A Global Sense of Place.pdfVIP

A Global Sense of Place Doreen Massey This is an era - it is often said - when things are speeding up, and spreading out. Capital is going through a new phase of internationalization, especially in its financial parts. More people travel more frequently and for longer distances. Your clothes have probably made in a range of countries from Latin America to South-East Asia. Dinner consists of food shipped in from all over the world. And if you have a screen in your office, instead of opening a letter which - care of Her Majestys Post Office - has taken some days to wend its way across the country, you now get interrupted by e- mail. This view of the current age is one now frequently found in a wide range of books and journals. Much of what is written about space, place and postmodern times emphasizes a new phase in what Marx once called the annihilation of space by time. The process is argued, or - more usually - asserted, to have gained a new momentum, to have reached a new stage. It is a phenomenon which has been called time-space compression. And the general acceptance that something of the sort is going on the marked by the almost obligatory use in the literature of terms and phrases such as speed-up, global village, overcoming spatial barriers, the disruption of horizons, and so forth. One of the results of this is an increasing uncertainty about what we mean by places and how we relate to them. How, in the face of all this movement and intermixing, can we retain any sense of a local place and its particularity? An (idealized) notion of an era when places were (supposedly) inhabited by coherent and homogeneous communities is set against the current fragmentation and disruption. The counterposition is anyway dubious, of course; place and community have only rarely been coterminous. But the occasional longing for such coherence is none the less a sign of the geographic fragme