JANE PICKERSGILL

For Space.

Doreen Massey (2005)  

The author begins by talking about how we discuss the concepts of space, time and place together. The story might go: they crossed this space, in that time and settled in that place. This narrative posits space as being a surface and the things that we do are phenomenon on that surface. Thus, geography becomes history and space becomes time. p.4

 

An alternative view; her counter argument, is that we can think about space as:

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1.    a meeting up of histories; ‘as the product of interrelations’

2.    as a sphere in which different and ‘distinct trajectories’ can, and do occur simultaneously

3.    that it is always being re-made, under construction, incomplete. p.9

 

Space thus becomes; the ‘story so far’, never finished, a product of relations between objects, people, events. Massey asserts  that in the west we have been told a story (by our governments) that globalization is the inevitable path for all civilizations, a natural phenomenon, not an ideological project which has been undertaken. What is not considered is that other countries could follow a different path - that just because we are currently more developed they will automatically follow the same route.

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In the early chapters of the book are discussed the idea of place as having an almost totemic value. The notion is usually evoked as one of the local which is endlessly mobilised in political arguments as the opposite of global. The local represents a ‘retreat to place’, a pulling up of the drawbridge against ‘invaders’ and those who are different. Our current politics are manifesting this phenomenon via calls for independence, protection, and local governance.

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Later chapters discuss public space and its decline in the globalized cities of the developed world.  This is manifested in the existence of geographic zones where behaviour is monitored, where social relations are manipulated and where exclusions can be enforced.  This trend entails the exercise of a regulatory framework where curtailment of the right to intermingle and independently negotiate is being removed. Along with the citizens' rights to use the space our democracy is therefore being seriously compromised by this privatisation of what were once public streets and spaces.