How’re we going to live together?
Space is not about physical locality so much is relations between human being.
Space is material as well as has an abstract dimension. Space concerns our relation with each other. In fact social space is a product of our relations with each other, our connections with each other.
Globalization is a new geography constructed out of the relations we have with each other across the globe. And the most important thing that rises all those relations going to be filled with power. What we have now is in a sense geography of power, the distribution of those relations mirrors the power relations with in the society we have. The way we look at globalization in the moment it turns space into time.
What that does? It is to convert contemporaneous difference between countries into a single linear history. It’s like that country let’s say Argentina (or Russia, or Vietnam) isn’t a country which is significantly different but it’s a country which is following our development path to become a country like ours.
In that sense we denying a simultaneity and multiplicity of space and turning all of these diversity and difference into a single historical trajectory. Which has a lot of political effects - most important one which says there is only one future.
Neoliberal imagination and then export of that way of thinking. Power more than just economic, it’s also political and ideological.
How is power relations in a city political? Is about the role of city in domination of economies and economic ideologies around the rest of space. We kinda unable to map power relations. Power itself an ability to do something which is ok. But what we’re should be critical about is distribution of power, power of some groups over others, power of some places over others.
That way of turning space into time, turning geography into history is way of denying the possibility of alternative futures.
We should take space seriously as dimension of multiplicity. Then It would open up politics to the possibility of alternatives.
If we took space as a dimension that we create through our relations which are of fool of power and refuse to align them into one story of development then we really reimagine the world in a different way. It presents us with a new political questions, it opens up our minds.
Often people get trapped in imaginations what is then a matter of challenging common sense. And the hegemonic sense at the moment includes notion that we stuck in what we have.
That way of thinking one road is very classic to modernism and modernity generally on left and right of the political spectrum.
Development/ progress/ narratives as some version of Marxism: that from feudalism we’d go to capitalism then to socialism and then to communism which in fact highly political and product of power relations of its era. That no doubts the banks in the city and the leaders of western world want the rest of the world precisely to follow and to be dominated by. The USA and the UK are very much involved in trying to force other countries into what they call democracy which actually means market societies.
From the one hand there is kinda zietgeist which is over a hundred years old. And on the other hand there is a particular political dimension in which the powerful do want to drag in the rest of the world.
Occupy movement: what neoliberalism has done to our city - privatising much of what was public space. So Occupy managed briefly to create a really public space which means it was a place for the creation of a public of politically engaged territory, territory of alternative futures. That was a real creation of a space of the kind that we need a lot more of that brings us together to talk and to argue about the kind of future world we want.
How to make space with a concept of care?
Complexity of existed networks in space. From local to global and back: the understanding of any locality must precisely draw on the links beyond its boundaries. For one crucial element of what 'geography' is all about is difference and specificity. For those who were dubious about the value of such studies the term 'local' sometimes became one which in itself reverberated with disapproval. To call something a local struggle or a local concern was in this lexicon to designate it with a whole range of characteristics - a kind of particularism, an exclusivity, often an essentialism, and a selfishness which refused to consider the supposedly greater good of some (implicitly or explicitly) supposed universal.
Those who mistrusted the newly emerging 'localisms' saw them as divisive. But in reply it had to be argued that the old coherencies had really been constructed by the smothering of internal diversity - the male dominance of the coalfields, looked back on so fondly by some as an exemplary solidarity, was a clear case in point.
Another strand of resistance to any affirmation of the importance of place came from another direction altogether. This argument drew upon the associations of 'a sense of place' with memory, stasis and nostalgia. 'Place' in this formulation was necessarily an essentialist concept which held within it the temptation of relapsing into past traditions, of sinking back into (what was interpreted as) the comfort of Being instead of forging ahead with the (assumed progressive) project of Becoming.
Begin to develop an argument for thinking of social space in terms of the articulation of social relations which necessarily have a spatial form in their interactions with one another.
The global is in the local in the very process of the formation of the local. This, then, is an extension to the concept of place of that element of the argument about space which has it that not only is space the product of social relations but that 'it is those relations which constitute the social phenomena themselves'.
Thinking of places in this way implies that they are not so much bounded areas as open and porous networks of social relations.
It implies that their 'identities' are constructed through the specificity
of their interaction with other places rather than by counterposition to them.