Remaking the socio-spatial fix: Actors, time and crisis in two iron ore towns

Abstract

The ‘spatial fix’ has been central to economic geography for nearly 50 years, examining capitalist development through both stability and change. Harvey’s original conceptions of the fix prioritised capital’s capacity to fix space to accumulate and forestall crisis. We continue this by considering the ‘socio-spatial fix’, allowing closer investigation of who makes the landscapes of capitalism, and how actor choices and actor inter- and intra-relationships forestall crises of accumulation. We show how crisis, time and actors are central to making and re-making socio-spatial fixes and in turn to understanding both the socio-spatial dialectic and the spatial fix. Empirically, we compare two remote but globally networked mining towns, Kiruna, Sweden and Newman, Australia. Mining towns are rewarding case-studies because capital’s relative immobility and the dominance of a single industry make strikingly clear how both production and social reproduction are remade. We enrich general theorisations in three ways, by explaining: first, how crisis-threatening events require renegotiation of socio-spatial arrangements; second, how time and timing are critical in remaking fixes; third, how actor agency and heterogeneity are central because the actors who make fixes change over time and are in complex relationships with each other.