This article serves as introduction for a themed issue on Peter Sloterdijk's enormous philosophy of space. The paper gives some orientation on the anthropological and social philosophy Sloterdijk deploys within his oeuvre, and illuminates the various fields of social and cultural research his ideas have informed so far. The article also discusses the necessity of a critical distance to the philosophical premises on which Sloterdijk grounds his philosophy.

With his magnum opus on Spheres, Peter Sloterdijk introduces a critical philosophical and cultural view on the spatiality of current society. In this contribution we elaborate on the spatial metaphor Sloterdijk uses but also scrutinise Sloterdijk's ideas by drawing some parallels between his ideas and those of other philosophical anthropological thinkers. Finally, we very briefly point to a suitable conceptual framework for investigating the spherology of a human being in the world.

During recent decades, consumption-oriented spaces of comfort and hospitality have proliferated, including, for instance, lounge shopping malls, food court plazas, spas, entertainment retail, visitor centres and the development of ever-larger pedestrian precincts. In this article we explore shopping malls as capitalist domes in Sloterdijk's sense. We observe atmospheric production, atmospheric management and atmospheric culture (which we propose to call atmoculture) inside such domes.

Contemporary urban theory has less to say about internal processes of crowds for theoretical reflections on urbanity. The paper analyses the work on crowds by Peter Sloterdijk and the performative theory of assembly by Judith Butler to enrich contemporary thinking on urbanity in the South. The paper accentuates two arguments. Sloterdijk emphasises the `affective synthesis' of crowds, whereas Butler elaborates the performative effect of crowds to articulate the right of owning attested rights.