Doreen Massey, 'The Spaces of Community'
In: Annotations 1: Mixed Belongings and Unspecified Destinations. Edited by Nikos Papastergiadis. London: Institute of international Visual Arts, 1996,
pp. 30-37.
I would like to consider, in very abstract terms, the way we might think about space and the way we might think about community, the two terms playing off against each other, and to ask what if any relation there might be between them.
I will begin with two points: first of all I would argue that communities are not necessarily based on place, that there is no necessary, or perhaps even likely, coincidence between geographical specificity on the one hand and social coherence on the other [...]
The second point is more in the nature of a confession: it is that politically and at a gut level, I start off with a great wariness about the notion of community in its current formulation [...]
There are problems, both internal and external, as to what communities are. Externally, there is the obvious problem that, if there is an 'us' then more than likely, there has got to be a 'them'. We so frequently construct the notion of community and the notion of identity, through counterposition: 'I am this, is in large part precisely because I am not that'. It is an everyday, unthinking, operationalisation of the classic rigid binary either/or construction. It is a notion of identity constructed by drawing up borders. There is also an internal problem; that of the internal power relations which hold community together. This is perhaps less often examined [...]
It seems important at this moment to be critical, because the politics of the word 'community' seems to be shifting. In the politics of the '60s and '70s 'community' was our word; it was a word of the Left. It was a word used to evoke marginalisation, it somehow posed communities as being in struggle against the big power structures; community was the little people. In contrast, what I think we are seeing at the moment is an appropriation of the 'community'. The discourse of communitarianism is being taken up by both the Labour Party and by people on the Right. It is because of that I emphasise, at this moment, the negatives. It does not mean that there aren't also positive things about 'community', but one always has to speak with an awareness of the political moment.
It is this political appropriation of community, and particular ways of thinking about community that I'd like to critique. It is an approach which poses community as being closed and bounded, with a fixed identity which often appeals to something called authenticity, an authenticity which itself is often understood as somehow emerging out of an internalised history. Such a history is one of locatable origins (locatable in the place), and it roots an identity constructed out of counterposition. These are the spatial principles of construction of that notion of community. They are defensive principles, bearing witness to a vulnerability. For me as a geographer, one of the things which is interesting is that way of defining communities, as bounded and authentic, is very much like the way in which place has so often been described. Moreover, the same big story is now being told about place as is told about community: that suddenly now, in the age of globalisation, our places are being invaded and fragmented, and that we no longer have a sense of place [...]
The way I try to think about social space is that it is something that we create; it is the result of social interactions - whether they be the local interactions within a place like Southampton, or the global interactions of multinational companies. It is 'space considered as social relations' that I am trying to capture and there are a number of reasons for such a strategy. First of all, I want to insist that space isn't something we live in in the sense that it is a volume which we carve up and move about in: rather it is something which is socially created by the way in which we live our lives. We create space through our interactions. What that means, first of all, is that it is full of power because all the interactions that exist between us are imbued with social power. The flow of this power, both in its negative and enabling shape, shapes the social space in which we live. That is how I try and think of space in general. It means you start thinking of space not as something divided up but as something formed out of an incredibly complex network of intersections, interconnections, relations, contacts and so forth.
From this perspective, place can be understood as open, porous, and as necessarily constructed through interconnection. Therefore, as necessarily hybrid. It is place, precisely, as meeting place. This shorthand way of reconceptualising space in this manner is to think of space in terms of power-geometry and of place in terms of a global sense of the local, a global sense of place.