firstspace

Space as it is directly perceived by the senses.

Although there is an epistemology to the study of Firstspace, it is in Secondspace that epistemological discourse receives the greatest attention. In the long history of geographic thought, Secondspace approaches have been turned to most often when mainstream Firstspace approaches have become too rigidly materialist and "scientistic," as with the various critiques that emerged in response to the epistemological closures of positivist human geography.

For scholars of the ancient world, access to Firstspace is almost non-existent.

Alternative form of Firstspace.

In thinking the countryside into Soja's trialectics of spatiality it is possible to undersand the countryside in firstspace or perceived space terms. It has a materiality and 'realness' that is, while evolving and shifting, nevertheless concrete and mappable.

In other words, we have marginalized 'counterspaces', resisting dominant (firstspace or secondspace) orders - thirdspace, the space of radical openness, of creativity, of activism, of social struggle (Soja, 1996).