For Space

by Doreen Massey

"The reason for my enthusiasm for this book is that Doreen Massey manages to describe a certain way of perceiving movement in space which I have been - and still am - working with on different levels in my work: i.e. the idea that space is not something static and neutral, a frozen entity, but is something intertwined with time and thus ever changing - also when we are not occupying it. Doreen's descriptions of her journey through England for example are clear and precise accounts of this idea, and she very sharply characterizes the attempts not to recognize this idea as utopian and nostalgic."
- Olafur Eliasson

In this book, Doreen Massey makes an impassioned argument for revitalising our imagination of space. She takes on some well-established assumptions from philosophy, and some familiar ways of characterising the twenty-first century world, and shows how they restrain our understanding of both the challenge and the potential of space.

The way we think about space matters. It inflects our understandings of the world, our attitudes to others, our politics. It affects, for instance, the way we understand globalisation, the way we approach cities, the way we develop, and practice, a sense of place. If time is the dimension of change then space is the dimension of the social: the contemporaneous co-existence of others. That is its challenge, and one that has been persistently evaded. For Space pursues its argument through philosophical and theoretical engagement, and through telling personal and political reflection. Doreen Massey asks questions such as how best to characterise these so-called spatial times, how it is that implicit spatial assumptions inflect our politics, and how we might develop a responsibility for place beyond place.

This book is "for space" in that it argues for a reinvigoration of the spatiality of our implicit cosmologies. For Space is essential reading for anyone interested in space and the spatial turn in the social sciences and humanities. Serious, and sometimes irreverent, it is a compelling manifesto: for re-imagining spaces for these times and facing up to their challenge.

Genres: Geography, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Space, Theory, Architecture, Sociology

233 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 8, 2005

About the author

From Wikipedia: Doreen Barbara Massey FRSA FBA FAcSS (3 January 1944 – 11 March 2016) was a British social scientist and geographer, working among others on topics involving Marxist geography, feminist geography, and cultural geography. Her work on space, place and power has been highly influential within a range of related disciplines and research fields. She served as Emeritus Professor of Geography at the Open University.

Massey was born in Manchester and spent most of her childhood in Wythenshawe, a large council estate. She studied at Oxford and later did a Masters in Regional Science at the University of Pennsylvania, beginning her career with a thinktank, the Centre for Environmental Studies (CES) in London. CES contained several key analysts of the contemporary British economy, and Massey established a working partnership with Richard Meegan, among others. CES was closed down and she moved into academia at the Open University.

Massey retired in 2009 but remained a frequent media commentator, particularly on industry and regional trends. In her role as Emeritus Professor at the OU she continued her speaking engagements and involvement in educational TV programmes and books.

Reviews

[Philippe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has been very helpful to me in understanding an important point in contemporary thinking about space. I must admit, however, that I didn't read it from cover to cover. The argument meanders, and the prose is rather turgid and jargonistic. But it was Patsy Healey's typology of four different geographies (discussed in her book Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies: Towards a Relational Planning for Our Times...) that allowed me to frame Massey's plea 'for (a different conception of) space'.

Healey's typology unfolds along two axes. A first axis differentiates between two structuring principles in space: proximity or connectivity. A second axis shifts the perspective from an external, descriptive point of view to an active, immanent position. At the intersection of proximity as a structuring principle and an external stance, we find traditional Euclidian space. In shifting to a space defined by connectivity but still approached from an objectivist vantage point we end up with the networked 'space of flows' (as expansively treated in Manuel Castell's The Rise of the Network Society). Something rather fundamental happens when we move to an immanent, constructivist perspective: by default space becomes 'potential', and an arena to shape a political project. Concepts of spatial development inevitably turn into frameworks to organise society. Alberto Magnaghi and his Territorialist School (see his book The Urban Village: A Charter for Democracy and Local Self-Sustainable Development) embodies this activist stance, but from an proximity perspective. Massey occupies the last quadrant of our typology, at the intersection of immanence and connectivity. Massey's conception of space shows three distinctive characteristics: coevalness, heterogeneity and relationality. In space we are inevitably confronted with simultaneity, otherness and the exercise of power. And hence space appears as the necessary condition and enabler of politics. In an interview Doreen Massey expresses this point very clearly as follows:

"If time is the dimension in which things happen one after the other, the dimension of succession, then space is the dimension of things existing at the same time: of simultaneity. It’s the dimension of multiplicity. We’re sitting here, and it’s around midday in London. Well, at this moment it is already night in the Far East; my friends in Latin America are just stirring and thinking about getting up. Space is the dimension that cuts across all those stories; the dimension of our simultaneity, of multiplicity. What that means is that space is the dimension that presents us with the existence of 'the other.' It presents me with the existence of those friends in Latin America. It is space that presents us with the question of the social. And it presents us with the most fundamental of political questions, which is, how are we going to live together? (...) Space concerns our relations with each other and, in fact, social space, I would say, is a product of our relations with each other, our connections with each other. Globalization, for instance, is a new geography constructed out of the rela­tions we have with each other across the globe. And the most important issue that that raises, if we are really thinking socially, is that all those relations are going to be filled with power. So what we have is a geography which is the geogra­phy of power. The distribution of those relations mirrors the power relations within our society. (...) If we took space seriously as a dimension that we create through our power relations, and as a dimension which presents us with the multiplicity of the world, and refused to align all stories into one story of development, then we would reimagine the world in a different way. We are presented with different political questions."

Space thus conceveived is open, plural, relational and always becoming. It is, in fact, a 'medium', understood as an 'infrastructure of being' (not simply as a carrier of signals and symbols; see John Durham Peters' The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media). This is a very fluid conception of space. It invites us to choose position, and engage in ethical, existential and epistemological experiments in order to find ways to jointly live together and to adapt to an always changing environment.

I find this a very appealing set of ideas and I'm sure this will help me to stay the course in a post-truth, Trumpist future.

[Harry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Split between deep insights, evocative writing and some of the most dense disengaging academic writing I've come across.

Massey repeatedly demonstrated, not least of all in her political writings, that she could communicate rigorously and engagingly - it was a shame that didn't happen here, as the actual content is crucial for anyone attempting to take space seriously in their work.

[Andrew]

I'm increasingly appreciating these uber-theoretical, Foucauldian/Derridean/and so forth texts as meditations rather than as cohesive arguments. As a meditation, For Space is lovely. It reminds me of my wonderful old British Modernism professor who dressed like Virginia Woolf and had an office with sagging bookshelves and a heavy patchouli reek.

A lot of her arguments should be familiar to anyone who's read geography. In fact, a lot of them are cribbed from Edward Soja's "Postmodern Geographies" and she even uses the exact same quotes from Foucault's "Des Espaces Autres." But the way she winds Deleuze and geography together is both, a) super original in the world of theory, and b) exactly in line with my thinking. I found myself pumping my fist a lot lot.

[Jeanette · Rating 5 out of 5]

"For the truth is that you can never simply 'go back', to home or to anywhere else. When you get 'there' the place will have moved on just as you yourself will have changed. And this of course is the point. For to open up 'space' to this kind of imagination means thinking time and space as mutually imbricated and thinking both of them as the product of interrelations. You can't go back in space-time. To think that you can is to deprive others of their ongoing independent stories. It may be 'going back home', or imagining regions as backward, as needing to catch up, or just taking that holiday in some 'unspoilt, timeless' spot. The point is the same. You can't go back. You can't hold places still. What you can do is meet up with others, catch up with where another's history has got to 'now', but where that 'now' is itself constituted by nothing more than--precisely--that meeting-up (again)."

[Alya · Rating 3 out of 5]

This isn't exactly the kind of book you want to read when you start fasting; I could barely focus and it is complex enough already, especially for a geography newbie. It's very theoretical, and it helps to be well read in many theorists prior to delving in.
Still, I got enough of it to know that her meditations on space open up a way of conceiving and imagining it that has been overlooked over time. I just have to reread it later to form that definition in my head more clearly. I can see this really informing and guiding my own explorations of space (not the final frontier variety :)) in literature.

For now I will hold on to space as the simultaneity of stories-so-far.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

no supero que el que diu sigui tan increible i tan contemporani tot i q el llibre ja te 20 anys: la millor!!!!!
nomes he llegit dos llibres seus i alguns articles, però diria que aquest es el que explica mes be la teoria de l’espai (ordinari) wifbsiensifnosd llegiu-la

[Christian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, perhaps i should study Geography

[Andrew Nolan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a deeply awkward book to read that veers between insightful theoretical analysis and a periodically garbled text that reads like a computer algorithm wrote the book; imagine paragraph length human geography versions of @marxbot3000 twitter.

At the book's best Massey distills a considerable breadth of knowledge in order to advance her own theories on space: space is a product of interactions and interrelations; space is a multiplicity of co-existent heterogenies; space is always under construction and never completed or closed.

[Ayush · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for anyone looking to understand contemporary pressures in the geography of spaces. Massey writes in a way that is approachable, focusing always on the most precise formulation that is necessary for the reader to understand as well as gain a sense of. Recommended also for all reading lists, often as a text once one has had a basic introduction to the terms of the argument.

[Dylan Vieites Glennon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Supposedly made for a non-academic audience but is certainly full of jargon. The discussion on her trip from her home (London) to Milton Keynes is especially useful for understanding her wider arguments.

[Frances Wilde · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic introduction if anything, outlining existing theorisation of time & space & place

[Daniela · Rating 5 out of 5]

HERMOSO.

[Jason Cooper]

Defo not finished it i read the first page and a couple pages from diff chapters and it was literally insane so abstract like impossible to understand total and absolute waffle doreen massey piss off

[Letha · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my very favorites! I love this re-imagination of the concept of space. Theoretical. Our assumptions about space make a difference in our politics, relationships, co-existence with others, perception of so many things. This is a worthwhile read.

[Cheyanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

awesome!

[Lusine · Rating 4 out of 5]

A classic must-read in Human Geography.

[Jordan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dissertation research book - definitely not the angle I need!