Take social mobility for example: by increasing university fees, this is enabling richer students to access education and as a consequence it is limiting the power of poorer students to access a good education. In other words the power of some mobility can weaken the mobility of others. Her central concern is the politics of mobility: “mobility and control over mobility both reflects and reinforces power” (p.25). Massey talks about the political implications of the ‘space of places’ in relation to ‘the space of flows’ (see Castells). And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local.” (p.28) Instead then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a continent. “If one moves in from the satellite towards the globe, holding all those networks of social relations and movements and communications in one’s head, then each ‘place’ can be seen as a particular, unique, point of their intersection. All the relations that have passed through that place are what makes its constantly evolving identity. Not only this, but what has always constituted that place has been the influences of the ‘other’ the global. However this denies the fact that the ‘other’ is already within. She argues that there is a desire for fixity and boundaries from otherness as a form of protecting identities from the flux changes and influences of the outside world. Place as rooted in a locality or a territorially based community is often romanticised and we should question the value of considering place in this way: “place and locality are a foci for a form of romanticised escapism from the real business of the world” (p.26). In her view, if place seen in these terms becomes a static, dead object whilst time is seen as a progressive, socially produced, relational process. Massey argues that the idea that places have a single ‘essential’ identity based on a bounded history of a territorial place is flawed. How can we hold onto the rootedness of ‘place’ without being defensive and reactionary? How can we maintain identity if there are no boundaries, no fixity, no difference? How can we rethink our views of place so that they are progressive and outward looking? The central concerns which Massey addresses in this article are: Massey is writing in response to what she calls the effects of time-space compression (the simultaneous spreading out and concentration of space and time) on our notions of place. What is the context in which Massey is writing? Reference: Massey, D., 1991, “A global sense of place” Marxism Today (38) 24-29
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