Space, Territory, and Territoriality

Abstract

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.