Doreen B Massey - For Space

for
space

for
space

doreen massey

Doreen Massey 2005

First published 2005

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1 4129 0361 0
ISBN 1 4129 0362 9 (pbk)

Library of Congress Control Number 2004094666

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Printed in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

Contents

acknowledgements

This book has been written, and rewritten, over a number of years in the increasingly pressured interstices of life as an academic. It would be impossible to thank everyone who has influenced my ideas, in conversations variously intense and meandering, over that time but I should like to acknowledge just a few. The Geography Department at the Open University is constantly provocative of new thoughts. Within the department John Allen, Dave Featherstone (now at Liverpool), Steve Pile, and Arun Saldanha (now at Minnesota) gave me really helpful comments on all or part of the manuscript. More widely, I gained much from seminar discussions of these ideas at a number of universities, and especially at the Geography Departments at Queen Mary, University of London, and the University of Heidelberg. An annual Reading Weekend of German-speaking geographers has been a source of inspiration and friendship. Many of the arguments here, though, have had their source, and have been tested, in the world beyond academe in the ordinary things of life and in a whole variety of political engagements. In the process of production I have benefited from the expert help of the team at SAGE, Robert Rojek, David Mainwaring, Janey Walker and Vanessa Harwood, and from the secretarial assistance of Michele Marsh at the Open University. In particular I should like to thank Neeru Thakrar, also at the Open University, whose skills in producing the typed manuscript and her professional administrative support have been invaluable. Finally, the longest conversation has been with my sister Hilary Corton, herself by education, imagination and passion also a geographer and with whom in the course of much walking talking and general travelling many of the thoughts here have developed.

The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material:

Figures

: Courtesy of The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1, fol. 2r

: Courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago

: Courtesy of the Bibliothque nationale de France, Paris

: Thanks to cartographer John Hunt at The Open University

: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford

: The Palaeontological Association

: Design Steffan Bhle; used with the kind permission of Ulla Neumann

On p.140 the image is Peter Pedley Postcards, Glossop, Derbyshire

Section opening images

Texts

The boxed text on p.165 is courtesy of Greenpeace (http://www.greenpeace.org)

Tenochtitlan. Tierra del nopal. Entrada de Hernan Cortes, la cual se verific el 8 de No-viembre de 1519.

Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

Ive been thinking about space for a long time. But usually Ive come at it indirectly, through some other kind of engagement. The battles over globalisation, the politics of place, the question of regional inequality, the engagements with nature as I walk the hills, the complexities of cities. Picking away at things that dont seem quite right. Losing political arguments because the terms dont fit what it is youre struggling to say. Finding myself in quandaries of apparently contradictory feelings. It is through these persistent ruminations that sometimes dont seem to go anywhere and then sometimes do that I have become convinced both that the implicit assumptions we make about space are important and that, maybe, it could be productive to think about space differenly.

The armies were approaching the city from the quarter named the reed or crocodile the direction in which the sun rises. Much was known about them already. Tales had come back from outlying provinces. Tax gatherers from the city, collecting tribute from conquered territories, had met up with them. Envoys had been despatched, to engage in talks, to find out more. And now neighbouring groups, chafing against their long subordination to the Aztec city, had thrown in their lot with the strange invaders. Yet in spite of all these prior contacts, the constant flow of messages, rumours, interpretations reaching the city, the approaching army was still a mystery. (The strangers sat on deer as high as the rooftops. Their bodies were completely covered, only their faces can be seen. They are white, as if made of lime. They have yellow hair, although some have black. Long are their beards.

figure 1.1a Tenochtitln Aztec depiction

Source: The Bodleian Library

It was also the Year One Reed, a year of both historical and cosmological significance: a particular point in the cycle of years. Over past cycles the city had become mightily successful. It was only a few cycles ago that the Mexica/Aztecs had first set up in this huge high valley. They had arrived from the direction of the flint and after long wanderings; an uncultivated people in the eyes of the cities already established around the lake. But since their arrival, and the founding of this city Tenochtitln, the Aztecs had piled success upon success. The city was now the biggest in the world. Its empire now stretched, through conquest and continual violent subordination, to the ocean in two directions.