Abstract
This paper should be seen as a step towards reestablishing the individual, or the subject, in urban and regional studies. It is argued that to overcome the problems of ecological as well as structural determinism it is necessary to return to basic ontological questions. The questions raised are of the nature of human action and of existing and acting in a context, and they are discussed in their philosophical groundings and in relation to recent social theory. At the centre of the discussion are the concepts of temporality and spatiality which are broken up into their different, but related, dimensions. In the final section of the paper an analytical method to study mode of life which uses the dimensions of time and space as crucial categories in the mediation between structure and action is outlined.
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