8. The Production of Urban Space and “Critical Geography”

Knowledge is part of the process of reproducing reality, a need to capture its novel aspects. I am referring to the profound transformations of reality since the 1990s, noting that, tending towards the urban, they take place in a global space, under the aegis of financial capital. These metamorphoses need to be explained in their contradictions which can be interpreted, in this century, through the urban conflicts exposed by demonstrations in public spaces in major cities, demanding an effort to interpret them. This is based on a certain theory of reality that assumes an open and contradictory social totality. This revelation, which is based on the dialectical method, enables the elaboration of a transition from Geography towards a metageography which, going beyond the limits imposed by a specialisation, accentuates the need to address the foundations of explaining reality. This movement is performed through the centrality of the concept of a “social production of space”, focussing on how the spatiality of social relationships takes places in the modern world. From this perspective, we define space as a “condition, medium and product of social reproduction”, within a critical-radical geography about urban space in the present day.