This book has emerged from a series of four seminars held in February 2003 at the hospitable Institute of Political Thinking "Nikos Poulantzas" as part of the "Poulantzas Seminars" and were repeated at the "Ermoupolis Seminars" in 2006. The intention of the seminars at the time, but also the occasion to present them today in book form, was and is to contribute to a theoretical and comparative discussion with international experiences of what happens daily in the cities and regions we live in, in which the renewing radical Left in Greece has an important contribution. At the same time, our ambition is to introduce the space into the broader problematics of the Left, which often ignores the spatiality of social relations or reduces it to the material and only space.

In this book, we do not make a general and exhaustive reference to the history of ideas about space, nor a philosophical retrospective on the concept of space. We focus on left thinking about space, attempting a kind of synthetic ("internal" and "external") left historiography. Such an endeavor would require extensive exploration, which the book opens without exhausting. The starting point for a left approach to the concept of space and its status as spatiality is the recognition that space is not something outside society, something waiting to be discovered out there, but that space is produced by society, it encompasses and is encompassed by social relations and is therefore deeply political. Societies, through specific, often conflicting relations, create not only their history but also their spaces - material, relational, symbolic, and experiential - yet in conditions that they have not chosen themselves.