Doreen Massey (1944-2016): an appreciation

Readers of Soundings will probably know Doreen Massey best as one of its founding editors, for her articles and editorials in the journal and for her editorship (with Stuart Hall and Mike Rustin) of the Kilburn Manifesto. As well as this, Doreen also had a long and highly distinguished career as an academic geographer at the Open University, and was a life-long political activist, socialist, feminist and internationalist, a prolific author of books, articles and essays and a hugely charismatic public speaker. She was also an inspiring teacher and mentor, not least to her PhD students, of whom I was privileged to be one.

I first met Doreen in 1984 at a talk for geography students to mark the publication of her new book, Spatial Divisions of Labour.¹ Two years earlier she had been appointed Professor of Geography at the Open University, a post she would go on to hold for a further twenty-five years until her retirement in 2009. She had already published two notable books - Capital and Land (with Alejandrina Catalano) in 1978 and The Anatomy of Job Loss (with Richard Meegan) in 1982 - but it was Spatial Divisions of Labour that would establish her reputation for re-thinking economic geography by combining Marxist economic and class analysis with a novel approach to understanding space and place.² As a new undergraduate in 1984 I was quickly discovering that the conceptual underpinnings of much of the human geography I had learnt at school was the object of a number of excoriating critiques by academic geographers from a range of theoretical and political perspectives. Doreen was central to this debate and her talk was both a revelation and an inspiration.

In particular, the ‘quantitative revolution’ in geography was being called into question. Taking the subject by storm in the 1960s, this had involved a concerted attempt to move geography away from its perceived reliance on descriptive studies of unique places and regions, and to recast it as a ‘spatial science’ by developing generalised models of location and spatial organisation. Many such models were based on the assumptions of neo-classical economics (private enterprise, perfect competition, profit maximisation, rational actors) but were nonetheless touted as a quasi-universal science of space. (Doreen had been an early antagonist of these ideas, as the author of an influential critique of industrial location theory in 1973.³) At times it appeared that what was being proposed was a theory in which ‘space’ had an independent existence and an autonomous capacity to influence social outcomes. Such ‘spatial fetishism’ got short shrift from Doreen, and from many other thinkers, drawing inspiration from a range of social-theoretic traditions, including Marxism. As Doreen put it in For Space, ‘abstract spatial form in itself can guarantee nothing about the social, political or ethical content of the relations that construct that form (p101)’.

Wariness of spatial fetishism had led some to argue that the analytical focus should be squarely on the social content, with the spatial patterning of social phenomena seen as a second order concern - as the outcome of social processes whose fundamental workings needed to be understood in social terms without reference to their geographies. Doreen, in contrast, insisted on the central importance of space and geography. Abstract spatial form might ‘guarantee nothing’, but, as the title of a book she co-edited famously put it, geography matters!⁴ Society is not determined by its spatial forms, but neither is space merely incidental. The social and the spatial are in separable, ‘an impossible dichotomy’:

The fact that processes take place over space, the facts of distance or closeness, of geographical variation between areas, of the individual character of and meaning of specific places and regions - all these are essential to the operation of social processes themselves. Just as there are no purely spatial processes, neither are there any non-spatial processes. Nothing much happens, bar angels dancing, on the head of a pin.⁵

Today this view is widely, though not universally accepted. It is accepted not only by geographers, but more broadly across many fields of knowledge, following what some...