Doreen Massey: places are “open and porous networks of social relations”

Massey’s concept of space-time challenges the dualistic concept that frames time as becoming and space as being. Massey’s concept challenges, as well, the dualism that frames place as the local and “everywhere” as the global—a distinction that pits the concrete against the abstract, the particular against the universal. In “A Global Sense of Place,” she argues that the idea of place problematizes the distinction between global and local because the specificity of a place lies neither within the place’s identifiable borders nor within the place’s proper history. In truth, a place is a site where wider cultures meet, networks take root, and social relationships evolve:

What gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus. 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. It is, indeed, a meeting place. (p. 154)

If a place is not constructed by an internally produced and essential past, the place’s identity is not singular, fixed, and unproblematic. If places are “open and porous networks of social relations” (p. 121), places not only develop mixtures through history but also bring differences together in space. It follows that places constructed out of “juxtaposition, the intersection, the articulation, of multiple social relations” are of course internally contradictory and contested, and that while places are necessarily shared, there will simultaneously be clashes between various and competing interests over what the area is, and what it ought to become (p. 137). To extract advantages from a set of social relations, the particular claimant groups lay claim to some particular position in time-space (whether through the establishment of heritage centers and the promotion of nationalism), so that the groups can establish an identity of a place, although “the past was not more static than is the present” (p. 169):

When black-robed patriarchs organize ceremonies to celebrate a true national identity they are laying claim to the freezing of that identity at a particular moment and in a particular form—a moment and a form where they had a power which they can thereby justify themselves in retaking. All of which means, of course, that the identity of any place, including that place called home, is in one sense for ever open to contestation. (p. 169)