After my insistence on beginning with the concrete, I now take a slight step backwards to discuss the conditions of possibility for the built environment, space in general. Does God have space in Godself? If God is a-spatial can our spaces – which are always both literally and metaphorically constructed – be redeemed? In asking about the grounding of space in God, we are asking about the possibility of ultimate redemption for what we have made of the world. In exploring the issue I shall seek to bring into conversation Christian and non Christian ideologies, or theology and secular theory. Picking up the theme of the first chapter I shall end with an attempt at a Trinitarian mapping of space.

THE IDEOLOGY OF SPACE

In the broadest sense the built environment is a political question – it concerns the constitution of the polis, the shape of the human community. ‘Shape’ here is not a metaphor. At levels of complexity greater than hunter gatherer societies, all human communities are class, caste, gender, and sometimes racially divided. We need only think of the contrast between palace and slum, caste village and outcaste cheri, the white suburbs of Johannesburg and the townships, the gender division implicit in most Western housing.