CONCEPT
The Space of Places
The embodied, local, rooted geography in which people live their material lives — increasingly colonized by the space of flows but never fully absorbed into it.
The space of places names the spatial logic of embodied human life: the rooms, neighborhoods, cities, and regions where people raise children, grow old, maintain relationships, and die. It is bounded, sequential, and organized by physical proximity and biographical time. Castells contrasts it with the space of flows to name the characteristic tension of the information age — the conflict between two incompatible spatial logics that coexist in every knowledge worker's daily experience. The AI transition intensifies the tension by dramatically expanding what the space of flows demands of the individual while leaving the space of places largely unchanged in its material requirements. The family still needs dinner at a specific time. The body still needs sleep in a specific bed.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The space of places is not nostalgic. It is not the pre-modern world being eroded by modernity. It is a permanent dimension of human existence that cannot be dissolved without dissolving embodiment itself. The knowledge worker can