The Territory as a Social Construction

Abstract

In the current work, written at the dawn of the 21st century, Fals Borda addressed the concepts of territory, territoriality and region. Fals Borda’s aim was to further the debate he had been promoting in local, regional and national settings since the previous decade and, in particular, since he participated in the National Constituent Assembly in 1991 and took on a role in the Territorial Planning Commission implemented during the early years of the new Political Constitution. Fals Borda insisted on the importance of the recognition of territorial autonomies and the insufficiency of the idea of a unitary republic for Colombia. He considered analyses that applied “mechanistic” or Newtonian precepts to the human elaboration of space inconsistent and opted instead to understand that space/time takes on the form of concrete, yet transitory, units of human occupation.