Introduction: Reconceptualizing Place: Doreen Massey oon Relational Geographical Processes

With nationalist, anti-immigrant, and white supremacist politics again on the rise, Massey’s writing from the 1990s and early 2000s is strikingly, almost painfully relevant today. Her distinctively geographic entrance point into these debates was through re-envisioning place. In Massey’s analysis, place is not a static, bounded, homogenous territory to be defended against incursion, but instead the interconnected product of relations stretching across multiple scales, interlinking us in relations of tension and solidarity. In the chapters in this section, Massey builds on this conceptualization of place as process (Chapter 9) to reframe the geographical roots of identity (Chapter 10), re-envision the bases of political solidarity (Chapter 8), examine the contested boundaries between home and work (Chapter 11), redirect the left’s critique of globalization (Chapter 12), and propose a powerful re-imagining of citizenship and the importance of ‘care at a distance’ (Chapter 13). Massey’s re-envisioning of place as a constellation of social, economic, and cultural relations stretched across space, some restrictive and some enabling, is common to all the chapters in this section, but is theorized most explicitly in Chapters 9 and 10: “Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place” and “A place called home?”. As she conceptualizes it, the uniqueness of a particular place comes not from a bounded, internally nurtured, singular identity, but from the specificity of its linkages to other places and scales as they accumulate and interact over time. Individual places are extraverted: linked to the wider world and knit together out of multiple identities (Chapter 10). The global, national, and local scales which can seem so distinct, she argues, are in fact shaped and co-constituted not only by flows and interconnections of capital and labour, but also of meaning, culture and ideas. Crucially, different individuals, groups, and places have very different relations to these interconnections. Some create them, some are stuck with them; some benefit from them in ways that weaken others’ ability to do so (Chapter 9). One of Massey’s key points in these chapters is that the uniqueness of place stems not from homogeneity, but from multiplicity and heterogeneity. Acknowledging differences along axes of race, class, gender, and colonial history is one of the most characteristic aspects of her work.

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