Excerpt of Ptolemy´s World, illustrated 1482; Source: wikimedia/public domain
The area researched the social control mechanisms through which spaces have, in the most diverse ways, been constituted, defined, formed and regulated, and through which space has been endowed with territorial, social, cultural, administrative, political or religious meaning. These practices and their related conceptions are, with regard to the shared knowledge of a given society, fundamental in various ways: they create a framework for operative, symbolic and systematic knowledge relations, while simultaneously enabling the ongoing expansion and modification of certain knowledge contexts. Research in this area focused mainly on those mechanisms which define governed territories on territorial, socio-economic and ideological levels. The individual research projects of area B were distributed between four research groups (B I-V) and a number of subgroups.