Claude Raffestin

Space, Territory, and Territoriality:

In this paper I reconstitute my own approach to the notions of space, territory, and territoriality. Developing from the early 1970s, my thoughts resided in the effort devoted to deriving from space the idea of territory qua production by the projection of labor, a Janus-faced category composed of energy and information. The construction of territory is the consequence of territoriality—defined as the ensemble of relations that a society maintains with exteriority and alterity for the satisfaction of its needs, towards the end of attaining the greatest possible autonomy compatible with the resources of the system. I also propose a descriptive model utilizable in the production of territory as well as in the production of representations of this territory in making available ‘images’ or landscapes. In the conclusion I draw attention to the fact that if labor is always a mediator, it is not thereby any less subordinated to the money whose possessors are in a position to alienate labor by subjecting it to orientations that can be undesirable. Money accelerates the process of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. Geography, by considering only territorial productions, has neglected to take up the issue of labor; consequently, it has not been able to demonstrate the effects on labor of money as a mediator that has rendered everything more and more fluid.

From the Territory to the Landscape: The Image as a Tool for Discovery

Until the nineteenth century, the Western society made a clear difference between territory and landscape, between reality and image. Now, there is a confusion between reality and its image. The landscape as image is an instrument to have an idea of reality, to know a particular character of reality. We want to analyze the reality of different representations, which constitute the fount of our knowledge and also the fount of the sociocultural perceptions of the members of our societies. The images inform on the vision of the society. The people create landscapes through the different languages and give possibility to understand the sociocultural meanings of the landscapes.

The Rural Origins of European Culture and the Challenge of the Twenty-first Century

book that I had found all the more interesting because it did not have the slightest scholarly pretensions. I had opened it more or less mechanically and found in it a passage, already underlined in pencil by myself, that seemed to me to offer an almost perfect approach for developing what was in my mind: &dquo; ... i Veneziani, sopra i pali di larice, hanno edificato chiese e palazzi.&dquo; 1 In fact, I could