I have been reading Doreen Massey, particularly her article A global sense of place (1991), Place, Space and Gender (1993), and For Space (2005). Throughout these works, Massey always insists that how one formulates the concept of space or place radically shapes one’s understanding of the social world and how to effect transformation in it and of it. Her thinking about space has had a profound impact on how I come to understand the social production of space and its social and political implications.
What I want to do in this essay is share my engagement with and understanding of Doreen Massey’s theory of relational space, a central concept that reverberates through the entire corpus of her writings.
Relational thinking of space/place
The notion of relational space is central to the work of Doreen Massey and she first explained this to a significant extent in the article A global sense of place published in 1991 in Marxism Today. Massey was writing it at a time when ethnic cleansing was happening in Serbia and the Soviet Union was collapsing which left the world with antagonistic nationalism. It is against this political moment that Massey tried to reimagine and reconceptualize space/place as open and unbounded. Massey challenges the positivist and quantitative approach to understanding space (though it was Henri Lefebvre who was arguably the first to convincingly articulate the notion of space as socially produced). She also strongly rejects the notion of space and place as nostalgic, authentic, and closed—the conceptions of space that have been frequently provoked by people from exclusivist localism camp (including those on the left who all too easily equate “local ownership” with good and “external control” with bad). Instead, she argues that places are “porous networks of social relations”—complex identities situated within and shaped by forces well beyond any rigid, notional boundaries. Massey’s relational thinking about space has been influential in expanding the understanding of mechanisms underlying regional inequalities, the spatialization of power relationships between genders, among many other things.
Although summarising Massey’s relational view in the form of a straightforward list of propositions will not do justice to the richness and subtlety of her thinking, below are some useful insights to start with. (Massey however insists that this should serve neither as model nor as a formula but instead as a provocation to critical, progressive theory and politics)
- Space is the product of interrelations, constituted through interactions. “The character of place is not somehow a product only of what goes on within it, but results too from the juxtaposition and intermixing of flows, relations, connections from ‘beyond’…”
- Space as the sphere of multiplicity and coexisting heterogeneity;
- Because relations are processual, spaces, too, are processual, always under construction, always in the process of being made. A named space (e.g Melbourne, London, Da Nang) does not have a permanent essence.
- Therefore, Massey postulates that we should rethink identity to imagine a politics that is suspicious of foundational essentialism that tends to claim rights for pre-given identities.
Relational space and COVID-19 border restriction
Having been separated from my family for the past two years due to the restrictive border politics to contain covid, I have reflected on how we often think of space and place as a self-contained surface—a flat surface on which we cross and things happen —so that we draw (artificial) borders around space to contain the spread of the virus rather than acknowledging the interconnectedness and relationality of our existence. Who is it that can afford to live and isolate within a self-enclosed space? Who is it that had to work to keep the cities moving during the pandemic? Who is it that is categorized as Australian citizens and their immediate family members and can come back to Australia? Who is it that is due to their visa status, cannot cross the borders to see their loved ones no matter what the circumstances? It no longer makes sense to think of space and place as self-contained, as Massey has always insisted, but is always formed through their relationship with other places and people. But the pandemic has normalized international and inter-state and inner-city border closure: parks are closed; postcodes are declared hotspots; public transport is deemed dangerous space; home is championed as a safe haven. This perpetuated a highly exclusionary and isolationist understanding of place, substituting for the harder task of building effective public health infrastructure and global vaccination.
Trang Le 