Place and space are tricky words, as difficult to manage as our squirmy five-month-old granddaughter. They come up all the time in everyday conversation without much thought being given to what they mean. Yet these same words have been staples of learned discourse ever since the ancient Greeks, if not before, and continue to be major talking points in many specialized disciplines and institutionalized sites of knowledge production today.
So you deserve to know at the outset how I intend to traverse this difficult discursive terrain. I will treat place and space not as separate and autonomous things but as abstract processes that make sense only in relation to each other, much as a five-month-old makes sense to her grandparents only in relation to the adult they hope she will become. I will also treat them not as timeless and universal but as socially constructed in a manner consistent with the reproduction requirements of the capitalist mode of production.
In emphasizing the relational, historical and capitalist character of place and space, I will rely heavily on the theory of capital set out by Karl Marx and more recently applied to questions of place formation and space production by geographer David Harvey. Wherever the journey takes us in Framing Capitalism in Place, rest assured that Marx and Harvey won't be far behind, pointing out this or that feature of the place before us, and helping us understand the processes that shape what we see.
This is the first of five mini-essays under the "Place" tab. They will treat place formation as a more-or-less self-contained process abstracted from the larger political-economic forces acting on it. In contrast, the seven mini-essays under the "Capital(ism)" tab will shift the focus to how the dynamics of capital accumulation and circulation shape the production of space.
I am aware that proceeding along this double track runs the risk of creating a false dichotomy between place and space. My hope is that after reading both essays you will see the truth in Harvey's observation: "The dialectical relation between space and place is central to understanding both the constructive and destructive aspects of the motion of capital in space and time."
The diagram above provides a visual representation of the process of place formation as it unfolds through its built, natural, social and cultural "moments."
The left half of the circle is labelled "materiality" and represents place as a spatial configuration of physical objects; the right half is labelled "meaning" and represents place as a spatial configuration of lived experience. The arrows indicate that place formation is a circular process in which physical objects and lived experience, materiality and meaning, are constantly interacting to form a coherent spatial whole.
This process operates at many, interconnected levels. To help you visualize this idea, I have subdivided each half of the circle into two parts: the built and natural moments fall on the materiality side of the divide, the social and cultural moments on the meaning side.
Here's a quick rundown of the moments. The built moment comprises all of the human-made physical structures of a given place, from streets, electrical grids and airports to public parks, sewer systems and suburban subdivisions. The natural moment includes the totality of biospheric entities, structures and processes of a given place, non-human and human alike. The social moment centers on the dynamics, strategies and practices of social reproduction which are nested in a given place. Finally, the cultural moment encompasses the values, norms and dominant ideologies through which the meanings of a given place are articulated and empowered.
You shouldn't mistake the moments of the circle for self-contained spatial entities like the areas of a paint-by-numbers canvas. Rather, they should be regarded as useful abstractions for examining how the four moments of place run together like the wet paint of a water color.
The terms "abstraction" and "moment" have particular meanings in the dialectical method of analysis, which is a way of inquiring into how the world is put together and how it can be reproduced in the realm of thought. Marx and Harvey use this method of analysis, as will I in what follows.
The dialectical method has a long history whose most famous practitioners are the German philosopher Hegel and his most famous student, Marx. While Hegel advanced an idealist vision of the world, and Marx a materialist one, they both started from the same two dialectical propositions. First, all serious inquiry into concrete reality and its manner of representation should deal with processes rather than things, the latter of which are moments in which processes seem to harden into thing-like material forms. Second, all such inquiry should trace the motive force behind change to internal contradictions embedded within a given process rather than to external forces that operate outside and independently of the process under investigation.
This will undoubtedly sound strange to most modern ears. The dialectical method runs against the grain of empiricism, positivism and measurability which has dominated Western modes of thinking since the Enlightenment, and is the common sense across the institutionalized disciplines of social science today. Fortunately, dialectical analysis continues to occupy a prominent place in neuroscience, earth science, evolutionary biology and quantum physics, albeit shorn of its Marxist associations.
If all this philosophizing is starting to make you nervous, take heart in knowing that we will soon be discussing matters closer to home.