Fabio Petani - room A34 - 13:30-15:00

Regimes of worth at play in planning and building a 200 million $ multi-arts centre
Orders of worth at play in creating a center for the arts: the agency of unrealized spaces
This paper seeks, within the "practice turn" in social theory (Schatzki et al., 2001), to contribute to the development of a pragmatics of space (as called for by Lussault and Stock, 2009). We adopt their conceptualization of space as "proof" or test, a term developed by French sociology (épreuve) which allows us to inquire into the production of space through practices, which are partially resisted or supported according to specific pragmatic regimes of planning and justification (Thévenot, 2001).
Building on data from a focused ethnography of the planning and construction of a cultural center for the arts, we show the interplay of various orders of worth, or worlds (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006) converging in the professional activities of the players involved (politicians, architects, engineers, museum and theatre directors, private investors etc.) Our analysis focuses on the interaction between the production of space and the agency of space as socio-material producer (Lefebvre, 1974). In particular, we find that spaces that fail the test of strength (Boltanski and Chiappello, 2005) and consequently are not produced, influence the orders of worth at play in the production of space. These "ghost" spaces keep impacting on the justification processes.  In fact, in the ongoing process of space production, while the emerging produced space acts as a powerful justification, so does the excluded production of space, legitimizing - albeit less visibly - the socio-material actors and their practices. 
Our study shows how space across time is produced by and in turn is constitutive of powerful means of justification, creating both an arena for criticism and a test, co-orienting human actors and material agents. Our data, examined through the lenses of the orders of worth, allow us to empirically ground Lefebvre's dialectics of the production of space, and to suggest that conceived spaces, even if unrealized, maintain agency in the planning and construction process. This non-representational layer (Thrift, 2008) of not produced or "ghost" spaces sheds light on a scarcely considered dynamic of how space production is constantly (con)tested.