Reading – A Global Sense of Place by Doreen B. Massey
- Can you think of any recent geopolitical events that are examples of, or the result of what Massey calls a “longing” for a time when “places were (supposedly) inhabited by coherent and homogeneous communities”? (146-47)
Can you think of any examples from the more distant past?
– Trumps wall between the United states and Mexico
– Racism and protest in America/worldwide related to police brutality and suppressed races
– Hitler, WW2, genocide and “ethnic cleansing” to colonise central and eastern Europe
– Berlin wall, separating East/West
– Republic of Ireland/Northern Ireland border? - Why are “place and the spatially local… rejected by many progressive people as almost necessarily reactionary”? Whats wrong with attempting to reclaim a (supposedly) long-lost coherence between place and community? (151, 146-147)
– Spaces are built upon communities, they had to start somewhere… the people who think that they claimed it first came from somewhere else to begin with so everything builds on itself. It’s okay to associate a community with a place but it’s not just one single community, there can be a group of communities. Nobody appears from nothing, everybody is a culmination of things that happened before to combine into what your life begins from. It could be considered reactionary to think that because you were raised there or from there that you have more of a claim than somebody else over that place. - In what way is “the currently popular characterisation of time-space compressions… very much a western, colonisers view”? (147)
– It is something that has been happening for centuries although on a different scale. The way westerners see a once local street now lined with foreign food places is similar to the way an indigenous person would have felt seeing ships with foreign people on it and all the things they brought with them, such as tools, food, religions, clothing etc. Westerners look at it in a way that suits them without thinking of the ways in which they may have been a part of this for another culture. Maybe this is how people of other cultures feel when westerners come to their countries for holidays and sight seeing.
– Sense of Ethnocentricity (belief that your culture or ethnic group is superior) in western colonies. - What does Massey mean when she says that “time-space compressions needs differentiating socially”? (148)
– Not everyone has equal opportunities to experience time-space compression. Those who are privileged get to experience time-space compression, while there are plenty of others who don’t. An example is that there are people on long haul flights everyday flying easily between countries for business or pleasure. There are people in higher up, glamorous jobs, there are people in essential jobs and there are some people who aren’t able to have jobs at all. “Somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, theres a woman – amongst many women – on foot, who still spends hours a day collecting water.” - Massey instructs us to think of people who do engage in global travel and yet are in fact deeply disempowered. What kind of people or phenomenon is she thinking of? Whats her point in bringing this up? (149)
– Refugees, Migrant workers. People struggling for a new, better life for themselves and their families. They experience movement but not in the same way a businessman or jet-setter would and they’re not “in charge” of it. “And there are those from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, The Caribbean, who come half way round the world only to get held up in an interrogation room at Heathrow.” By bringing this up she is able to show the darker side of global travel that those less privileged have no way around. She is able to point out a major social inequality. - In what way can “differential mobility… weaken the leverage of the already weak”? What does Massey mean by this?
– Her example is “every time someone uses a car, and thereby increases their personal mobility, they reduce both the social rationale and the financial viability of the public transport system – and thereby also potentially reduce the mobility of those who rely on that system.” People who rely on public transport are being given less opportunity for a well functioning system as there isn’t the numbers using said system to make improvements viable. Or by shopping from large international chain stores we make it harder for small local shops who then raise prices in turn making items less desirable. - Massey poses her million-dollar question at the top of p.152. See if you can locate it.
– “The question is how to hold on to that notion of geographical difference, of uniqueness, even of rootedness if people want that, without it being reactionary.” - Why is Massey allergic to the typical geographers obsession with drawing boundaries? (152,155)
– It creates an inside and an outside. Creating the opportunity for people to feel as if they either do or don’t belong depending which side of the boundary line they’re on. Can create an “us and them” scenario. Boundaries are not needed for the conceptualisation of places themselves. By giving an inside and outside you create the chance for vulnerability or “invasion” and feeling threatened by a change to this place. - Why is it misguided to imagine that “places have single, essential, identities”? Why is it misguided to identify place with community? (152, 153, 154)
– People who make up communities come from somewhere and that somewhere becomes a part of that place through personal connections. There can be any number of connections within a place. Communities can also exist without being in the same place. A whole community does not need to live in one building to be considered a community, they can be spread worldwide. - In what way does Massey ultimately exhort us to conceive of the specificity of place? How should we picture the specificity of place, if we are to picture it in a progressive way? (154-55)
– It’s not some history of place that gives it specific meaning for us but rather the connections we make and the social elements that weave together. Links can happen on a local, regional, continental scale. integration of global and local. “There are real relations with real content – economic, political, cultural – between any local place and the wider world in which it is set.” - Should we, in the end, get rid of the notion of place specificity? (155-56)
– We need a “global sense of the local, a global sense of place.” We shouldn’t get rid of it but we should realise how its all interconnected.
Spatial Design 
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