2
New Directions in Space
DOREEN MASSEY
Elements of the story so far
Those in the 'discipline' of geography have for long had a difficult
relation to the notion of 'space' and 'the spatial'. There has been
much head-scratching, much theorising, much changing of mind.
Sometimes the notion has been clasped whole-heartedly as the only
claimable distinguishing characteristic within the academic division
of labour. Sometimes it has been spurned as necessarily fetishised.
There have also, along with these switchbacks, been major shifts in
the way in which 'space/the spatial' was itself to be conceived.
The l 960s and 1970s respectively provide instances of two extremes
in this lurching relationship, and it is out of that history that
emerges the first argument of this essay. The fundamental message is
simple; that the radical critique of the 1970s - for very understandable
reasons both intellectual and political - went far too far overboard in
its rejection of the importance of the spatial organisation of things, of
distance and perhaps above all, of geographical differentiation.
Go back a moment to the period before 1960; that bygone age
when human geography, or at least a central part of it, was plainly
about 'regions'. School and university courses were organised around
sections of the world. There were courses on 'Africa', on 'Asia', on
'The Regions of the British Isles'. The focus was on place, on dif-
ference, on distinctiveness - on uniqueness. The concern was to
understand how lcicalities come to be as they are, how they get their
particular character. Certainly, it was not always the most sophis-
ticated theoretical work. There tended to be rather a lot of chapters
which simply started with geology and ended up with politics. But
what this focus did give to this section of the social sciences was an
element of distinctiveness. First, it was concerned with putting things
together, rather than tearing them apart; with trying to understand
D. Gregory et al. (eds.), Social Relations and Spatial Structures
© Macmillan Publishers Limited 1985
10 New Directions in Space
links, relationships, synthesis, rather than being concerned only with
the dissection of analysis. It was, therefore, necessarily concerned
with the unique. Second, this focus gave geography an object of its
own, a bit of the world (quite literally) on which it could focus - the
place, the region, the locality.
All this was overthrown in the 1960s. Along with other social
sciences, geography too was hit by the 'positivist revolution' - in
particular in its quantitative guise. The old regional geography was
hidden away in embarrassment and the door closed firmly on it. It
was explained away as part of our own Dark Ages, whence we had
now emerged on to the High Plains of truly scientific endeavour. The
story is familiar and we need not dwell on it. Such an enterprise, of
course, went well with the wider characteristics of the period. This
was the age of Wilsonism and of the 'white heat', of technological
revolution, of the belief that you could save the world through the
application of a neutral science and technology. So, with the urban
problem beginning to nudge its way on to the political agenda, we
built mathematical models of trip distribution, of modal split, and
agonised over questions of the length of the journey to work. And, of
course, all of that was common to many social sciences. Geography
shared with them all the problems of that kind of an approach- the
trivial notions of causality, the idea that a scientific 'law' was some-
thing that could be spotted simply through empirical regularity (so
long as you had enough observations), the mathematics (or problems
in the mathematics) leading the direction of enquiry rather than
questions which arose from the real world processes themselves. But
the new wave posed 'geographers' with a problem in addition to all
these. For what exactly was being modelled? What kinds of laws and
relationships were being sought? Laws about what, precisely? What
had happened was that the convergence of method had left geogra-
phy without an object. The insistence that only the general and the
generalisable were scientific left geography shorn of one of its central
concerns. The last thing in which one should be interested in this
brave new world was the unique, the particular, the specific. Such
stuff was to be disposed ofby normalisation; it was a hindrance to the
cause of science. Things were relatively easy for economics, for
sociology, for politics - or so it seemed. However difficult it was to
define, they had a section of the substantive world to study - the
economy, the social, the political. Geography had no such segment of
the world to claim for its own, no particular bit of social relations to
