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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 seem
still 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 deal with 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 aspects of socio-spatial reality – from
the 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 complexity
of 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 time as 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 within Luhmann’s theory, that is, in a way to take
advantage of Luhmann’s 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 affect
interacting 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.1 Such 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
Luhmann’s theory are the meanings produced 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.
Luhmann’s 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] and
rendering choice sufficiently unproblematic through ‘structurification’ (Strukturifizierung)” (McCarthy,
1984:226 on Luhmann). Societies have to deal with their 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 structures in the social: that of vanishing 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 are ‘self-referential systems’ that 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 selection amongst 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 social 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 Luhmann’s concept of selfreferentiality. 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 through practice (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 is
nothing but fluxes of meanings embedding agencies and ‘mobilities of signs’ and objects,2 filtered,
structured by space; penetrated, referred to, infinitely self-referred through 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 dialectic relation 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 meanings shared in
practice and in space. However, all these schematic observations refer to a level of reproduction of
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
part of a cycle of production, structuration and reproduction of 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 Luhmann’s selfenvironment of 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 of
their relations (say as intra-urban and urban-regional interlinkages and accessibilities)
consists of a ‘pre-selection’ of 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 Luhmann’s 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, increasing and reducing social complexity – paradoxically, all at once.
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3.1. Space as information and projection of 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, individual↔collective
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 locations
structured 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 of
meanings 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 centreperiphery 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 meanings always 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 Lefebvre’s 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 are
meaningfully 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 possibilities 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 processes3 so 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’, Storper’s (1997) ‘regions as
relational assets’, and in Soja’s (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 left
unexplained 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: Soja’s 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 associated…with land values and their
measures of attraction and comparative locational advantage based on accessibility, density of activity,
and potential for stimulating further urban development…Also 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 and
imagined competition for advantageous access that makes cityspace far from randomly or uniformly
organized. (Soja, 2000:16)
Soja’s tentlike distribution of nodalities and preferred axes is not usually brought to the forefront in
spatial economics.4 But I will argue below that it indeed makes sociological sense. The structures of
nodalities and axialities seen by Soja among others5 seem 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. Interrelating 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 random interactions) 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 copresence 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 communication mediated 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 complexity not 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 particular
places. 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, all interactions 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 suggest
that 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 one’s
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 practice
within a lifeworld. Space is the way that a lifeworld presents itself to itself – perhaps, echoing
Kracauer (1990), the Grund (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, for space 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 through space, 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
within most 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 all possibilities 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 timespace. A step further, she may know more easily those meanings/actions more ‘evidenced’ in the
tentlike structuring of space, and according to her knowledge of space and its symbolic-practicalphysical 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 her sphere 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 lifeworld
through 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 of and for society 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
reproduction could 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 and causality 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 the
lifeworld, 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.
14
3.4. Space as increasing and reducing social complexity
However, 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 selfreferential 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 complexity
furthers 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 reinforce forms of knowing,
selecting, and communicating. These communicative developments take the form of institutions,
modes of organisation and production, habitus and tradition – and spaces. The handling of social
complexity 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’, rationalpurposive 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
15
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 only
in 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.
16
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1
I draw such naïve 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).
2
I draw this expression upon Lash and Urry (1994).
3
Economics 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).
4
Goffete-Nagot (2000:319) affirms that “there remains a need for explanations of the internal configurations of cities…An
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 its 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).
6
See Sassen (2001) on random interaction in cities as aspect of innovation; Hillier and Hanson (1984) on social solidarities.