It has become an academic self-evidence that space can only inadequately be conceptualized as a material or earth-bound base for social processes. This could commend a theoretical view of space as the outcome of action, which brings both social production practices and bodily deployment into focus. The action-theoretical perspective allows the constitution of space to be understood as taking place in perception. Not only are things alone perceived but also the relations between objects. This article develops a space-theoretical concept according to which space is constituted through acts as the outcome of synthesis and positioning practices. This opens up a theoretical perspective defining atmospheres as an external effect, instantiated in perception, of social goods and human beings in their situated spatial order/ing. Exclusion and inclusion are accordingly comprehended in terms of perception of the attunement of places. With reference to Anthony Giddens, this article discusses how space can be understood as a duality of structural ordering and action elements.

Cities obviously differ from each other. Sociologically, this difference becomes significant when your aim is to ascertain the influence of local factors in a globalizing world or to understand processes of societal differentiation. To do so, scholars in the areas of urban and regional sociology, community research and local policy can turn to a number of theoretical and empirical studies on cities, municipalities, or, less specifically, the local setting as societally formative units that resist global influences. In this article I continue to ask how cities socialize in a way that allows shared experience to emerge in communities. Grounded in the sociology of knowledge shaped by German thinkers such as Max Weber, Alfred Schütz, Karl Mannheim, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, my aim is to illustrate that specific stocks of knowledge based on habitualized experience arise in every city. Intrinsic logic captures the hidden structures of cities as locally well‐established, operative processes of sense‐making along with their physical, material manifestations.

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Over the past 10 years two concepts of central significance in the social sciences have come up for rediscussion: ‘space’ and ‘gender’. Today the two concepts are seen as relational, as a production process based on relation and demarcation. Gender and space alike are a provisional result of an – invariably temporal – process of attribution and arrangement that both forms and reproduces structures. This article takes a microsociological look at the construction of the local, seeking to trace the genderization of spaces. For this purpose, it discusses the organization of perceptions, in particular of glances and corresponding body technologies. Referring to the example of beach life, the article shows that the genderization of perception (including a culture of the glance) leads, in the sense of an embodiment of social order, to a practice of localization that reproduces the structural principles of society (including gender). In other words, gender may be seen as inscribed, via body practices, in the production of spaces.

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As an invitation to spatial sociology, this article introduces key concepts and contexts to situate the articles in this monograph issue of Current Sociology. Spatial sociology is presented here as broad in scope and usefulness, but specific as a relational approach to space. As both a category of analysis and a lens through which to address sociological research questions, the gains of relational spatial research are shown in this monograph issue through articles exploring bodies, borders, units and mobilities. Outlining some of the history of relational thinking and space, clarifying some misconceptions about spatial theory, and developing a heuristic of the uses of spatial sociology, this article’s main aim is to invite specialists and non-specialists alike to spatial sociology.

This article offers a spatial sociological conceptualization of the concept of borders. In relational spatial theory, borders have rarely been a theme of interest, just as relational space is all but absent within border studies. In order to understand the empirical existence of container space, without rejecting the insights and challenges of the spatial turn, a concept of borders is developed within a theory of relational space.

A difusão veloz de tecnologias globais de informação e comunicação, uma progressiva divisão internacional do trabalho, a presença midiática do mundo nos espaços privados, as correntes migratórias, as mudanças climáticas globais: todos esses fenômenos são aspectos de um processo que abalou de maneira duradoura as noções de proximidade e de distância. Como observa com razão Peter Noller, a globalização conduz não apenas a uma mudança social, mas a uma mudança mental, isto é, à redefinição de conceitos e modelos que devem ajudar a entender o mundo. "O que, nos anos de 1970, se anuncia empiricamente como globalização é acompanhado por uma transição epistemológica, a passagem de uma compreensão tradicional, geograficamente limitada, para outra, pós-tradicional, aberta e plural, do espaço social" (Noller, 2000, p. 21). A percepção de que a mudança social não pode ser explicada satisfatoriamente sem uma reconceituação das categorias relativas à componente espacial da vida social é chamada de spatial turn 1 (cf. Berking, 1998;Schlögel, 2003; Döring e Thielmann, 2008). Vigora cada vez mais a noção de que "'ser e tempo' 2 não encerram toda a dimensão da existência humana" (Schlögel, 2003, p. 9), e de que o espaço é não apenas um contêiner ou uma realidade apriorística da natureza; diferentemente, ele precisa ser pensado e investigado como condição e resultado de processos sociais (cf