Whose values? From the discrete to the continuous in how place and space matter in valuation studies

Abstract

This collection provides some invaluable insight on the interface between the academic discipline of Geography and studies of values and valuation. This article suggests that the tension between the normative and the analytical dimensions of these terms in man pieces is best rooted in the subdiscipline of economic sociology associated with scholars such as Boltanski and Thevenot, Mackenzie, Muniesa and Stark. It goes on to highlight how the geographical tradition might be best served by developing less an argument about why ‘space matters’ and more the sense in which affordances and propensities invoke the temporal and the spatial simultaneously, a framing that echoes Latour’s characterisation of ‘timespace’. This argument is illustrated with reference to the notion of urban fabric as an exemplar of what Latour characterises as the ‘fifth dimension’.