CityReads│Why Geography Matters? Read Doreen Massey to Find out

218

Why Geography Matters? Read Doreen Massey to Find out

Doreen Massey: Thinking geographically about social power.

Brett Christophers, Rebecca Lave, Jamie Peck, Marion Werner, 2018. The Doreen Massey Reader, Agenda Publishing.

Llewellyn Williams-Brooks, Review of The Doreen Massey Reader, 2019

Sources: https://agendapub.com/books/30/the-doreen-massey-reader

http://ppesydney.net/review-of-the-doreen-massey-reader/

Doreen Massey (1944–2016) changed geography. Her intellectual trajectory traversed Marxian political economy, poststructuralist geography and feminist theory. Her ideas on space, region, labor, identity, ethics and capital transformed the field itself, while also attracting a wide audience in sociology, planning, political economy, cultural studies, gender studies and beyond. The significance of her contributions is difficult to overstate. Far from a dry defense of disciplinary turf, her claim that “geography matters” possessed both scholarly substance and political salience.

Through her most influential concepts – such as power-geometries and a “global sense of place” – she insisted on the active role of regions and places not simply in bearing the brunt of political-economic restructuring, but in reshaping the uneven geographies of global capitalism and the horizons of politics. In capturing how global forces articulated with the particularities of place, Massey's work, right up until her death, was an inspiration for critical social sciences and political activists alike. It integrated theory and politics in the service of challenging and transforming both.

Four human geography professors from Sweden, the United States and Canada bring together a collection of Massey's writings for the first time the full span of her formative contributions, showcasing the continuing relevance of her ideas to current debates on globalization, immigration, nationalism and neoliberalism, among other topics.

To read Doreen Massey is to traverse the labyrinth-like history of the British New Left from their rupture in the radical sixties to the rolling crisis of the Great Recession. From her working-class origins in the Wythenshawe public-housing estate in Greater Manchester to her academic career at the Open University, Doreen Massey committed to locating the extent to which“Geography Matters!” (her most famous quote).

Part one (Region) serves as an excellent supplement to her famous paper ‘In What Sense a Regional Problem?’ by highlighting the primacy of land, labor and gender in their historic context for analyzing capital. Massey's critique of Industrial Location Theory serves as the point of departure for this discussion, in which she argues that regions are not only composed of consumers and producers but of capitalists, workers, imperialism and private property. Subsequently Massey explores the importance of land-orientated analysis in a policy document prepared for the British Labor Party. A paper exploring the landed property of the British economy furthers these themes, highlighting the ascendancy of finance capital over the land holding of feudal and industrial private property. This leads nicely to a discussion of the changing spatial division of labor under global capitalism and its implications for trade union decline. A standout paper in the section explores the regional/industrial specificity of women's historic work in England and its implication for social reproduction. For example, it is elaborated that the coal mining villages of Durham tended to intensify patriarchal modes of unpaid domestic work, while Lancashire women in the cotton industry formed a militant trade union stronghold.

Part two (Place) interrogates the interaction between subjective place-making and its relationship to structural processes of power. The intersection is best accounted for in the famous paper ‘Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place’ which explores the contradictory nature of place. As is argued, placeless is something constructed by groups of people in distinct natural and built environments, however place is also experienced as something influx and unbounded. The remainder of the chapter develops a range of material pursuing the importance of pluralistic conceptualizations of place-solidarity; from an exploration of the relationship between the emergence of new social movements and Miner's support group coalitions in England, to critiques of the gendered nature of knowledge economy workers in the tech industry. In this way, Massey depicts how the public sphere of work is able to dominate the private sphere of the households, while the gendering of work makes alternative geographies of labor appear inconceivable.

In the final section, the conceptualization of space logically extends the previous discussions of region and place by critiquing ‘historic/time’ centric conceptions of social processes. Capital must also be contested as a holistic vantage for understanding social problems as she argues: “In any given actual society capital is differentiated also by such things as social character, temperament, regional history…”. In the same vein, the famous paper Flexible Sexism takes issue with two of the most famous works in Marxist geography: Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies and David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity. As Massey scathingly claims, the central agent of their work is “… in fact mainly capital, for neither book allows much space for resistance, even from labor.” In extending her concern for agency, Massey advocates a feminist standpoint epistemology in order to provide foundation for gendered resistance, decentering masculine viewpoints as the natural location for understanding postmodernism. The section closes with a discussion of Venezuela's‘power-geometry' project, which operationalized Massey's critique of spatial power through spatial redistribution policy. Together, space emerges as a rich but dizzying category, which incorporates a regional and place-based conception of geography.

Massey's Reader serves as a critical conjuncture for thinking geographically about social power. While other figures following the Marxist geographic turn of the 1960s would focus on deindustrialization from the vantage of global capitalism, Massey committed to shining a light on the specifically local dimensions of globalization. She was able to demonstrate that the local and global are co-constitutive, and that there are advantages of thinking globally about local problems. Massey suggests that a global sense of placeness might be capable of transcending the increasingly polarized politics of working class communities, producing a new locally embedded form of resistance. Since her passing in 2016, the world has witnessed a range of regional ruptures contesting the legacy of globalization. In this respect it seems that questions of regionalism and their relationship to place and space are increasingly urgent. Massey suggests that we need to propose progressive alternatives of solidarity to navigate the wilderness of the fractured international context. But this needs to be carefully understood as place-specific and largely subject to the history and process of social geography. For this reason, we should be grateful to possess the road map offered in The Doreen Massey Reader in helping understand the implications of Massey's other well-known phrase:

“there is no point of departure”.

Related CityReads

（Click the title or enter our WeChat menu and reply number ）

CityReads ∣Notes On Cities

"CityReads", a subscription account on WeChat, 

posts our notes on city reads weekly. 

Please follow us by searching "CityReads"  

Or long press the QR code  above