Introduction

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Text by a Marxist Tourist

PLACE: INTRODUCTION

What is place? I propose to build a definition of place step by step, as one might build a house, starting with the foundation, proceeding to the framing and ending up on the roof. First, place is a location in space. Second, it is a bounded location in space. Third, it is a bounded location in space that possesses coherence. These three structural elements—location, boundedness and coherence—are mutually constitutive parts of a whole called place, just as the foundation, framing and roof are mutually constitutive parts of a whole called house.

Let's now dig a little deeper and ask the question, what turns the parts of place into a whole place, giving a particular location its boundedness and coherence? What processes inside the house transform the foundation, framing and roof into a home? The diagram above shifts our attention from the fixed elements of place to the fluid processes of place formation. The left half of the circle is labelled "materiality" and represents place as a bounded and coherent whole made up of physical objects; the right half is labelled "meaning" and represents place as a bounded and coherent whole made up of lived experience. The arrows around the circle indicate that place formation is a looping process in which physical objects and lived experience, materiality and meaning, are constantly interacting with each other to form a bounded and coherent whole.

The process of place formation operates at many, interconnected levels. To help you visualize this idea, I have subdivided each half of the circle into two parts or "moments." The built and natural moments fall on the materiality side of the divide, the social and cultural moments on the meaning side. 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 ideologies through which the meanings of a given place are represented and empowered.

The diagram is my attempt to apply the dialectical method to the process of place formation. At the core of this method is the concept of totality. In his magnum opus Capital, Karl Marx shows how and why capitalism constitutes a totality of interrelated processes that take on the appearance of thing-like forms, and how and why these thing-like forms prevent us from seeing the internal processes underlying the totality. While Marx has little to say about place formation per se, his dialectical method is tailor-made for our diagram in which place is represented as a totality of interrelated processes that assume the thing-like forms of natural, built, social and cultural moments.

In this essay, I will focus my attention on the place called home. There are good reasons for doing this. Home is the place par excellence, where the spatial dynamics of materiality and meaning are most directly experienced, and the four moments of place formation are most clearly visible. It is also a critical site of capital as a mode of production and capitalism as a social formation. While not as large as the city, region or nation in which it is nested, nor as small as the rooms nested within it, home is constrained by the same dialectical logic that operates across all dimensions of socio-spatial life under capitalism.

I will play the part of participant observer here, taking you on a tour of the home in which my wife Allyson and I have lived since 1992, and the homes in which my parents lived before their deaths in 2019. In "The Dialectics of Home," I will use our home to examine place formation as a largely self-contained process in which natural, built, social and cultural "moments" mesh to form a bounded and coherent space. In "The Value of Home," I will use my parents' homes to show how the commodification of housing lies at the heart of place formation, producing wants, needs and desires that are by their very nature difficult if not impossible to satisfy. The final section, "Coda," deals with home as a place of healing.

Most of these homes I know inside and out. They live in me, just as surely as I have lived in them.

Capitalism in Place: Photos and Text by a Marxist Tourist

PLACE: INTRODUCTION

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Text by a Marxist Tourist