Geographies of space design

Urbanists have long held an interest in the design of spaces, objects, and environments as a metaphorical expression of capitalist power. The processes of urbanisation that build and tear up the capitalist city have often been treated as power saturated, particularly by critical geographers and sociologists, and as a result the discourses and visual imagery that emerge in the production of the built environment have often been interpreted as "spatial inscriptions of social conflict" (Merrifield, 1993, page 1281). Consequently, there has been a strong suspicion-certainly among Marxian scholars-of the work of various intermediary agents involved in the production of urban space. Lefebvre, for example, famously draws attention to the importance of a 'representation of space' in such processes, "a space envisioned and conceived by assorted professionals and technocrats: planners, engineers, developers, architects, urbanists, geographers, and others of a scientific bent" (Merrifield, 2002, page 89; Lefebvre, 1991). Zukin, in Landscapes of Power (1991), argued that "While most people want to enjoy the pleasures of fine buildings, good stores, and beautiful urban spaces, the practices that create them make the city more abstract, more dependent on international capital flows, and more responsive to the organization of consumption than the organization of production" (page 54).