Over the past 50 years, there has been a radical change in the scientific understanding of concepts of culture and space, and their linkage to territorial references has been broken. In everyday discourses, however, the understanding of culture in inhabited space has persisted. In fact, a close connection between culture and space is intuitively obvious: even the description of networks of relationships can hardly do without spatial concepts of proximity, distance and positioning. Accordingly, the departure for old shores calls for not abolishing the unity of culture and space, but for rethinking it from the perspective of the lived-in: culture as lived-in space moves living as an active activity and communicative practice to the centre; non-verbally in the sense of bodily spatial behaviour (proxemics), verbally in the sense of spatial analogies and metaphors. The analysis of such habitual communication of non-verbal and verbalised proxemics holds the potential to thematise and reflect on habitual impressions of perception and their reflexive verbal and non-verbal expression through semantic reflection and the spatial change of perspective, so that culture in the sense of a habitual space can be grasped, experienced and shaped.

Procedure and milestones:
Theoretical analysis of philosophical and phenomenological conceptualisations of living, space, spatiality, body, perception, etc. as well as their translation into the social sciences with the help of proxemics.