Mapping the Futures

Local Cultures, Global Change

John Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, Lisa Tickner, John Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, Lisa Tickner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134912902
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

There are now new experiences of space and time; new tensions between globalism and regionalism, socialism and consumerism, reality and spectacle; new instabilities of value, meaning and identity - a dialectic between past and future. How are we to understand these?
Mapping the Futures is the first of a series which brings together cultural theorists from different disciplines to assess the implications of economic, political and social change for intellectual inquiry and cultural practice.

Part I

The cultural politics of space

Chapter 1

From space to place and back again: Reflections on the condition of postmodernity

David Harvey

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike

They’ve all gone to look for America

All gone to look for America

(Simon and Garfunkel)

INTRODUCTION

In the conclusion to The Condition of Postmodernity (Harvey 1989:355) I proposed four areas of development to overcome the supposed crisis of historical materialism and Marxism. These were:

1 The treatment of difference and ‘otherness’ not as something to be added on to more fundamental Marxist categories (like class and productive forces) but as something that should be omnipresent from the very beginning in any attempt to grasp the dialectics of social change.

2 A recognition that the production of images and discourses is an important facet of activity that has to be analysed as part and parcel of the reproduction and transformation of any social order.

3 A recognition that the dimensions of space and time matter and that there are real geographies of social action, real as well as metaphorical territories and spaces of power that are the sites of innumerable differences that have to be understood both in their own right and within the overall logic of capitalist development. Historical materialism, in short, must take its geography seriously.

4 A theoretical and practical recognition that historical-geographical materialism is an open-ended and dialectical mode of enquiry rather than a closed and fixed body of understandings. Marx’s theory of a capitalist mode of production, for example, is not a statement of total truth but an attempt to come to terms with the historical and geographical truths that characterize capitalism, both in general as well as in its particular phases and forms.

It is in this spirit that I turn to just one particular topic broached in The Condition of Postmodernity and attempt both a clarification and an elaboration of its importance to the overall argument. I want to examine in more detail the shifting relations between space and place and to explain, in particular, why it might be that the elaboration of place-bound identities has become more rather than less important in a world of diminishing spatial barriers to exchange, movement and communication.

THE PROBLEM OF PLACE

An initial point of clarification will, I fear, not clarify much. There are all sorts of words such as milieu, locality, location, locale, neighbourhood, region, territory and the like, which refer to the generic qualities of place. There are other terms such as city, village, town, megalopolis and state, which designate particular kinds of places. There are still others, such as home, hearth, ‘turf’, community, nation and landscape, which have such strong connotations of place that it would be hard to talk about one without the other. ‘Place’ also has an extraordinary range of metaphorical meanings. We talk about the place of art in social life, the place of women in society, our place in the cosmos, and we internalize such notions psychologically in terms of knowing our place, or feeling we have a place in the affections or esteem of others. We express norms by putting people, events and things in their proper place and seek to subvert norms by struggling to define a new place from which the oppressed can freely speak. Place has to be one of the most multi-layered and multi-purpose words in our language.

While this immense confusion of meanings makes any theoretical concept of place immediately suspect, I regard the generality, the ambiguity and the multiple layers of meanings as advantageous. It suggests, perhaps, some underlying unity which, if we can approach it right, will reveal a great deal about social, political and spatial practices in interrelation with each other. So, although I shall concentrate mainly on the territoriality of place, the very looseness of the term lets me explore connections to other meanings. I shall suggest, for example, that while the collapse of spatial barriers has undermined older material and territorial definitions of place, the very fact of that collapse (the threat of ‘time-space compression’ as I called it in The Condition of Postmodernity) has put renewed emphasis upon the interrogation of metaphorical and psychological meanings which, in turn, give new material definitions of place by way of exclusionary territorial behaviour. Explorations of this sort should help clarify the thorny problem of ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’ (made so much of in post-modern rhetoric) because territorial place-based identity, particularly when conflated with race, ethnic, gender, religious and class differentiation, is one of the most pervasive bases for both progressive political mobilization and reactionary exclusionary politics.

There is, it also happens, a theoretical lesson to be had from such an enquiry. It permits reflection on the question of how to sustain and elaborate general theory in the face of particularity and difference. In this respect, geographers’ experiences are of interest. When the rest of social science was dealing with general theories specified in time, geographers were struggling with the specificities of place. Furthermore, the incorporation of space into existing social theory, of whatever sort, always seemed to disrupt its power. The innumerable contingencies, specificities and ‘othernesses’ which geographers encountered could be (and often were) regarded by geographers as fundamentally undermining (dare I say ‘deconstructing’) of all forms of social scientific metatheory. The prime source of this difficulty is not hard to spot. None of us can choose our moment in time and, being determinate, time is more easily open to theories of determination. But we do have a range of choices as to location and such choices matter because the potential fixity of spatial configuration (a building, a city) permits that choice to have the apparent effect of freezing time (if only for a moment). The effect is to fragment and shatter the more easily specified processes of temporal change. These sorts of arguments have recently entered into literary theory. Kristin Ross (1988), for example, follows Feuerbach in suggesting that ‘time is the privileged category of the dialectician, because it excludes and subordinates where space tolerates and coordinates’. The inference, of course, is that geography is not open to universal theory and is the realm of specificity and particularity. My own view, however, is that while too much can be made of the universal at the expense of understanding particularity, there is no sense in blindly cantering off in the other direction into that opaque world of supposedly unfathomable differences in which geographers have for so long wallowed. The problem is to rewrite the metatheory, to specify dialectical processes in time-space, rather than to abandon the whole project. An account of the role of place in social life should prove helpful in this regard.

The first step down that road is to insist that place in whatever guise is, like space and time (see Harvey 1990) a social construct. The only interesting question that can be asked is: by what social process(es) is place constructed? I shall try to get a fix on that problem by looking at two quite different answers and then triangulate in to suggest a conceptual resolution of the problem.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PLACE AND CONSTRUCTION UNDER CAPITALISM

I begin with a consideration of capitalism’s historical trajectory of geographical expansion through the construction of actual places. Since I have written extensively on this topic elsewhere (Harvey 1982, 1985), I shall here offer a very abbreviated account.

Capitalism is necessarily growth oriented, technologically dynamic, and crisis prone. It can temporarily and in part surmount crises of overaccumulation of capital (idle productive capacity plus unemployed labour power) through geographical expansion. There are two facets to this process. First, excess capital can be exported from one place (region, nation) to build another place within an existing set of space relations (e.g. the recent history of Japanese investment of capital surpluses in overseas real estate development). Second, space relations may be revolutionized through technological and organizational shifts that ‘annihilate space through time’. Such revolutions (the impact of turnpikes, canals, railways, automobiles, containerization, air transport and telecommunications) alter the character of places (if only in relation to each other) and thereby interact with the activities of place construction.

In either case, new networks of places (constituted as fixed capital embedded in the land) arise, around which new territorial divisions of labour and concentrations of people and labour power, new resource extraction activities and markets form. The geographical landscape that results is not evenly developed but strongly differentiated. ‘Difference’ and ‘otherness’ is produced in space through the simple logic of uneven capital investment and a proliferating geographical division of labour. There are tensions within this process. To begin with, it is necessarily speculative (like all forms of capitalist development). Place construction ventures often go wrong or become mired down in speculative swindles. Charles Dickens used the history of a mythical New Eden in Martin Chuzzlewit as a witty denunciation of a process which continues to this day as pensioners head down to their retirement plot in sunny Florida to find it is in the middle of a swamp. Thorsten Veblen (1967) argued, and I think he was basically correct, that the whole settlement pattern of the United States should be understood as one vast venture in real estate speculation. To say, therefore, that place construction is a given in the logic of capitalism’s production of space is not to argue that the geographical pattern is determined in advance. It is largely worked out a posteriori through competition between places.

The second difficulty arises out of the inevitable tension between speculative investment in land development and the geographical mobility of other forms of capital. Those who have invested in the former have to ensure that activities arise that render their investments profitable. Coalitions of entrepreneurs actively try to shape activities in places for this purpose. Hence the significance of local ‘growth-machine’ politics of the sort that Logan and Molotch (1987) describe and of local class alliances to promote economic development in places. The ‘social networking’ which occurs in and through places to procure economic advantage may be intricate in the extreme but at the end of the day some sort of coalition, however shifting, is always in evidence. But such coalitions cannot always succeed. Competition between places produces winners and losers. The differences between places to some degree become antagonistic.

The tension between fixity and mobility erupts into generalized crises, however, when the landscape shaped in relation to a certain phase of development (capitalist or precapitalist) becomes a barrier to further accumulation. The landscape must then be reshaped around new transport and communications systems and physical infrastructures, new centres and styles of production and consumption, new agglomerations of labour power and modified social infrastructures (including, for example, systems of governance and regulation of places). Old places have to be devalued, destroyed and redeveloped while new places are created. The cathedral city becomes a heritage centre; the mining community becomes a ghost town; the old industrial centre is deindustrialized; speculative boom towns or gentrified neighbourhoods arise on the frontiers of capitalist development or out of the ashes of deindustrialized communities. The history of capitalism is punctuated by intense phases of spatial reorganization. There has been, as I sought to show in The Condition of Postmodernity a powerful surge of this from about 1970, creating considerable insecurity within and between places.

I can now venture a first cut at explaining why it is that place has become more rather than less important over the past two decades:

1 Space relations have been radically restructured since around 1970 and this has altered the relative locations of places within the global patterning of capital accumulation. Urban places that once had a secure status find themselves vulnerable (think of Detroit, Sheffield, Liverpool and Lille); residents find themselves forced to ask what kind of place can be remade that will survive within the new matrix of space relations and capital accumulation. We worry about the meaning of place in general when the security of actual places becomes generally threatened.

2 Diminished transport costs have made production, merchanting, marketing and particularly finance capital much more geographically mobile than heretofore. This allows a much freer choice of location which, in turn, permits capitalists to take more rather than less advantage of small differences in resource qualities, quantities and costs between places. Multinational capital, for example, has become much more sensitive to the qualities of places in its search for more profitable accumulation.

3 Those who reside in a place (or who hold the fixed assets in place) become acutely aware that they are in competition with other places for highly mobile capital. The particular mix of physical and social infrastructures, of labour qualities, of social and political regulation, of cultural and social life on offer (all of which are open to construction) can be more or less attractive to, for example, multinational capital. Residents worry about what package they can offer that will bring development while satisfying their own wants and needs. Places therefore differentiate themselves from other places and become more competitive (and perhaps antagonistic and exclusionary with respect to each other) in order to capture or retain capital investment. Within this process, the selling of place, using all the artifices of advertising and image construction that can be mustered, has become of considerable importance. ‘Someday we all go to a better place’, announces a vast hoarding in Croydon, advertising for relocation in Milton Keynes.

4 Profitable projects to absorb excess capital have been hard to find in these last two decades, and a considerable proportion of the surplus has found its way into speculative place construction. The lack of wisdom in much of this is now becoming clear in the massive default of savings and loan institutions in the United States ($500bn—larger than the combined Third World debt) and the shaky position of many of the world’s largest banks (including the Japanese) through overinvestment in real estate development. The selling of places and the highlighting of their particular qualities (retirement or tourist resorts, communities with new lifestyles, etc.) become even more frenetic.

The upshot has been to render the coercive power of competition between places for capitalist development more rather than less emphatic and so provide less leeway for projects of place construction that lie outside of capitalist norms. The concern to preserve a good business environment or to realize a profit from speculative development dominates. Interplace competition is not simply about attracting production, however. It is also about attracting consumers through the creation of a cultural centre, a pleasing urban or regional landscape, and the like. Investment in consumption spectacles, the selling of images of places, competition over the definition of cultural and symbolic capital, the revival of vernacular traditions associated with places, all become conflated in interplace competition. I note in passing that much of postmodern production in, for example, the realms of architecture and urban design, is precisely about the selling of place as part and parcel of an ever-deepening commodity culture. The result is that places that seek to differentiate themselves end up creating a kind of serial replication of homogeneity (Boyer 1988).

The question immediately arises as to why people accede to the construction of their places by such a process. The short answer, of course, is that often they don’t. The historical geography of place construction is full of examples of struggles fought for socially just reinvestment (to meet community needs); for the development of ‘community’, expressive of values other than those of money and exchange; or against deindustrialization, or the despoliation of cities through highway construction (even the upper classes organize against the destruction of their neighbourhoods by the activities of some crass developer). Henri Lefebvre (1991) is quite right, therefore, to insist that class struggle is everywhere inscribed in space through the uneven development of the qualities of places. Yet it is also the case that such resistances have not checked the overall process (spec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The cultural politics of space
• Part II Changing places
• Part III Moving times
• Part IV Shifting values
• Part V Thinking futures
• Index