Taken from Christopher Tilley's A Phenomenology of Landscape which adresses notions of place and space as necessarily arising out of human (practical, material) experience rather than pre-existing it. Emphases are mine.
The following forms of space might be identified:
Somatic space is a space of habitual and unselfconscious action. It is the space of sensory experience and bodily movement. An understanding of this space takes as its starting-point the upright human body looking out on the world. Space opens out before the body and is differentiable in terms of front/back; left/right; vertical/horizontal; top/bottom; within reach/ beyond reach; within hearing/beyond hearing; within sight/ beyond sight; here/there polarities (Relph 1976: 9; Taun 1977:35-50). The very physicality of the body imposes a schema on space through which it may be experienced and understood. An experience of space is grounded in the body itself; its capacities and potentialities for movement. Through time-space routines of movement a person knows where she or he is in relation to familiar places and objects and 'how to go on' in the world. Lived body-space incorporates not only habituated movement in general but also modes of walking, turning, reaching in performing particular acts: body-ballets (Seamon 1979,1980).
Perceptual space is the egocentric space perceived and encountered by individuals in their daily practices. The centre of such a space is grounded in individual perception of distances and directions, natural objects and cultural creations. This space is always relative and qualitative. Distance and direction are perceived as near or far, this way or that way, moving along one track or another. A perceptual space is one that links patterns of individual intentionality to bodily movement and perception. It is a space of personality, of encounter and emotional attachment. It is the constructed life-space of the individual, involving feelings and memories giving rise to a sense of awe, emotion, wonder or anguish in spatial encounters. Such a space may as often as not be felt rather than verbalized. It creates personal significances for an individual in his or her bodily routines - places remembered and places of affective importance.
Perceptual space is intricately interlinked with existential space or the lived space as it is constructed in the concrete experiences of individuals socialized within a group. The meanings of existential space transcend the individual and form a grounding for perceptual space rather than being some kind of summation of individualized perception. Existential space is in a constant process of production and reproduction through the movements and activities of members of a group. It is a mobile rather than a passive space for experience. It is experienced and created through life-activity, a sacred, symbolic and mythic space replete with social meanings wrapped around buildings, objects and features of the local topography, providing reference points and planes of emotional orientation for human attachment and involvement. Places in existential space are foci for the production of meaning, intention and purpose of societal significance. Boundaries are of major significance in structuring existential space both in and between places and regions. Boundaries are to do with creating distinctions and marking out social oppositions, mapping social and cultural difference and Otherness. The presence of boundaries, obvious natural prototypes being river courses, mountain chains, or rock outcrops, and the coast, may be of major significance in delimiting territories, the choice of locales and the networking of paths through a landscape.
Architectural space only makes sense in relation to pragmatic, perceptual and existential space, but involves a deliberate attempt to create and bound space, create an inside, an outside, a way around, a channel for movement. Architecture is the deliberate creation of space made tangible, visible and sensible. This is why buildings play a fundamental role in the creation and recreation,production and reproduction of existential space and have profound structuring effects on perceptual space.
Finally, cognitive space provides a basis for reflection and theorization with regard to understanding the others. It is the 'space' of this discussion and analysis. Space can only exist as a set of relations between things or places. In this sense there is no space that is not relational. Space is created by social relations, natural and cultural objects. It is a production, an achievement, rather than an autonomous reality in which things or people are located or 'found'. Having been constituted by things and places spatial relations affect the way in which they relate. In other words, there is a sociospatial dialectic at work - space is both constituted and constitutive.
