Introduction: Restructuring Regions: Doreen Massey on Uneven Geographical Development

Like several of human geography’s other luminaries of the past half-century, Doreen Massey had a deep, career-long interest in the question of uneven geographical development. It was always with her, animating her politics as much as her research practice, from the early 1970s through to the early 2010s. Embracing the challenge of understanding uneven geographical development as a concrete abstraction, Massey approached it by way of iteration between theory and particular empirical and political contexts: it was first and foremost uneven development in Britain that exercised her, and her ability to show how her particular conceptualisation of uneven development – which she coined “spatial divisions of labour” – helped explain the consequential particularities of the British case has inspired a generation of economic geographers. Developed in and “of” Britain, the idea of spatial divisions of labour nonetheless could be (and has been) mobilized to illuminate actually-existing economic-geographic realities much further afield. And at its core is the region. Uneven geographical development is, for Massey, a complex, continuous and multi-layered dynamic of regional restructuring . This dynamic is the common thread running through the six chapters in Part 1 of this book. As ever with original thinkers such as Massey, the stimulus to innovative theorization was a realization that existing approaches to understanding the object of interest – in her case, pronounced intra-national spatial variegation in economic processes and outcomes – were simply not up to the task. Most obviously this was true, in Massey’s view, of the prevailing economic orthodoxy, neoclassicism, the paradigmatic dominance of which was to be seriously challenged by the modestly titled “Towards a critique of industrial location theory” (Chapter 2). But, significantly, she also thought it was true of the array of heterodox economic approaches that were in circulation during that period – the 1970s – when she began to explore uneven development and to develop her own unique approach to its conceptualization, a process that began in an appropriately grounded way in “Regionalism: some current issues” (Chapter 5; see also Chapter 14). As Massey saw it, the principal cause of the inadequacy of these various approaches was their weak or simply flawed conceptualization of space. If, as she would later famously insist, geography matters, then neither neoclassicism nor existing heterodoxies adequately showed how or why.

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