The Scale Politics of Spaliality

Abstract

In a recent paper, Dorccn Massey (1992) expressed some concerns about the way critical theorists have recently engaged with, and appropriated, spatial concepts. She felt that the kind of spatial grammar emerging in critical theory is more about fixity, inertia, and stasis than it is about the dynamic qualities of space and human spatial relations. Instead of replacing the rigid categories of historicism and modernism, recent attempts to reassert space in critical theory seem merely to have generated a parallel set of problematical spatial ideas and metaphor. Massey proposed that critical theory move towards an integrative approach to spatiality that is firmly rooted in social and material activity: "It is not the 'slice through time' that should be the dominant thought but the simultaneous coexistence of social relations that cannot be conceptualized as other than dynamic ... space is by its nature full of power and symbolism, a complex web of relations of domination and subordination ... a kind of 'power-geometry'" (pages 80-81).