"空间"是人文地理学研究的核心概念。全球化时代,空间概念的内涵与外延都发生了重要变化。本文通过重述后现代主义哲学、当代城市与区域空间重构的社会实践、当代人文地理学前沿理论三者之间相互印证的理念与事实,重申全球化时代的空间观为空间与社会辨证统一的后现代空间观,并阐述了其对当代人文地理学研究的重要意义。

Space, as a core concept in the research of human geography, has experienced an important transformation in the era of globalization. This paper rethink the concept of space through a trinity study in the postmodernism, the contemporary practice of urban and regional reconstruction and the advanced theories of human geography. Postmodernism is a movement since 1960's in the humanities characterized as denial of objective truth and global cultural narrative. Contrary to modern approaches, postmodernism emphasizes diversification, heterogeneity, variability and localization. The origin of the rise of postmodernism lies in all economic, political and social restructuring processes caused by the globalization. The first global shift takes place in production. Global production networks emerged and created structures which are "discontinuously territorial". As hubs of economic activities, cities and city-regions are connected with each other through threads of flows. New urban and regional spaces forms due to these connections. This is the second global shift, space shift. Finally, the third shift occurs in the state area. New governance networks are founded on the new urban and regional spaces to manage the economic, social and political relationships among them. Generally, globalization arouses urban and regional space recombination and governance restructuring all over the world. The postmodern space conception as a social-spatial dialectic can be seen in all principal theories of human geography after the quantitative revolution. Actually, new regional geography, new regionalism, new cultural geography, and the recent discussions about scale, relationship and governance consider that things should be studied within their specific context. Therefore, in the sense of research paradigm, they are all postmodern geographies. This paper reaffirms that the space concept in the globalization era should be a social-spatial dialectic as an image of real-world, just as the postmodernism reveals. Recognizing the postmodern concept of space is a foundation for conducting researching on contemporary human geography.