Analysis of Arnade, Howell, and Simons' (2002) Fertile Spaces

In social sciences the concept of space has been widely used to address capitalism, modernization, and globalization via examination of political, material, legal, and urban space that has remained overly theoretical in its insufficient treatment of empirical record and underdeveloped conceptualization of concrete historical situations (Arnade et al. 2002: 515). In the process of bringing space into the center of theoretical attention the causal relations deriving from material, social, cultural, and economic dimensions of space become assembled in spatial relations as generative structure of historical change. Urban spaces have to be recuperated from the historiographic reification, causal insignificance, and subsumption into social networks without, however, breaking with existing scholarly traditions that sharing an interdisciplinary momentum increasingly take recourse to space from more empirically grounded positions (Boone and Stabel 2001; Hanawalt and Kobialka 2000). During late capitalism the notion of space underlies the accounts of formation and disintegration of modern metropolitan centers, of rising preeminence of global spaces, and of spatial erasures, resistances, and contraditions that owe most in their theoretical underpinnings to Lefebvre ([1971] 1991) whose Marxist theorization of relations between space and capitalism has made greatest explanatory contribution.

According to Lefebvre, the transition to modernity has been conjoint with subordination of space to the needs of capitalist reproduction that presupposes, mobilizes, and expresses spatial relations participating in legitimation, regulation, and materialization of action that in the recoursive process of structural functionalist production of space allows for analytical differentiation of spatial practices, representations of space, and representational or lived space (Gottdiener 1985). Lefebvre offers a point of critical reflection on diverse sociological traditions of registering the effects of transition to modernity in the urban space that for German sociology (Tonnies [1887] 1963) was accompanied with institutionalization of abstract and complex interpersonal ties, for Chicago school of sociology (Park 1926, 1969) made human interaction into site of social reproduction, and for ethnographic methodology (Rothenberg and McDonogh 1993) has meant reorganization of affective relations within the structure of urban grid. From Lefebvre's perspective, conventional treatments of space conceive of it as passively preexisting container that due to lack of theoretical attention has been variously conflated with geographical place, sphere of activity, and mental abstraction overlooking the actively generative aspects of space as its rendering in social sciences as a product rather than agent of capitalist production has evidenced (Lefebvre [1971] 1991: 15).

Lerebvre's reading of capitalism allocates to space the status of an independent factor of production equally under control of property relations as other productive forces are. In an attempt to restore historicity to the category of space, Lefebvre has put the transition from premodern to modern to postmodern Western city at the center of his theoretical attention to the formation of abstract space under capitalism as a regime of accumulation that produces spaces corresponding to each of each stages of development (Arnade et al. 2002: 519) so that mechant capitalism and industrial revolution had transformed urban space in its material, discursive, and practical dimensions (Lefebvre [1971] 1991: 265, 271). Lefebvre's historical analyses have contextualized modernity's rupture with traditional societies in terms that qualified the claims of national formation to diminish the importance of place in favor of recovery of the continued relevance of spatial relations (Agnew 1989). In North America the decline of public space offers one of the corroborations of Lefebvre's theorization with concrete examples of the independent effects that urban sprawl, shopping malls, advanced communications, and commericialized entertainment facilities have on the positions different groups can claim within the current mode of capitalist accumulation (Leach 1999; Sorkin 1992) as it generates its characteristic spatial, emotional, and social structures.

Sennett in historically superimposing classical Athens and contemporary New York shows that modern urban life is defined by subjective estrangement as a function of "interaction between the individual, the community, and the built environment" (Arnade et al. 2002: 520) that follows the dynamics of modernization in spatially recreating the grid of interrelations reflecting in their form the functional integration of disconnected communities rather than structurally indicating the connection between the individual and society experientially exposed to each other (Sennett 1990, 1994). Sennett's emphasis on culture brings him into proximity with postmodern theorization of space that treats it as incommensurable with time ruling out thereby the historical analysis of the spatial relations on the grounds of ontologically antithetical status of the two categories (Foucault 1980: 149) that in their postmodern separation invite the charges of meta-narrative, linear, positivist, and objectivist essentialisms. At the intersection of cultural geography and critical theory, Soja (1989, 1996) and Dear (2000) develop their heuristics of spatiality as part of the programme of the Los Angeles school of urban studies reportedly aiming to bring the historical corrective to the urban geography of late capitalist postmodernism (Schneider 2001) in clear departure from the Chicago school functionalist interpretation of structures of metropolitan life.

As opposed to epistemologically privileging antiquity as a point of comparison for the urban studies of modern cities, Lefebvre's suggestion to recognize medieval cities of Western Europe as more immediate predecessors to modernization shifts the ground of its understanding from the traditional subjects of humanities, as does Sennett, towards the actual urban spaces where commercial, industrial, and social preconditions for modernity were forged (Arnade et al. 2002: 522). Though Lefebvre pays significant attention to the place of cities in medieval and early modern history it does not come at the expense of the blurring of such distinct theoretical aspects of space as historical production of space, conceptual multivalency of space, and social construction of space so that its actual and imagined experience, its material and discursive reification, and its physical and ideological perception fall into functionally differentiated structures that the concept of space refers to. The production of space receives its historical significance in comparative perspective that follows conceptual typology of spaces rather than historical chronology so that such kinds of space as "legal space, ritual space, or mental space" (Arnade et al. 2002: 523) allow for theoretical superimposition and differentiation of reconstructed urban spaces.

Instances of construction and realization of legal space as a consequence of specific claims-making practices expose both the indeterminacy of the space-centric interpretations and the power of space to make possible and generate realities of politics and ideology (Arnade et al. 2002: 523). In history of European cities property rights, as in London (Harding 2002), reveal complex course of development where any claim to private ownership has hardly implied clear-cut definition of rights, inviolability of their exercise, or freedom from their contestation in the legal space of cities where conflicts, overlapping jurisdictions, and unstable demarcation are commonplace rather than exceptional while involving strategic action of organization, distribution, and positioning of legal claims within cultural, social, and physical dimensions of urban space. Inverse of the private property in definition, the public domain has likewise been shapeless, illimitable, and insufficient to serve as a legal basis to claims on space in the strict sense to the extent that unpredictability and redefinition has been characteristic of pre-modern forms of urban governance having led only under the economic pressure of demographic crisis to more unambiguous definition of rights, applications, and ownership (Camille 2000; Harding 2002).

The transition from contested jurisdictions of medieval cities towads discursive production of urban space took place in the course of competition among institutions and interest groups seeking authority over control of residents, legal titles, and physical space (Attreed 2002) that leading to protracted legal adjudication have called to life strategies of narrative organization of competing claims to rights, privileges, and powers elaborated in the "process of negotiation, dispute, compromise, challenge, and counter-challenge" (Arnade 2002: 524). The initial conceptualization by historians and anthropologists of separate political, legal, and ritual spaces, in line with functional differentiation approach, (Davis 1975; Hunt 1989) is complemented by evidence that that these spaces interpenetrate each other as social actors, practices, and relations generated by them draw on the spaces of their action to acquire legitimacy, power, and resonance (Eastabrook 2002; Boone 2002). To the extent that kinds of space correspond to the operation effects of social systems, the political space of early modern England has been forged in the struggles over ritual spaces that actors representing the governmental, religious, and monarchical systems fought during the civil war (Estabrook 2002) as the mutual effects of cities, politics, religion and law have contributed to an interpenetrating redefinition of the corresponding institutions.

Over the course of seventeenth century the struggle against the subordination of religion to political authority in England has led to an increase in instutitutional autonomy of both systems at the price of their systemic interpenetration since even though secular authority over sacred spaces has been reasserted both systems became more functionally differentiated no longer sharing rights over religious spaces and systemically integrated at the same time through recognition of exclusive rights of political authority in sacred spaces (Estabrook 2002). Historiographical applications of the notion space clearly show its limitations for neither can it adequately account for social change nor supply explanatory mechanisms for strategic action since the processes of production of space undergo perfomative reduction to collective struggles over rights the power over exercise of which is sufficiently explained as the power to perform rights in the corresponding spaces, as in the case of relationships between power and ritual that appear to exclude spaces from their reproduction as mutually constitutive performances (Eastabrook 2002). Similarly, the explanation of the struggles over urban spaces of medieval Low Countries has to make micro corrective to Pirenne's (1914) imposition of macro dynamics of class analysis upon economic relations to the effect that economy as macro environment for action cannot produce impact on the micro level of individual and group action before its differentiation from other medieval systems takes place (Boone 2002) as is recognized by Lefebvre ([1971] 1991: 263-275) as he refers to the mediating role of such cities as Ghent in the production of economic space.

The contestation of ritual spaces in medieval Low Countries was part of the struggles among competing citizen groups to accumulate power to claim existing spaces for communal use, to demolish physical spaces of rival groups, and to construct architectural structures symbolizing communal space with significant economic benefits accruing to the winning party under the conditions of undifferentiated relations between capital and labor (Boone 2002). Though political space underlies the transition to guild rule as constitutive mechanism of legitimation of the political power of artisanal corporations (Boone 2002) the mirco effects of space are insufficient to explain the departure from the class struggle terminology that historical discourse has to make to account for the institutional continuity of political, ritual, and economic spaces across social change (Arnade 2002: 526-527). As scenes for struggles over dukal authority in Burgundy the urban spaces of the medieval cities are subordinate to the strategies for gaining sovereign power by the seizures into possession, symbolic appropriations, and demolitions of selectively chosen sites (Boone 2002). Reducing action to performance (Arnade 2002: 527) historiography neverless connects banner marches, kneeling ceremonies, royal inaugurations, public beheadings, church burnings, and charter destructions with the functionally differentiated structure of Lefebvre's abstract, concrete, and representational spaces as the macro environments reciprocally dependent on individual and collective action.

Without recognizing historical change as an outcome of the interplay between social action and its systemic environments Lefebvre's concept of space cannot theoretically restrict or specify the process of discursive production of distinctly legal, ritual, or material spaces on its own (Andrade 2002: 527) all the more so since the basic classification of spaces by Lefebvre into imagined, practiced, and representational also folds into them the capabilities to confer social power. The characterization of early modern Catholicism in England as feminine can be seen as an outcome of individual, discursive, and institutional action by its such female patrons as Queen Henrietta Maria more dependent for success of their activity on social systems of religion, family, and royalty than on gendered spaces or classifications (Dolan 2002). Likewise, the macro environment of histility to Catholicism in periods of its disestablishment had micro-effect of restricting its practice to private households causing thereby its association with women-related spaces. Consequently, the historiographical discourse that takes spaces into narrow focus of discourse on production of spaces not only fails to explain causal mechanisms behind historical change but also offers tautological explanation for constitution of spaces in their rhetorical construction (Dolan 2002) the latter being from the structural functional perspective only an aspect of strategic action.

Consistent application of the notion of mental space to history of medieval Christianity shows the contradiction between its origins in Greek and Roman cities and its anti-urban ethos, between its polarization into aristocratic and monastic strategies of institutional action, and between Roman empire as an historical macro environment for the Church and Christendom as an otherworldly community (Milis 2002) that cannot be explained by a process of production of space. Though the Christian discourse on urban life exhibits significant continuity from antiquity to the middle ages, informs physical constutition of religious spaces, and consistently structures monastic and canonical texts (Milis 2002) there are no explanatory relations among spaces as conceptualized by Lefebvre beyond self-constituted agency of their production or developmental factors that analysis of spaces could uncover (Andrade 2002: 529). As an example of representational space, medieval romances and didactic literature in Low Countries do not constitute an autonomous space where acts of imagination would be unaffected by the commercial, pragmatic, and enterpreneurial urban influences that have restructured the literary canon of artistocracy in order to redraw the distinctions between the city and the countryside (Lefebvre [1971] 1991: 268) according to the emerging language of capitalism (Pleij 2002).

The discursive and rhetorical reconstruction of the representational space that was constituted in the medieval cities (Pleij 2002) draws its reality from the struggles between burghers and peasants, between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, between commerce and argiculture, and between social norms of traditional respectability and "energy, intelligence, and wit" (Andrade 2002: 530) of nascent capitalism. Consequently, the methodological implications of the general theory of action, structural functionalist approach, and microsociological investigation of the role of cities in the processes constitutive of transformations of capitalism have to rest on the substantive, comparative, and theoretical studies of urban space. Due to the special role that the cities of medieval and Renaissance Europe play in sociological theories of modernity, attention to the comparative urban studies also provides historical basis for contemporary theorization of the changing "nature of urban space" (Arnade 2002: 530), especially given the case that late medieval cities in Northern Europe were capable of challenging stongest hierarchies of power of the period (Ennen 1979). In the history of the Middle Ages the effective definition of the city draws its boundary in the space where the city walls separated it from the rest of the world thereby performing defensive, legal, and social functions as urban rights only applied within so demarkated urban space, as civil equality of cities sharply contrasted with feudal system in force in the countryside, and as city-dwellers had constitutionally guaranteed political autonomy and self-governance thus providing the blueprint for the Western social and political modernization (Ennen 1972; 1979).

Not merely the sites of introduction of innovative political or legal practices, the uniqueness of the medieval cities consisted in high geographical and social mobility of their populations, in widely ranging scale of social differntiation based on economic hierarchy, social dividions, and cultural practices, in exclusive hosting of nascent industrial production and specialized occupations, in serving as nodes of world-spanning mechant networks pursuant of mercantilist trade policies, and in regulating economic exchange within city and with countryside around urban markets (Arnade 2002: 531). The late medieval city has produced its urban space as a special macro environment for action taking its preconditions from the wall defenses, multiplicity of consumer and producer services, and proximity of locations dedicated to production, commerce, exchange, politics, sociability and culture (de Certeau 1988: Kobialka 2000). However, the tradition of representing late medieval cities as sites with distinctive spatial qualities dates from the mid-nineteenth century when Marx (1978) and von Gierke ([1868-1913] 1954) have sweepingly concluded that cities had higher historical significance than countryside for the processes of capital accumulation, bolstering market relations, and creating a more egalitarian sociopolitical community (DuPlessis 1997).

Most lasting historiographical impact on theories of cities is Pirenne's (1939; 1951) explanatory structure of urban social, political, and cultural life taking recourse to centrality of marketplace, distinct privileges, and universal urban rights (Prevenier 1986; Van Uytven 1986; Verhulst 1986, 1999) and Weber's (1968: 1212-1372) casting of late medieval Northern European cities into an ideal type of Western cities as bounded, corporative, and self-governing spaces (Callies 1973; Nippel 1991; Schreiner 1986). Urban studies not only follow in the steps of the historical scholarship bearing the stamp of the penchant for theoretical reflection and for associating markets with progress prevalent in the nineteenth century, but also shares the strategies of representation of cities current as early as thirteenth century to defend special urban rights of citizens by constructing urban space of their republics as orderly, idependent, and civic enclosures surrounded by socially, culturally, and politiclly alien territory (Arnade 2002: 533). Reflecting powerful legal and political interests, the representational strategies of cities gave rise to collective action that took form of such spatial practices as construction projects, legislative acts, and documentary records aimed at making urban distinction into reality of physical space, cultural production, and abstract classifications designed to separate cities from the hinterland (Pleij 2002).

Within complex geographies of urban jurisdictions, detailed legal regulation drew many boundaries restricting access to citizenship, guilds and crafts, property ownership, and residence in order to create the space where cities enjoyed self-governance, collected idependent taxation, enforced market rules, maintained police force, and provided freedom from feudal obligations (Bodin 1954, 1955; Ennen 1955; Postan 1965). Rather than functionally differentiating itself into an abstract space for decontextualized social action, as Lefebvre would have it, the actual urban space has always been part of the relations of structural functional integration of the urban community with the lordly manors, the suburbs, and the countryside as economic, demographic, commercial, and financial flows constantly connected cities to their outside (Britnell 1996; Nicholas 1971; Reynolds 1984; Stabel 1997). On the general level of preconditions for action cities have been integrated with the country by kindred religious beliefs and organizations (Rubin 1992), by mutual support ties between urban liberties and territorial sovereigns (Chevalier 1982), and by strategic alliances and struggles playing out in a macro environment inclusive of both fedual and urban spaces alike (Mundy and Riesenberg 1958), which is revealed by attention to individual and collective action rather than to abstract, physical or representational spaces alone.

Structural functional interpenetration between cities and the country does not equal integration between the two though since it is not their aggregate qualities as concentrations of people but their systemic characteristics that made cities into important nodes of relations with feudal countryside, into novel forms of social organization, and into focal points of struggles ranging far outside the urban limits. The integration of social practices, representations of space, and social spaces into comprehensive conceptual framework has to proceed by paying attention to discursive, material, and social conditions of action within a macro environment of diverse systems that exhibit development, interpenetration, autonomy, and effectivity so that a particular urban space can be contextualized as "a site of radical experimentation, distinct powers, and privileged actors" (Arnade 2002: 535). Such attempts at understanding of urban space in structural functionalist and action theoretical perspective can hope to bridge the gap of incommensurability with social, cultural, and economic urban studies of Italian Renaissance (Muir 1995) as well as with traditions of institutional and social historical studies of Northern Europe (Arnade 2002: 535-536).

For the study of modernity and urban space Burckhardt's ([1860] 1990) work on Renaissance Italy has been a path-breaking account of transition from medieval to modern governmentality replacing parochial allegiances with wider civic collectivities that gave rise to economic, political, and cultural modernization (Baron 1955, 1966; Becker 1981; Goldswaite 1980, 1993). However, overly sharp drawing of distinction between medieval and early modern cities as macro environments offering distinctively different conditions for action overlooks similarities in the urban spaces of the cities characteristic of each mode of governmentality, as formulated by Weber and Pirenne, so that spaces ideal typically representative of modernity can be equally likely found both in Renaissance Italy and Northern Europe (Andrade 2002: 537). The process of decoupling of conceptualization of modernity from decontextualized theorization of space took inspiration from detailed archival research of extended time periods aided by sociological and athropological theories dealing with "how people experienced their cities, formed alliances, established social identities, and claimed authority" (Arnade 2002: 537). Consequently, the claim to the exceptional importance of Renaissance Italy to the process of transition to modernity has been debunked in favor of reasserting the role of urban contexts, networks, and identities in individual and collective action giving no modernizing function to a European urban space (Brucker 1969).

Neither in terms of time nor space do the cities of Renaissance Italy distinguish themselves with respect to modernization as overlapping, situated networks have been overwhelmingly constitutive of their action environments (Hughes 1977; Klapisch-Zuber [1976] 1985), as usage of urban space has been subordinated to imperatives of individual or collective action geared to gaining control over it (Muir 1981, 1989; Trexler 1980), and as collective actors maximized effeciency of cities' exploitation, rationally divided them into zones of influence, and reciprocally reinforced their symbolic and political power (Guidoni 1977). Consequently the association of cities of Renaissance Italy with modernity has increasingly come into question (Vitale and Scafoglio 1995) as the cessation of long-standing social, cultural, and ritual practices receives its appropriate recognition as crucial factor in the process of modernization (Crouzet-Pavan 1992; Davis 1994) that in the form of obviation of previous spatial hierarchies and local networks took from the medieval period until the modern developments of nineteenth and twentieth centuries to fulfill (Burkhardt 1958; White 1973). The predominant historical understanding of the Renaissance Italian city tends to concur with the theory of structural functional interpenetration as their urban spaces have been particularly instrumental to the cultural, social, and political achievements of the epoch rather than merely integrated into an overarching dynamics of modernization as rupture with medieval structure and functions of cities so that comparable processes of systemic interpenetration can be found in late medieval Northern Europe where urban law attests to both growth in autonomy and interdependence of its urban spaces (Harding 2002; Dolan 2002).

During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, urban space played important role in the struggles among urban communities and feudal hierarchies for control of cities the possession and deployment of whose symbols came into being only after protracted conflict over urbanity, privileges, and related claims. Spaces carried memory of previous struggles in the legitimacy they confurred on their occupants, in the meanings that on-going negotiations of power added, and in the power relations stemming from monopoly on urban spaces and symbols. Spaces reveal themselves as embedded into macro environments as actions are since historical research of particular places shows them to be "the result of specific contests, specific institutional changes, and specific responses to chance occurences" (Arnade 2002: 540). The historical research building upon Lefebvre's generalization of the production of space in the medieval cities of Europe fills the concepts of representational space, spatial practices, and physical space with documentary detail that replaces the emphasis on participation of space in functional differentiation with the concern with "historical change, causality, and agency" (Arnade et al. 2002: 540).

Growing attention to space follows the tendency to provide context-specific micro corrective to largely macro oriented discourses to account for reciprocities between macro and micro processes, to describe structural change in terms appropriate to its scale and scope rather than personify or de-historicize it as Renaissance city or urban democracy would, and to make analytical transition from case studies towards generative structures of historical processes that cities are embedded in. Departing from utilitarian, teleological, and deterministic assumptions, spatial history foregrounds "power, intentionality, and agency" (Arnade et al. 2002: 541) as it reflects the actions of individual actors, weighs the historical causes of experience, traces the structural impact of institutions, interprets the collective meaning of change, contextualizes the legal practices, maps geographies of the economic exchange, and draws the pictures of military confrontations. The process of production of space articulates the structure of its functional differentiation according to the specificities fully belonging to places where it becomes physically, discursively, and experientially visible as an abstract category born of reconstruction of the structure of relations that ground particular places in architectures, infrastructures, communications, distinctions, functions, and relations.

Mental, material, and practical aspects of space do not pass into each other unmediated (Milis 2002; Pleij 2002) but belong to struggles over spaces, to appropriations of space, to collective confrontations, to regulation of practices, to competing representations, and to emergent meanings and expectations (Dolan 2002). Introduction of spatial production and urban space into the scholarship of cities definitely opens new avenues of inquiry into how economic, gender, and public relations find reflection in the legal, literary, and other kinds of record of the collective and individual agents bearing an imprint on urban history. Without displacing the importance of economic relations, the formative influence of economy on cities has to be complemented with attention to space-specific accounts of urban development (Boone 2002). Never alien to cities of medieval Europe, markets were subjects of urban regulation by physical space of architecture, abstract space of legal discourse, and lived space of political decisions so that urban marketplaces were functionally differentiated by traded goods, transaction type, and traders' identity within the structure of personal mediation of market relations, of micro equilibration of supply and demand, and of particularized oversight of economy geared to everyday life and local industry (Arnade et al. 2002: 543).

Marketplaces have also interpenetrated with the rest of the medieval cities as numerous other sites have claimed their place in the economic structure that neither privileged formalized economic exchange nor kept its instutitional form unaffected by social change (Braudel 1992). Cities as sites of systemic interpenetration bring in the medieval marketplaces the logic of participation restrictions, prescribed exchange rules, production controls, and innovation prohibitions into joint operation with unrestrained freedom of action within these rules allowing the excercise of rational choice to individuals considered equal and free within these spaces (Arnade et al. 2002: 544). However, the focus on spaces leaves the process of transition to modern socities unexplained as the structure of closed places has become replaced with open societies. Medieval cities have been the historical sites of of multiple urban cultures that within the inclusive spaces of marketplaces, streets, fairgrounds, and shops have claimed legitimate participation in the production of urban space (Stabel 1999). Later differentiation of spaces, practices and representations coupled with transformation of the structure of gender, social, and economic relations demands elaboration of larger framework of spatial reorganization cutting across public, private, and market spheres (Arnade et al. 2002: 545).

Significantly, the process of creation of European domesticity has proceeded along the lines of structural differentiation that within the emerging spatial structure of social, gender, and property relations has separated domestic from public spaces, sleeping rooms from dining halls, servant rooms from bath rooms, salons and guest rooms from private chambers (Goldthwaite 1982). Of special importance to the modern production of space is the spatial construction of functional differentiation between domestic and business spaces that while not beginning until the Industrial Revolution has become combined with legal regulation of production for the market, with gendered integration of households into the economic exchange, with institutionalization of trade on corporate principles, and with transformation of firms into permanent capital-holding entities (Howell 1986; Wiesner 1993). Equally connected was marketplace to the formation of public sphere that became associated with physical space, legal protection, and legitimating power after the medieval conception of common good finding ready reflection in the shared market of corporate community served as a precursor of much later ideas of public space (Arnade et al. 2002: 546; Harding 2002).

Additionally, public space derives its history from the police regulation undertaken as part of the political efforts by princes and municipalities to constitute, legitimate, and secure public good in the streets and marketplaces (Weidenfeld 1996) as part of the urban economic policies insuring "set weights and measures, fixed time and place of commerce, established quality standards and controls, determined currency exchange rates, guaranteed safety in travel, and registered and enforced contracts" (Arnade et al. 2002: 547). Control over public spaces has inextricably been connected to political power that municipal governments, urban institutions, and corporate bodies and confraternities claimed by regularly staging symbolic appropriations of common spaces through festive, ceremonial, and ritual perfomances of collective action in display and celebration of their authority (Arnade 1996; Kertzer 1988; Kipling 1998). As the city lost its sovereignty to the territorial state the urban space has become a stake in the hegemonic struggles facilitating the transition from the ritual appropriation of the right to perform the emergent state in public to its integration into the state that replaced the space of urban autonomy with the space of state authority no longer in need to legitimate itself via urban spectacle (Arnade et al. 2002: 548). As urban spaces had actively participated in dramatic historical changes they contributed in time-, place-, and society-specific ways to the formation of structures, cultures, and communities that by participating in collective struggles have produced the spaces of cites across their history as active agents in relations of power, exchange, and accumulation.