Space and Society an Introduction to the Special Issue
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Bernadett Csurgó Space and Society An Introduction to the Special Issue Space and spatial differences have gained increasing attention in social sciences in recent years. An eclectic range of scholars, such as Michel Foucault (2000), Antony Giddens (1985), Derek Gregory and John Urry (1985), Henri Lefebvre (1992) Nigel Thrift (2006) and even Manuel Castells (2009) highlighted the significance of spatiality in social life. Space and place offer inspiring frameworks for all of the topics studied within sociology and related social sciences. It is also reflected in the large number of papers submitted for this Special Issue. As a result of a rigorous selection and review process eleven articles are presented in this Special Issue. Each of the articles contributes important insights into the relationships between society and space. Although the papers do not include all of the problems linked to space in social sciences, all of them are connected to this issue and discuss contemporary problems of space and society. The dynamics of social and spatial relationships with a focus on inequality, poverty and ethnicity are presented in the first four papers which emphasise social and spatial exclusions. The first paper by Tünde Vi- rág presents the formation of a Roma ghetto in a small rural town in Hungary. Her analysis shows how urban policies and institutional changes resulted in the transformation of a socially and ethnically heterogeneous neighbourhood into a stigmatized ghetto.Kata Fehér also analyses the question of spatial and social segregation in a micro community from a former industrial mid-sized-town in Hungary with a focus on the spatial construction of symbolic and social boundaries. András Vigvári analyses the question of spatial inequalities in Hungary from a new perspective. By investigating the lives of poor Budapest residents who originated from rural areas, his paper provides a new approach to understanding rural-urban relations and spatial inequalities in Eastern Eu- ropean societies. Rural-urban division and symbolic struggle are also at the centre of Cecilia Fe L Sta Maria’s paper. Based on an analysis of photographs, maps, field notes and interviews, the paper demonstrates the spatial consequences of urbanisation and the monumentalisation of urban environments utilising Lefebvre’s, Bourdieu’s and Giddens’s concepts on space in Matnog, Sorsogon, Philippines. The paper presents the spatial machinations which are orchestrated to construct polemical spaces that deftly conceal spaces occupied by the poor. The subsequent four papers provide insights into different aspects of rural-urban relationships. Peter Ehrström’s paper discusses new producer-consumer relations concerning local food in the context of rural gentrification in a suburban community in Finland. The local food is the focus of Riccardo Brozzi and his co- authors’ – Agnieszka Elzbieta Stawinoga, Christian Hoffmann, Thomas Streifeneder’s – paper. The analysis of a representative sample of 498 consumers in South Tyrol proves that consumers’ cultural background and their place of residence as a spatial pattern significantly influence attitudes towards local food purchase. Another 1 ● socio.hu ● Special issue 2016 ● Bernadett Csurgó: Introduction ● aspect of rural-urban relationships and the role of urban newcomers in rural places are presented in the paper by Judit Farkas. In her paper, the urban-rural dichotomy is presented through an analysis of the narratives of urban newcomers in the case of a Hungarian ecovillage. Máté Tamáska’s paper analyses the process of suburbanisation in Hungary through the case of a small historical town Komárom–Koppánymonostor. The paper analyses the formation of a suburban townscape with a special focus on its morphological aspects. The last three papers explore different aspects of local and territorial developments. Krzysztof Gorlach and his co-authors Martyna Wierzba-Kubat, Anna Jastrzębiec-Witowska and Piotr Nowak analyse the role of food in regional rural development in Poland. They suggest and apply a new extra-human approach combined with a neo-endogenous perspective to the analysis of local food products in the rural development context. Eliza Bodor-Eranus, Hanna Kónya and László Letenyei’s paper presents research on collaboration networks of local governments in the Kaposvár subregion in Hungary. This paper identifies the actors who benefited from the structural characteristics of the collaboration network of local governments. Finally, the last paper, Anna Augustyn and Gusztav Nemes’s work presents an analysis of social marketing components of projects in the European Network for Rural Development database. They highlight that the values related to social networking and bottom-up rural development approaches are essential for food-driven innovation in rural areas. Papers in this Special Issue investigate many aspects of spatiality in various social contexts. The presented research outcomes highlight the mutual influence of space and society. Most of the papers focus on places and localities, however it does not mean that only the micro-spaces of everyday life are important. Macro-spaces at regional, national or even global level are also considered. All of the papers place significant emphasis on the heterogeneity of territorial context and place-relatedness of social life. It is hoped that the papers selected and presented in this Special Issue will inspire social scientists to include spatial aspects more often in their research and analysis. This Special Issue aims to highlight the growing interest of sociologists in the concept of space too. Acknowledgements We would like to thank the reviewers for their work on all submitted papers for this Special Issues even where they have not been published. This Special Issue would not have been possible without their contributions. We would also like to thank Chris Swart, the language editor for his work on this Special Issue. References Castells, M. (2009) The Space of Flows. In The Rise of the Network Society. Wiley-Blackwell, 407–459 Foucault, M. (2000) Nyelv a végtelenhez. Tanulmányok, előadások, beszélgetések. Debrecen: Latin Betűk. Giddens, A. (1985) Time, Space and Regionalisation. In Gregory, D. – Urry, J. (eds.)Social Relations and Spatial Structures. Macmillan Education UK, 265–295. Gregory, D. – Urry, J. (1985) Social relations and spatial structures. Macmillan. Lefebvre, H. (1992) The Production of Space. (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.) Oxford, OX, UK; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Wiley-Blackwell. Thrift, N. (2006) Space.Theory, Culture & Society, 23 (2–3), 139–146. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276406063780. 2 Tünde Virág1 Spatial consequences of urban policies forming a Roma ghetto DOI: 10.18030/socio.hu.2016en.3 Abstract The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a neighborhood situated at the edge of a small town inhabited by the local poor for decades. The neighbourhood that was once connected to the town through a set of institutions has become isolated over the years as personal relationships and institutions have ceased. I intend to present the institutional changes and social processes that transformed a socially and ethnically heterogeneous neighbourhood into a stigmatized ghetto. In this process, the role of different organizations that structure the life of the urban poor, and the governance structures in which those organizations are embedded are fundamental. Overall, the penalization of poverty and criminalization of ethnicity characterize the mechanisms that maintain invisibility. These are as follows: (1) limiting their right to access certain institutions through the creation of a second set of institutions, particularly in education; (2) operating a public work scheme along ethnic divisions; and (3) surveillance of space used by the local Roma minority government to organize, monitor and regulate this neighbourhood. Keywords: social and spatial segregation, stigmatized ghetto, Roma, urban policy 1 Institute for Regional Studies Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary 3 Tünde Virág Spatial consequences of urban policies forming a Roma ghetto Introduction Segregated neighbourhoods are places where the families come and/or stay not by their own free will, but under some economic or social pressure; where the given part of the settlement is even physically separated from the rest of the settlement; where the area in question is clearly stigmatized; where there are major differences in the access to the institutions compared to other parts of the settlement (Wacquant 2007, 2012). In the Central and Eastern European context, the spatial exclusion of marginalized Roma groups appears in two major patterns: the ghettoized rural village and the urban district combining the four structural elements of stigma, constraint, spatial enclosure and institutional parallelism (Ladányi–Szelényi 2006, Wacquant 2007, 2015, Ladányi 2015, Vincze–Rat 2013, Váradi–Virág 2015). Scholars argue that it is justified to speak of Roma neighbourhoods as ethnic ghettos in Central-Eastern European countries. Even if they differ in several aspects from the US ‘black ghetto’, the conceptual framework of the ghetto and the mechanism of exclusion determined by ethnicity, inflected by class and intensified by the state (locality) is similar (Wacquant 2015). The place of our case study, a segregated neighbourhood of a small town situated in the Great Plain, has been the dwelling place of the local Roma and non-Roma poor since the