Elizabeth Grierson and Kristen Sharp introduce Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991) as a seminal text for the considerations of re-imagining the city. Lefebvre outlines a spatial triad as the central epistemological framework for understanding space: spatial practice refers to the production and reproduction of spatial relations between objects and products. Each person in social space has a relationship to that space, a level of competence in moving around it and uses specific performances to get around; representations of space are tied to the relations of production and to the order’ which those relations impose; it involves knowledge, signs and codes, and is the space of bureaucrats and social engineers and the people responsible for order in a society; representational space as the space of inhabitants and users is directly lived through its associated images and symbols. It is the space where meaningful symbols and images of a community are located. It is also, therefore, the space of artists; the space the imagination seeks to change (Lefebvre 1991: 38-40). Edward Soja (1996) reappropriates Lefebvre’s trialectics of space to define a new critical understanding of what he defines as Thirdspace’. Rejecting the classic binary of historicity and sociality, he argues that the third important epistemology is spatiality. He posits Firstspace’ (the lived space of reality, the city itself, fixed on the concrete materiality of spatial forms and spaces that can be mapped) and Secondspace’ (ideas about space, cities understood through discourses, literary forms, imagined space, representatations of space, mental or cognitive maps). Thirdspace,’ integrates the first two to create a new epistemology. A thirdspatial imagination’ emerges that understands space as simultaneously real and imagined. As Soja argues:
Everything comes together in Thirdspace: subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdiscplinary, everyday life and unending history.
You ask what Sort of Defence Virginia can make. I Korea, North Map believe they will make an able Defence. Their Militia and minute Men have been some time employed Korea, North Map in training them selves, and they have Nine Battallions of regulars as they call them, maintained among them, under good Officers, at the Continental Expence. They have set up a Number of Manufactories of Fire Arms, which are busily employed. They are tolerably supplied with Powder, and are successfull and assiduous, in making Salt Petre. Their neighbouring Sister or rather Daughter Colony of North Carolina, which is a warlike Colony, and has several Battallions at the Continental Expence, as well as a pretty good Militia, are ready to assist them, and they are in very good Spirits, and seem determined to make a brave Resistance.
