Serious, and sometimes irreverent, it is a compelling manifesto: for re-imagining spaces for these times and facing up to their challenge. For Space is essential reading for anyone interested in space and the spatial turn in the social sciences and humanities. This book is "for space" in that it argues for a reinvigoration of the spatiality of our implicit cosmologies. 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. For Space pursues its argument through philosophical and theoretical engagement, and through telling personal and political reflection. Every time you drive to that out of town shopping center you contribute to the rising prices, even hasten the demise of the corner shop (Massey 1994) the current speed up may be strongly determined by economic forces with money always being at the forefront of everything Massey 1994). That is its challenge, and one that has been persistently evaded. Time-space compression is a concept developed by the Marxist geographer David Harvey to describe contemporary developments in capitalism which have led to the speeding up of the circulation of capital and with it a speeding up of social life in general while simultaneously reducing the significance of place. If time is the dimension of change then space is the dimension of the social: the contemporaneous co-existence of others. This occurs as the result of technological innovation, driven by globalisation. It affects, for instance, the way we understand globalisation, the way we approach cities, the way we develop, and practice, a sense of place. Time-space compression refers to capitalist expansion’s alteration of the relationship between space and time. It inflects our understandings of the world, our attitudes to others, our politics. 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. A lot of what I’ve been trying to do over the all too many years when I’ve been writing about space, she told interviewer Nigel Warburton in a 2013 Social Science Bites interview that remains one of our most popular, is to bring space alive. In this book, Doreen Massey makes an impassioned argument for revitalising our imagination of space. Doreen Massey, the geographer of space and power, died on March 11 at age 72. 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." 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. "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.
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