the frequently volatile richness of a lifeworld onto symbolic and

practical spatial structures seems only completely assured by a property of the relation between

social action and space: the mediation of meaning. Because practice builds up meanings in space,

our cognitive and practical relation to space depends on that condition. And because such cognitive

and practical construction is thus changeable by practice itself, the projection of social action onto

space is at its heart changeable specially at the level of the activity place. The production of

space as a constellation of meaningsalways already there to be known, evoked by and inserted in

our practice, structuring practice, seems to have this openness to changes as condition if not in

its rigidity, in the social contents of built forms. Surely such a projection does not imply a pre-given

spatiality, as Werlen (1993:4) incorrectly sees in Lefebvres use of the term. But the term

projection is nevertheless problematic. I refer to a projection of socialities over the material world

consisting of the very spatiality of human activities: the symbolic, practical and physical cacophonic

structures we built as our self-environment, and the recursive, virtually constant self-reference

between that environment and action. Spaces are symbolic and practical for they mean; they are

references to possibilities of meanings and practices in a lifeworld. The idea of projection must be

seen as a symbolic and practical flux of creative action into space, and back, as information to

practice and as a medium of self-referentially addressing other practices. Interactions aremeaningfully mediated. Space of course could not generate creative actions in itself, for that would

mean reifying space and forgetting the subjective and intersubjective driving of human creativity (cf.

Werlen, 1993:4). But space has the quality of offering appropriate conditions for the right

contingency that sparks creative actions (cf. Soja, 2000). That is, fostering communication, putting

people together through urban spaces whose symbolic-practical and physical structure favour high

levels of co-presence and exchange say busy streets or the old CBDs of urban economics.


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3.2. Space as materialisation and selection of possib ilities of action

Space is frequently seen as vital to the organisation and productivity of economic action, as

economic action has been seen, in turn, shaping space profoundly. These approaches explain how

space is important to practice mostly in terms of agglomerative advantages, external economies

and in terms of spatial agglomeration (see Marshal, 1920; Scott 1988; Krugman, 1995). However,

economic approaches rarely explore what the external economies generated by spatial

agglomeration consist of as actual conditions of social life. They lack a broad interpretation of

economic dynamics as social processes3so that they could help us understand the place of space

in social reproduction, or the role of cities to societies. These notions are nevertheless explored to a

broader effect in Jacobs (1969) cities as the spark of economic life, Storpers (1997) regions asrelational assets, and in Sojas (2000) Synekism.

The stimulating interdependencies and cultural conventions created by socio-spatial agglomeration

moving close together were the key organizing features or motor forces driving virtually everything that

followed. Such propinquity and interdependent co-presence made social cooperation more efficient and

effective, not only for defense and for the collective production (and consumption) of food and social

services, but also for the production of social and spatial order, long-distance trade, an increasingly

specialized division of labor, and locational continuity, all part and product of the intrinsically spatial

spark that would play an important role at every transformative moment in the geohistory of human

development up to the present. By reducing the friction of distance in everyday life while increasing

population densities,human interaction and sociality were creatively intensified. (Soja, 2000:46-my

emphases)

However an insightful statement, it is indeed the reduction of friction in everyday life that is in need

of explanation. What and how are exactly the social processes sparked by space agglomerations?

How could space influence social action as vanishing communicative structures, and as institutional

articulations? Soja falls short of such explanation, hiding behind a blurred sociospatial dialectic leftunexplained at the level of practice. Economic geography, in its turn, accounts that social action

requires spatial agglomeration but accounts only for general descriptions of little internally

differentiated urban spatialities. It does not show what internal form cities would assume regarding

practical requirements of interaction and transaction (see Goffette-Nagot, 2000 on the scarce

descriptions of internal differentiation of cities). But in order to study the intertwining of socialities

and space, we need to penetrate also the space within cities. We need to know how exactly space

is there in the way we relate our practices, we produce social structures and the complexity of

social action. In order to evoke the importance of urbanised space in social action, I would like to


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keep a notion as guidance: Sojas intuitive observation of a tentlike structure or distribution within

cities. Such spatial distribution would, according to Soja, also connect synergistically to the region,

stressing the importance of nodes along with that of axes and accessibility within cityspace.

The result tentike structure of cityspace densities is often associatedwith land values and their

measures of attraction and comparative locational advantage based on accessibility, density of activity,

and potential for stimulating further urban developmentAlso likely to be there patterning land use,

modifying concentricity and the tentlike density distribution, are preferred axes, usually major transit

arteries that typically cross in the city center, another reflection of the centripetal power of nodality. If

proximity breeds advantage, then the spatial specificity of urbanism generates a field of real andimagined competition for advantageous access that makes cityspace far from randomly or uniformly

organized. (Soja, 2000:16)

Sojas tentlike distribution of nodalities and preferred axes is not usually brought to the forefront in

spatial economics.4But I will argue below that it indeed makes sociological sense. The structures of

nodalities and axialities seen by Soja among others5seem a spatial form of accommodating certain

requirements of action say spatial conditions for getting information about possible actions from

space more easily, i.e. there, concentrated in certain nodes and axes, and for interconnecting our

actions through accessing them and converging within them. Such an internal structuring of cities

seems in fact a condition of communication and social transaction based on co-presence. Inter-

relating actions spatially would imply agglomeration and the structuring of social space in the form

of cities, including accessibility for articulating activities that need be close or easily accessed.

These provisional observations sustain that urban space is produced as a tentlike structure; a

practical condensation of meanings that mediate or filter practices, converge and diverge agencies

and the access to other interaction media. So I may finally address such symbolic and practical,

relational and physical structuration in itself as a form of social complexity.

Thus urbanised space concentrates, structures and to some extent generates the appropriate

contingency and structures the teleological condition of physically based communication, defining

areas of less or more intense interactions (including randominteractions) in the tentlike structure

and in the interstices of urban space.6 Due to its role as projection of information of actions and

knowledge of the lifeworld, and for containing the possibility of structuring the randomness of co-

presence and social contents (say in busy streets), urban spaces somehow structure unpredictable

interactions and the exchange of information in new social encounters (to be sure, without our


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conscious knowledge of it). By extension, it creates conditions to social change and production of

more interactions and information.

At the heart of communicationmediated by space, there is transformation: meanings foster the

production of more meanings, increasing the complexity of social systems (Luhmann, 1995). By

extension, space becomes a form of increasing social complexitynot only for bringing a form of

collectively produced, distributed contingency of encounters, but also in a certain causal vein, for

urbanised space will be always ready to be known and evoked by agents in the moment of practice,

intention, decision. Certain spaces will become meaningful elements for certain agencies, in the

self-referential production and exchange of practices and artefacts that converge to those particularplaces. Agency thus may address agency in potential relations through meanings latent in those

spaces. The actual access to and interaction between realms of the lifeworld find space (and

indeed produce spaces) either as medium of communication or as context for other media.

Luhmann (1995) affirms that the totality of possible choices of action cannot be seen or cognised by

agencies within a social system because of the impossibility of materialising them in time-space.

Indeed the universe of possible actions cannot be actualised in a way of being readily, completely

surveyed, for that would imply a form of space-time that would surely go beyond the materiality of

space and the cognitive linearity of the flux of time that we are practically bound to. Otherwise, we

would have the possibility of a form of omniscient knowledge about actions available in the lifeworld

as a whole, and a possibility of immediately reaching out and touching any agency we would like

to; possibilities allowed by a friction-less world where movement is not dictated by material

constrains such as energy and rigidity. In such a counterfactual world, allinteractions are always

already possible, at any time. Of course this is impossible even in technological virtual spaces

where interaction is abstracted from the body, however made accessible by electronic networks of

mobile communication (cf. Urry, 2001). Yet Luhmann leaves the spatial dimension of the

problematic of knowing social complexity and actualising possible actions unresolved. I suggestthat precisely the material conditions and restrictions of space and time compels social systems to

the production of spatialities, a form of social production that is a way of actualising constellations of

actions that are more likely to be interrelated in everyday practice.Space is a key issue in ones

participation in social events and transactions (however referring to other agencies and places).

Again, it is structured in a way that certain relations between certain complementary actions,

interactive agencies or events will be perhaps even suggested during wayfinding or search for an

activity (see Faria and Krafta, 2003; cf. Penn and Turner, 2003) say, where to find a particular

activity, the proximity between commerce and residence, work and residence, or the dependence


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between certain services or firms in input-output relations (e.g. IT and financial services, Sassen,

2001; Scott 1998).

I suggest that the material actualisation of action happens in the form of a structuration of space

that is also the basis of possibilities of structuration of action most likely within the horizon of a

particular sociality: according to its capacity to cognition and knowledge of itself, its technology and

mode of organising and producing itself and its artefacts. Such cacophonic, dialectical projection

seems rather fundamental for everyday life to take place, which would be otherwise spent in

dispersed, poorly connected or articulated spatialities. Therefore, space is not merely an event in

itself or an independent presentation of itself. It is in fact a statement of the possibility of practicewithin a lifeworld. Space is the way that a lifeworld presents itself to itself perhaps, echoing

Kracauer (1990), theGrund (ground, form, reason, explanation) of social reality.The spatiality of a

social system, when assuming structures in the form of locational and accessibility structures,

becomes itself, again, a pre-selection of actions. And that seems very interesting from the viewpoint

of agencies and their efforts of actualisation of action.

3.3. Space as a form of reduction of social complexity?

If that assertion is coherent, it would imply that space has the potential of instructing further action

selections, forspace would reduce the universe of actions to a constellation (in the form of urban

structures) that can be surveyed at any moment. The reduction of complexity happens as human

practice and communication is produced throughspace, requires the production of space as

condensations, distributions of activities in accessible, linear structures for mobility, produced

attending the basic requirements described above, so that the counterfactual universe of

possibilities is reduced. Space or the material condition for acts to happen at all becomes a

criteria of reduction of the counterfactual into sets of infinitely variable (and changeable) actions

withinmost likely arrangements. That is, the absolutely infinite variety of possible options of

actions-interactions is reduced to a practical infinity more evident from the viewpoint of agencies,in most immediate practical relations. All other interactions are still possible; they are just less

knowable, less accessible, and more costly. Reduction of social complexity thus is naturally

enforced by social and economic requirements of proximity and articulation for unproblematic

interaction. Potentially demanded symbolic-practical spaces are made readily accessible (both

cognitively and practically) in order to be appropriated as loci of praxis.

I would like to relate now the reduction of social complexity in the form of urbanised space to a

complementary form of reduction of complexity, our knowledge of space. That relation is intended


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to situate space as reduction of social complexity in the horizon of experience of the agent herself.

From her perspective, in her routine and social life, urbanised space is a form through which she

produces her knowledge of her sociality, a form of shaping her practical knowledge. Her

experience of social events is spatially structured (see Douglas, 1971; Werlen, 1993). An agent

does not know her whole social system, neither allpossibilities of action latent in her lifeworld. She

does not even know all meanings and possibilities of interaction already actualised in space,

constituting it: she does not know completely her city and region, the realisation of that local social

system (of course open and related to others). She only may experience meanings and possibilities

of action already reduced, projected, actualised as space, structured in the form of events in time-

space. A step further, she may know more easily those meanings/actions more evidenced in thetentlike structuring of space, and according to her knowledge of space and its symbolic-practical-

physical differentiation, and her interests and contingencies. She first knows what the city shows

first, i.e. the output of the double-reduction of social complexity in the form of actualisation of

actions: first through the production of space, second the production of tentlike structures of space.

Her experience and knowledge of urbanised space are perhaps a third moment of spatial

reduction of social complexity, now in hersphere of experience of the social world. Her knowledge

of that social system grows progressively, in more detailed descriptions of areas and socialities that

already make up or may relate to her own world.

In this sense, urban spaces are gates to socialities still to be known. The structuration of space will

offer a at once singular (personal) and plural (open to different agencies and experiences) form of

knowing society. The form that agents experience the spatial reduction of social complexity is

through a heuristic knowledge of practices that constitute their lifeworld, learned through spatial

experiences through the projection and reduction of actions as their most likely relations set out

there in the form of spatiality. The heuristic and intuitive knowledge of a relation between activity

location and a spatial structure is already the knowledge of a set of actions or possibilities of action

more likely to be found. That is the knowledge of how she may enact appropriating her lifeworldthrough space. In short, the spatial reduction of social complexity will pre-dispose a form of knowing

what is society, how is it being in a society, how society works. The heuristic knowledge of space

is in itself the reduction of the complexity of both knowing and doing a cognitive and spatial

reduction or structure that will nevertheless be platforms for agents practice. The symbolic,

practical and physical structures of action and of space will be a liberating power, a tangible,

intelligible means of doing and being. Otherwise, without the liberating power of such structures,

reductions, agents would be forced to deal and operate within nothing, or chaos a shapeless

social and spatial world. Thus, the relation between space and the heuristic knowledge of practice


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is not incidental. Beyond the fact that one can only know what exists, what is out there available in

urbanised space, we have a more illuminating assertion of the importance of spatial experience to

social knowledge. But space is of course not only a form of knowledge. At the moment of heuristic

experience of the social content of spaces a moment that is always ongoing and transformed into

practice, into knowledge itself , space and spatial experience are already reductions of a previous

complexity, of previous possibilities of knowledge and actions and also those that were latent, that

were never realised, but that remained possibilities in the horizon of meanings actualised there in

space, as activity-places. Space is thus a social memory, a memory ofand forsociety itself a

memory that is also a statement of new, possible actions.

Space becomes a form of rendering the empirical self-relatedness of actions, agencies and bodies

sufficiently unproblematic through the self-referentiality of meanings there in space and in action.

From the viewpoint of agents and against the pressure of time and of economic costs in social

reproduction, the meanings latent in their reasoning and interpretation of their contexts and events

actualised in utterances, practices and bodily exchanges with the social world may refer to the

meanings in space as a way to refer to other utterances and practices. But a spatial form of social

reproductioncould only happen if space and practice would be related also at the level of

production. That is to say, in a way that action structures may emerge and socialities relate and

reproduce through the production of space. The production of space will allow and stimulate certain

possibilities and forms of actions culturally and institutionally defined, and attend levels of

contingency andcausality involved in social interaction. Cities and their internal differentiation can

be seen as a social emergence required by the workings and conditions of social structuration. I

insist that that is a major reason for social space to be produced in the first place, in Western

modes of interaction and production, in the form of cities.

A last counterfactual image would reinforce this point. In an immaterial, liquid or ethereal social

world, agents would face the complexity of all possibilities of action and information available in thelifeworld, in some abstract, dematerialised realm of choices. Luhmann argues that,without the

reduction of such a complexity, there would be nothing, no world consisting of discrete entities, but

only undifferentiated chaos (Knodt, 1995:xvii). The structuring of space in the form of cities (in

synergetic relation to the region and world) is in fact the actualisation of actions, i.e. actions

reducing their own complexity not through a shapeless world but through material forms that

already offer solutions (or pre-selections) of complementary actions.That is the central thesis of

the reduction of social complexity through space.


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3.4. Space as increasing andreducing social complexityHowever, there is a paradox in the role of space in social complexity. Space is a meaningful and

practical production, a form of informing agencies, allowing social action to emerge

unproblematically, reducing social complexity. Space assumes meanings that turn it part of the self-

referential flows of meanings that embed production and communication; turn it a medium of

interaction in its own right. A step further, space will potentially structure such flows, as a medium of

interaction that overlaps and converges all others. Through its meanings, space makes the whole

social system and systems of communication addressable and intelligible. However, as Luhmann

(1995) asserts, meanings carry in themselves the seeds of new meanings. The production of

information furthers the capacity to produce new information. Every level of social complexityfurthers social complexity, demanding new forms of handling increasing levels of information and

forms of actualising information through production of objects, text, choices, new actions and

interactions. Here lies the potentially growing role of urbanised space to society: a society reared in

its own growing complexity requires forms of making such a complexity cognisable. And space may

be one of the forms of doing that. However, space assumes meanings that, when they are part of

practice (and that is the only way space could be meaningful), furthers the production of new

meanings, through the practices that happen there, or that refer to that place and other places. Just

as actions happen as a form of reducing social complexity that implies more meanings and more

complexity, space is a form of reducing complexity that nevertheless increases complexity. The way

out of this paradoxical reproductive trap characteristic of systems that reproduce through

meanings, as consciousness and societies, according to Luhmann is, through the recursive

production of their own structures. Societies are trapped in a cycle of production that may only lead

them to produce and reproduce their own (symbolic and material) structures. That is, actual forms

of recursive communication and action. I insist that structuration includes space in a crucial way. If

only complexity can reduce complexity (1995:26), more information reinforceforms of knowing,

selecting, and communicating. These communicative developments take the form of institutions,

modes of organisation and production, habitus andtradition and spaces. The handling of socialcomplexity through space is another way of seeing the dialectical implication of space in the

production of action. The reproduction of societies implies the production of cities to solve the

problem of their own growing complexity and internal differentiation, so that socialities may emerge

and vanish less problematically.

A substantial part of such vanishing social structures involves both work and interaction, rational-

purposive and communicative, economic and non-utilitarian actions that are in fact corporeal

transactions, i.e. happen through co-presence. Ours is a society characterised by a highly complex


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division of labour, with a immensely complex network of exchanges (Lash and Urry, 1994; Castells,

1996), also dependent on face-to-face interaction, on innovative production of signs and objects,

the production of largely dense networks of activities linked by networks of accessibility (Sassen,

2001). Cities consist of a cognitively and practically efficient form of assuring these flows a

intelligible and efficient form. Nevertheless, a substantial part of social life is performed as system

integration, i.e. transpatially, through long distances. Virtual spaces of communication are also

forms of social complexity, because they are there in production, they are sources and means of

information, relation, exchange and power (see Castells, 1996). Furthermore, the complexity of

social transactions and actual space is subject to global forces.Apparently, a self-referential

convergence of actions, people, objects and information in urban spaces must be looked at not onlyin relation to possibilities open at the local level, but stretched in time-space, in relation to virtual

spaces and conditions of synchronisation and flexibility in global transactions and production (see

Lash and Urry, 1987; Giddens 1990). Social complexity grows in a global scale with information

largely available and concerning possibilities of action-interaction with agencies virtually anywhere.

Whether urbanised spatialities are still necessary in a context of increasing global complexity that

is yet to be discussed under a self-referential perspective.


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References

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Urry J, 2001 Mobile cultures (draft) published by the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University at

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1 I draw such nave notion diversely upon, and hopefully without causing damage to, those in Weber (1968), Schutz (1972),

Habermas (1984), and Luhmann (1995), in turn based on different traditions: the philosophy of consciousness (Weber,

Schutz) to the philosophy of language (Habermas) and to systems and cybernetic theory (Luhmann).2I draw this expression upon Lash and Urry (1994).3Economics came to its rather peculiar position that economic action is essentially maximizing, rational behaviour, and

everything else belongs to noneconomic action, rather perturbations to an economic action taken as a one-dimensional,

closed world. Such tendency was exaggerated in the twentieth century when economics has had minimal contact with the

other social sciences. (Gravonetter and Swedberg, 1992:6).4Goffete-Nagot (2000:319) affirms that there remains a need for explanations of the internal configurations of citiesAn

internal urban configuration depends on firms and households interactions in the city and can change following changes in

urban size and the evolution of agglomeration economies. At the same time, because of i ts durability, the urban configuration

will largely determine future transport costs, land rents, congestion, and finally the rise of agglomeration economics.

5

Such an observation is found in theorists as diverse as Isard (1956), Morril (1970), or Hillier (1996).6See Sassen (2001) on random interaction in cities as aspect of innovation; Hillier and Hanson (1984) on social solidarities.

social complexity and space

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