Doreen Massey: Critical Dialogues

Economic Transformations

Series Editors: Brett Christophers, Rebecca Lave, Jamie Peck, Marion Werner

Fundamental to the Economic Transformations series is the conviction that geography matters in the diverse ways that economies work, for whom they work, and to what ends. The so-called imperatives of globalization, the promises of development, the challenges of environmental sustainability, the dull compulsion of competitive life, the urgency of campaigns for economic rights and social justice – in all of these realms geography really matters, just as it does for a host of other contemporary concerns, from financialized growth to climate change, from green production to gender rights, from union renewal to structural adjustment. This major new series will publish on these and related issues, creating a space for interdisciplinary contributions from political economists, economic geographers, feminists, political ecologists, economic sociologists, critical development theorists, economic anthropologists, and their fellow travellers.

Published

The Doreen Massey Reader

Edited by Brett Christophers, Rebecca Lave, Jamie Peck and Marion Werner

Doreen Massey: Critical Dialogues

Edited by Marion Werner, Jamie Peck, Rebecca Lave and Brett Christophers

Doreen Massey: Critical Dialogues

Edited by

Marion Werner

Jamie Peck

Rebecca Lave

Brett Christophers

© 2018 Marion Werner, Jamie Peck, Rebecca Lave and Brett Christophers; individual chapters; the contributors

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2018 by Agenda Publishing

Agenda Publishing Limited

The Core

Science Central

Bath Lane

Newcastle upon Tyne

NE4 5TF

www.agendapub.com

ISBN 978-1-911116-85-1 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-911116-86-8 (paperback)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

Printed and bound in the UK by TJ International

Contents

Acknowledgements

Contributors

1Out of place: Doreen Massey, radical geographer

Jamie Peck, Marion Werner, Rebecca Lave and Brett Christophers

Part I – Contexts

2North and South: spatial divisions in a life lived geographically

Linda McDowell

3Her dark past

Trevor Barnes

4Trainspotting in Bethlehem

Michael Dear

5Becoming a geographer: Massey moments in a spatial education

Gillian Hart

6Why did space matter to Doreen Massey?

Michael Rustin

7Ontology and the politics of space

Andrew Sayer

8Doreen matters: ways of understanding and being in the world

Núria Benach and Abel Albet

9Just carry on being different

Susan M. Roberts

Part II – Conjunctures

10From the North to the South: spatializing the conjuncture in British cultural studies

John Pickles

11Reflections on Capital and Land by Massey and Catalano

Richard Walker and Erica Schoenberger

12The road to Brexit on the British coalfields

Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson

13Industrial restructuring and spatial divisions of labour: understanding uneven regional development in the UK

Richard Meegan

14Where is London? The (more than) local politics of a global city

Allan Cochrane

15Finding place in the conjuncture: a dialogue with Doreen

John Clarke

16Lampedusa in Hamburg and the throwntogetherness of global city citizenship

Matthew Sparke and Katharyne Mitchell

17Hegemonies are not totalities! Repoliticizing poverty as resistance

Victoria Lawson and Sarah Elwood

Part III – Connections

18Doreen Massey’s urban political ecology

Nik Heynen, Nikki Luke and Caroline Keegan

19The sociogeomorphology of river restoration: dam removal and the politics of place

Frank Magilligan, Christopher Sneddon and Coleen Fox

20Film and thinking space

Geraldine Pratt with Jessica Jacobs

21Geographical imaginations of pension divestment campaigns

Kendra Strauss

22Doreen Massey and Latin America

Perla Zusman

23Grassroots struggles for the city of the many: from the politics of spatiality to the spatialities of politics

Helga Leitner and Eric Sheppard

24Towards a queer phenomenology of social reproduction: insights from life histories of informal economy workers in urban India

Priti Ramamurthy and Vinay Gidwani

25Global factory, supply chains and spatial divisions of labour at the Mexico–US border

Christian Berndt

26Place and the power-geometries of migration

Jennifer Hyndman and Alison Mountz

Epilogue: How we will miss that chuckle: my friend, Doreen Massey

Hilary Wainwright

Select bibliography of Doreen Massey

Index

Acknowledgements

This volume and its companion, The Doreen Massey Reader, were spurred by Doreen Massey’s untimely passing in March 2016. As we reflected upon her contributions, we lamented that so many of Massey’s works were relatively difficult to access and thus began the process of re-reading her works and making the invidious decisions about what could be included in the Reader. Because Massey was in the middle of so many conversations at the moment of her ill-timed death, we also sought a way to continue those discussions among her long-time collaborators and friends and to extend them to other scholars who, while not directly engaged with Massey, were interested in thinking with the many wonderful conceptual tools that she developed over her career. When we sent out invitations to potential authors, we were overwhelmed by the enthusiastic response and the willingness of the contributors to conform to a relatively short timeline. We would like to thank the 39 authors for their insightful and generous contributions to the Doreen Massey: Critical Dialogues volume. The process of creating both volumes benefited immensely from the insights and guidance of John Allen, who serves as the literary executor of Doreen’s estate. We are also grateful for the support of Agenda Publishing, its managing director, Steven Gerrard, and especially, Alison Howson, who has worked closely with us on the numerous moving parts of the project, as well as the editorial assistance of Rachel Brydolf-Horwitz at UBC. We are indebted to Doreen’s sister, Hilary Corton, who graciously granted us permission to reprint the work included in The Doreen Massey Reader. All royalties from both volumes will be donated to charities designated by the Massey Estate.

Marion Werner

Jamie Peck

Rebecca Lave

Brett Christophers

Contributors

Abel Albet is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Trevor Barnes is Professor and University Distinguished Scholar in the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia.

Núria Benach is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the Universitat de Barcelona.

Christian Berndt is Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Huw Beynon is Emeritus Professor at the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods at Cardiff University.

John Clarke is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at the Open University and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology.

Allan Cochrane is Emeritus Professor of Urban Studies at the Open University.

Brett Christophers is Professor in the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Uppsala University.Michael Dear is Emeritus Professor of City and Regional Planning in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, and Honorary Professor in the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London.

Sarah Elwood is Professor of Geography at the University of Washington and co-founder of the Relational Poverty Network with Victoria Lawson.

Coleen Fox teaches in the Department of Geography and the Environmental Studies Program at Dartmouth College.

Vinay Gidwani is Professor of Geography and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Gillian Hart is Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, and Distinguished Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Nik Heynen is Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia.

Ray Hudson is Emeritus Professor of Geography at Durham University.

Jennifer Hyndman is Professor in Social Science and Geography at York University in Toronto, where she is also Director of the Centre for Refugee Studies.

Jessica Jacobs is a geographer-filmmaker currently based at Queen Mary University of London.

Caroline Keegan is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia.

Rebecca Lave is Associate Professor in Geography at Indiana University.Victoria Lawson is Professor of Geography at the University of Washington, Director of the University of Washington Honors Program and co-founder of the Relational Poverty Network with Sarah Elwood.

Helga Leitner is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Nikki Luke is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia.

Frank Magilligan is Professor in the Geography Department at Dartmouth College and was recently awarded the Frank J. Reagan ’09 Chair in Policy Studies.

Linda McDowell worked with Doreen Massey at the Open University between 1983 and 1992. After leaving the OU she held posts at Cambridge and London Universities, ending up as Professor of Human Geography at Oxford University.

Richard Meegan first worked with Doreen Massey at the government- funded Centre for Environmental Studies in London. He is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Liverpool.

Katharyne Mitchell is Dean of the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Alison Mountz is Professor of Geography and Canada Research Chair in Global Migration at the Balsillie School of International Affairs at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Jamie Peck is Canada Research Chair in Urban and Regional Political Economy, Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.John Pickles is the Patterson Distinguished Professor of International Studies and Geography and adjunct Distinguished Professor in Cultural Studies and Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Geraldine Pratt is Professor of Geography and Canada Research Chair in Transnationalism and Precarious Labour at the University of British Columbia.

Priti Ramamurthy is Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Susan M. Roberts is Professor of Geography and Associate Provost for Internationalization at the University of Kentucky.

Michael Rustin is Professor of Sociology at the University of East London, and a Visiting Professor at the Tavistock Clinic and at the University of Essex.

Andrew Sayer is Professor of Social Theory and Political Economy at Lancaster University.

Erica Schoenberger is Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University, with a joint appointment in Anthropology.

Eric Sheppard is the Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Geography at UCLA.

Christopher Sneddon is Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environmental Studies Program at Dartmouth College.

Matthew Sparke is Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Kendra Strauss is Associate Professor and Director of the Labour Studies Program at Simon Fraser University, and an Associate Member in the Department of Geography.

Hilary Wainwright is co-editor of the magazine Red Pepper and Fellow of the Transnational Institute.

Richard Walker is Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1975 to 2012 and served at various times as Chair of Geography, Global Metropolitan Studies and California Studies.

Marion Werner is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York.

Perla Zusman is Professor at the University of Buenos Aires and Researcher at the National Research Council (Argentina).

Chapter 1

Out of place: Doreen Massey, radical geographer

Jamie Peck, Marion Werner, Rebecca Lave and Brett Christophers

Doreen Massey changed geography. As a creative scholar, an inspiring teacher and a restless activist, she initiated new ways of seeing, understanding and indeed changing the world. She launched critiques, both in the relatively small world of economic geography and the much bigger worlds of social theory and progressive politics, which would prove to be truly transformative; she developed arguments against a host of establishment and orthodox positions that left something better and more productive in their place; she confronted structurally embedded power relations, most notably of class and gender, while steadfastly resisting political and analytical foreclosure; and she started conversations that continue to resonate and reverberate, not least those around the protean potential of place, even in these challenging times.

There is no point of departure is a line that Massey liked to quote from Louis Althusser (1971: 85; Massey 1995b: 351; Featherstone & Painter 2013). For her, it meant that socially made historical geographies really matter, always and everywhere, and that futures are neither singular nor pre-given. Her own life was a case in point. The product of an ordinary place (Massey 2001b: 459), a public-housing estate just south of Manchester, Doreen Massey knew where she came from and for that matter, which side she was on. I’m from the North West [of England] and have lived with, through and kind of in combat with regional inequality [since] my childhood, Massey once explained (Massey with HGRG 2009: 405). Out of the conformity of postwar Britain, Massey fashioned a transformative trajectory not least, she later reflected, by participating in political movements in the late 60s and the 70s with the emergence of Marxism, feminism, sexual liberation, being part of the GLC [Greater London Council] in the 1980s, or the kind of stuff that has happened more recently, from Chavismo in Venezuela to the Occupy movement in London (ibid.: 403, 405; Featherstone et al. 2013: 253, 257).

From her adopted home of Kilburn, in North London, she would sometimes commute to work at the Open University with her longtime friend and collaborator, Stuart Hall. The quotidian experience of driving to campus and back served as a reminder to both that one can never ‘go home’ … You can’t go back, since neither of them came from this tract of southeastern England, nor was it possible for them to return to the Jamaica or Manchester of their youth, which of course were not the same as when we left (Massey 2000b: 230). Walks down Kilburn High Street would evoke for Massey, indelibly, a global sense of place, quite the opposite of its sometimes parochial, introspective, singular, or static meaning, but instead an open-ended, processual, intersectional and dynamic sense of place, always in the (re)making (Massey 1991a).

This understanding of place as an emergent constellation, or moving configuration, of social trajectories echoed the way in which Massey sought to problematize connection and difference – not separately but in the same time-space. As she would reflect in relation to her travels (and conversations) with Stuart Hall:

What the simultaneity of space really consists in, then, is absolutely not a surface, a continuous material landscape, but a momentary coexistence of trajectories, a configuration of a multiplicity of histories all in the process of being made. This is … part of the delight, and the potential, of space.

(Massey 2000b: 229)

That Massey’s journey should take her here, all the way from regional science and industrial geography, is a story in its own right. Since there can be no singular point of departure, nor any final moment of closure, our purpose in this chapter is to trace some of the contours and milestones of Doreen Massey’s transformative intellectual and political journey. Reassembling the story will require, inevitably, some measure of chronology. But as David Featherstone and Joe Painter wrote in an earlier collection on Massey’s career-long contributions, Any attempt to fit her work into a neat sequential account of geography’s recent past … would be doomed to fail (Featherstone & Painter 2013: 2). What follows then should be understood less as a sequence of steps or stages, and more as a collection of episodes in the formation of an intellectual and political biography. We begin in Manchester and end in Kilburn. In between, we arc selectively through Massey’s paradigm-making interventions in political-economic geography and late-neoliberal politics, through her distinctive interventions in Marxist and feminist theory, seeking to trace along the way some of the contours of her foundational contributions to the understanding of space and spatiality. And it still feels like we are barely scratching the surface …

Out of Manchester

Doreen Massey grew up in a working-class family in the Wythenshawe council estate in south Manchester, a public housing development that was for a while the largest in Europe (see Massey 2001b). Along with many of their neighbours, the Massey family relied upon the state for subsidized housing, free schooling and healthcare. This would be especially important for their eldest daughter, who was born with a calcium disorder that made her bones fragile and subject to breaks throughout her life. [H]‌ad there not been a welfare state and the hospitals, Massey later reflected, I would probably not have survived so well. I really feel in a kind of physical, personal way the need for a welfare state, not as a ‘safety net,’ but just for ordinary people simply to provide a decent life (Freytag & Holyer 1999: 85). She would take a hardly typical path for a working-class girl from the North, going to Oxford University in the mid-1960s, where not for the first nor indeed last time in her life she would sometimes feel like a space invader (see Telegraph 2016: 33; cf. Massey 1994: 185). Somewhat ironically perhaps, given the discipline’s overwhelmingly conservative cast at the time, it was through Geography that she discovered her way out, even as she retained an abiding anti-establishment sensibility.

Despite being awarded a First at Oxford, Massey initially rejected the academic path and instead went to work in the computing department of a market research firm. As she described her thinking later, The reason I left Oxford not wanting to be an academic was that I’d seen what I thought it meant to be an academic. And I didn’t want to be that. So I went into industry – and hated it! (Freytag & Hoyler 1999: 84). Abandoning the private sector, she began her research career in earnest at the Centre for Environmental Studies (CES), an independent research institute founded by Harold Wilson’s Labour Government in 1967 with a remit in spatial planning. Here she would make some of the first moves in what would amount to a radical rethinking of industrial and class restructuring. In 1970, Massey returned briefly to Oxford to participate in the UK’s first Women’s Liberation Movement conference of that era. From then on, she later reflected, I have always been involved in feminist movements (Albet & Benach 2012: 53, editors’ translation). Massey would shape and channel her anti-establishment sensibility in productive tension with feminism in the ensuing decades, wary of currents within feminism that tended towards essentialism and narrow identity politics, and always emphasizing the imbrications of class and gender (Albet & Benach 2012: 54). She insisted that [C]‌lass and feminism … [affect] what kind of voice you have; what kind of role you can play, and want to play (Featherstone et al. 2013: 261).

In 1971, Massey was granted a leave from CES to undertake a Master’s degree in regional science and mathematical economics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, then a citadel of neoclassical location theory, which she viewed as a ‘you ought to know your enemy’ kind of thing (Massey with HGRG 2009: 404). It was here that an extracurricular visit to the French Department provided a quite unexpected introduction to Louis Althusser and to a distinctive (and generative) interpretation of Althusserianism. After Penn, it was not the mathematics of location theory that she pursued, but instead an altogether more radical path. For a while, CES would be an accommodating home for what would prove to be formative work on the political economy of Britain’s regional problem, some of this in collaboration with Richard Meegan (see Meegan 2017). But in 1979, when the incoming Thatcher administration abruptly withdrew funding for the organization, Massey found herself at a crossroads of sorts. Fortunately, at least for the short term, she had a research grant enabling her to work at the London School of Economics, and to make what would prove to be a remarkably catalytic visit to the University of California at Berkeley (Peck & Barnes 2019). It was here, in what was otherwise an especially lean spell for British universities, that an unexpected opportunity arose:

While I was in California the advertisement came up that offered a post at the Open University and that seemed to me to be a place where it might be possible to be an intellectual, a teacher, a researcher without being at a more formal university, and I applied for that job and I got it. There was a short time to go before I would have been unemployed. So it was either a chair or the dole.

(Freytag & Hoyler 1999: 85)

Doreen Massey would spend the next 27 years of her academic career teaching at what many would consider, rather ironically, the most placeless of British universities, the Open University, a distance-learning institution in the infamously anonymous new town of Milton Keynes, where in the context of limited face-to-face contact with students she pioneered innovative ways of teaching at a distance (Clarke 2016: 360), not to say engaging across distance.

Massey was on the frontline in some of the signature struggles against Thatcherism, including the miners’ strike of 1984–85 and the municipal-socialist project of the Greater London Enterprise Board, events that in retrospect marked an historical inflection point between a regionalist model of labour organization and the ascendancy of the new urban left. She was also heavily involved in a wide range of intellectual projects, as an early editorial board member of Capital & Class and Red Pepper, as a co-founder of Soundings with Stuart Hall and Michael Rustin, and as the key mover in an extended series of remarkably influential Open University course texts. For many years, Massey was engaged in political struggles in Latin America and South Africa too, as a researcher and activist. And she would devote the later part of her career to a creative and politically inspiring analysis of why the global financial crisis of 2008 had not led to the collapse of neoliberalism, culminating in a final project in collaboration with Hall and Rustin. Characteristically, what was known as the Kilburn Manifesto could be considered both a product of their (shared) place, as a model of conjuncturally situated political, economic, and cultural analysis, and a contribution that resonated and reached significantly beyond that place (see Hall et al. 2012; Peck et al. 2014). In these, as in so many of her other endeavours, Doreen Massey consistently gave the lie to the idea that the price of theoretical sophistication had to be paid in political irrelevance or incomprehensibility outside (and sometimes even inside!) academia. Similarly, she refused to accept that there should be a dividing line between political and intellectual work.

These were principles that she quite literally embodied. One of the most striking things about Doreen Massey was the contrast between her very small physical stature and her very large personality. Possessed of a radiant smile, ready laughter and boundless curiosity, she had a notable ability to connect personally and intellectually with those around her. Throughout her life, she moved in academic and political circles dominated mostly by men, and not only rejected but actively challenged the masculinist cultures of both those worlds. This is a political position, not an essentialization around masculinity, femininity or whatever, she once explained. But I do find myself amazed by and wary of the ease with which writers make Olympian statements about the age … [while] standing outside society and describing it and forgetting that we’re also within it (Featherstone et al. 2013: 261). Massey never forgot that, despite the enormous influence that her own work would have in geography, in feminism, in social theory, and in left scholarship more generally. She handled this, as she noted in amusement in an interview with graduate students at the University of Kentucky in the early 1990s, by just carry[ing] on being different!

I can’t speak like some of these big guys do. If you are five foot one, and you are fair-haired, and you are female, and quite often you can barely see over the podium, then just physically and materially you cannot be imposing in the same way that you can when you are six foot five and have a big male deep voice. The very physicality and materiality of it, as well as the fact that they just take those people more seriously than they take us, starts you off in a different situation. So what I’ve tried to do is just carry on being different.

(Ijams et al. 1994: 101)

In what follows, we sketch some of the many generative and inspiring ways in which Doreen Massey carried on by being different, beginning where her scholarly career began, with a transformative critique of industrial location theory.

Industrial dislocations

Doreen Massey made the first of many field-shaping interventions in 1973, with her practically terminal critique of the science of location theory. Towards a Critique of Industrial Location Theory, published in the recently launched radical journal, Antipode, marked her uninvited arrival to the male-dominated, white-bread field known at the time as industrial geography. Hers was a nominally tentative critique from which the field would never really recover. The journey implied by the article’s title did not in the end result in a march … into a newly-formulated industrial location theory (Massey 1973: 38, 33), but instead would take a more circuitous route to an entirely different paradigm. Not unlike British industry itself, the field of industrial geography was in a parlous state at the time, dogged as it was by unreflexive strains of empiricism and economism, and falling short in its attempts to account for disorienting patterns of path-disrupting, radical, and often divergent change (see Williams & Thomas 1983; Martin et al. 1993).

Critical not only of the epistemological but also the ideological affinities between location theory and neoclassical economics, Massey challenged the prevailing conception of abstract firms operating in abstract space on the grounds both of analytical insufficiency and an evident estrangement from real-world conditions:

What are emerging as locational problems, whether intra-urban, interregional or international, are the spatial manifestations of the contradictions of capitalism … spatial development can only be seen as part of the overall development of capitalism. However, it is also true that many of the emerging contradictions of the economic system both take on a specifically spatial form, and are exacerbated by the existence of the spatial dimension. To this end, consideration of the spatial element is essential to all effective economic analysis.

(Massey 1973: 38–9)

Here, Massey was not only calling into question the plausibility of location theory’s claim to a separate existence, as a project of closed-system theorizing premised on the principles of rational action and general equilibrium, she was also anticipating an entirely different ontology of the economic, together with an understanding of its constitutive spatiality.

The course (and cause) of Massey’s work during the 1970s was taking shape. There was a recognition that the disorderly economic conditions of the time – oil crises, deindustrialization, stagflation, industrial-relations strife, anti-immigrant backlash, rising unemployment, the International Monetary Fund’s bailout of the UK economy, the failure of both Conservative and Labour governments on the altar of economic policy – more than amply confirmed the redundancy of the timid orthodoxy of regional science. More than this, though, they demanded a radical alternative, one that offered analytical purchase on the real-time restructuring of (regional) economies in crisis. A further indicator of Massey’s thinking at the time was a book review commissioned by her former boss at CES, Alan Wilson, just a few months after the publication of the Antipode article. In a broadly sympathetic but exacting review of David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City, Massey credited the book for raising questions and problematizing issues, "which quite simply cannot arise within the normal framework of Anglo-Saxon regional science. The book offered a necessary critique, she continued, albeit an insufficient alternative; it built suggestively on Marxian notions of rent, but less persuasively on the accompanying apparatus of a narrowly defined class analysis. Overall, she concluded, Harvey’s intervention would surely shake a good many economist-geographers out of their implicit and tautological assumptions" (Massey 1974: 235). Thus, more or less in parallel, Massey and Harvey spurned the trappings and pretensions of positivist geography – with its trivial notions of causality, [its] idea that a scientific ‘law’ was something that could be spotted simply through empirical regularity [and with] the mathematics (or the problems in the mathematics) leading the direction of enquiry rather than questions which arose from real world processes themselves (Massey 1985: 10). The next steps that they would take, however, would be different ones.

Convinced that geography mattered, in a material, political, social, and constitutive sense, but deeply sceptical of positivist claims concerning supposedly spatial laws, Massey found in more abstract forms of Marxism both an affinity and an irreconcilable limit. As a member of the editorial board of Capital & Class and elsewhere, she had for years been engaged in debates around value theory, dialectics, uneven development and more, but often found these base categories of analysis to be bloodless, byzantine entanglements inadequate in political as well as explanatory terms (1995b: 307). As she later reflected, the way in which I was thinking was definitely influenced, utterly influenced, by Marx, but at the same time, because of its orthodox remit, she found it very, very difficult to count myself as a Marxist (Massey with the HGRG 2009: 403, 405). Some of these critical reservations stemmed from Massey’s feminism, which shaped her orientations to theory and politics for some time before it was explicitly incorporated into her analytical schema. Initially, then, feminist influences manifested in her reaction against macrotheoretical abstractions that presumed, rather than interrogated, their impact on the world. Neither value, as an abstract category, nor class, understood primarily in economic terms, could explain the lived realities of restructuring (as it would come to be known) observed in particular places and industries. Gender blindness was part of the problem, but there was a wider failure to account for who it was that filled the empty spaces of so many abstract Marxian categories (cf. Hartmann 1979), and for that matter the different ways in which those empty spaces were filled in different places.

Massey’s twin convictions that geography mattered and that Marxian categories must be rendered concrete if they were to furnish analytical and political value were on clear display in her first monograph, Capital and Land, co-authored with her CES colleague Alejandrina Catalano (Massey & Catalano 1978). The product of several years of collaborative labour, the book was a trenchant critique of a central pillar of Britain’s radically unequal political economy (then, but also now): private landownership. It seamlessly combined theoretical sophistication and empirical exposition, marrying a clear explication of that most abstruse of Marxian demesnes – rent theory – with the first major investigation of patterns of landownership in Britain for over a century, those ownership patterns having remained essentially undocumented since 1873’s Modern Domesday book, The Return of Owners of Land. The book became a touchstone for scholars of the land question in Britain in the ensuing decades. Its main message – that the social institution of landed property profoundly colours British capitalism – was one that stayed with Massey for the rest of her career (indeed, it was to be explicitly reiterated in the Kilburn Manifesto), although she would not work on land issues again. Instead, her attention turned to what were seen at the time as more pressingly urgent questions – labour, (un)employment and the political economy of capitalist restructuring.

In collaborative work with Richard Meegan, Massey had been tracking patterns of employment change across dozens of UK industries, in the process uncovering a heterogeneous tangle of sectoral dynamics that belied simplified narratives of the causes of manufacturing job losses and the phenomenon known as deindustrialization. Unpacking what they would call the anatomy of job loss meant taking account of a repertoire of causally distinct processes at the sectoral level: in some cases, production systems and employment regimes were being rationalized; in others, they were being reorganized through new waves of technological investment; while elsewhere, the imperative was to drive improvements in productivity by way of intensification (Massey & Meegan 1982). To isolate, analyse, and document these distinctive strategies was not to tune out the supposedly steady signal of structural change in favour of cacophonic noise, Massey and Meegan insisted, nor was it to be diverted by local details or confounding contingencies; instead, it was to theorize generatively with and across difference, to illuminate varied configurations and pathways, and to point to conjuncturally specific stress points and sites of intervention. Crucially, this was not just about wading into the empirical undergrowth and then insisting upon the need for a more granular account; neither was it simply a matter of adding texture while continuing to colour between the lines of big-picture accounts of industrial transformation and uneven development. Instead, these were early steps on the path towards a more deeply relational form of geographical political economy.

When Massey first introduced what was to become one of her signature concepts, the spatial division of labour, she did so in order to make a point (1979: 234): the geographically differentiated conditions of production, including for instance the availability and cost of labour, should not be seen as some inert surface across which profit-seeking firms maximized returns. Rather, the relationship between the dynamics of accumulation and the shifting geographies of work and production was one of mutual interaction and adaptation. Beginning, in effect, with just two dimensions – industrial sectors and employment geographies – Massey conjured a vividly three-dimensional understanding of capitalist spatiality, displaying a characteristic combination of complex reasoning and unvarnished exposition. Granting that the orthodox observation that economic activities are distributed systematically in space according to the principle of profit maximization was correct [but] also trivial, she set out in the space of two paragraphs an alternative (and demanding) remit for political-economic geography:

What [the orthodox account] ignores is the variation in the way in which different forms of economic activity incorporate or use the fact of spatial inequality in order to maximise profits. This manner of response to geographical unevenness will vary both between sectors and, for any given sector, with changing conditions of production … [There is an] interaction between, on the one hand the existing characteristics of spatial differentiation, and on the other hand the requirements at that time of the particular process of production. Moreover, if it is the case that different industries will use spatial variation in different ways, it is also true that these different modes of use will subsequently produce/contribute to different forms of geographical inequality. Different modes of response by industry, implying different spatial divisions of labour within its overall process of production, may thus generate different forms of regional problem.

One schematic way of approaching this as a historical process is to conceive of it as a series of rounds of new investment, in each of which a new form of spatial division of labour is evolved. In fact, of course, the process of change is much more diversified and incremental (though certainly there are periods of radical redirection) … In any empirical work, therefore, it is necessary both to analyse this complexity and to isolate and identify those particular divisions which are dominant in reshaping the spatial structure. The geographical distribution of economic activity which results from the evolution of a new form of division of labour will be overlaid on, and combined with, the pattern produced in previous periods by different forms of division of labour. This combination of successive layers will produce effects which themselves vary over space, thus giving rise to a new form and spatial distribution of inequality in the conditions of production, as a basis for the next round of investment. The economy of any given local area will thus be a complex result of the combination of its succession of roles within the series of wider, national and international, spatial divisions of labour.

(Massey 1979: 234–5, emphasis added)

The implications of this remarkably succinct formulation would be far reaching, intellectually and politically. It presaged a style of relational theorizing that did more than transcend the rapidly fading orthodoxy of location theory; it challenged Marxian political economy to engage and work with the patterned specificities of industrial restructuring, locality effects and the complex recombination of class and gender relations, rather than to override them, or to subsume them within reductionist or all-encompassing categories of analysis.

Relational understandings of space and spatiality, in short, were central to Massey’s formulations, rather than being secondary to (or derivative of) social processes. This concern with how social processes take place, as it were, implied nothing less than a relational ontology. ‘Spatial outcomes’ are not simply the ‘outfall’ of restructuring, Richard Meegan (2017: 1287, 1288) has explained, but are constitutively active in shaping successive rounds of investment. And while this is [o]‌ften misinterpreted as a geological metaphor of the layering of strata, the notion of the historical layering of rounds of investment spatially is more accurately a metaphor of interaction and articulation. Subsequently, articulation would become a hallmark of Massey’s approach, initially by way of an Althusserian treatment of the combination of economic, political, and ideological forms and practices within regional conjunctures, and then much more expansively, in her influential notion of relational space (Massey 1995b: 315–23; Featherstone & Painter 2013: 4–7).

Locality effects

Massey’s foundational arguments concerning the spatiality of capitalism were worked out in extended form, and operationalized too, in Spatial Divisions of Labour, a book on which she worked for several years and to which she would return – taking the opportunity to append substantial methodological elaborations – just over a decade later (Massey 1984b; 1995b). In its first edition, the book crystallized what was taking shape as the restructuring approach, although in retrospect it may also have represented its zenith (see Warde 1985; Lovering 1989). It carried the burdens of complexity and specificity alongside its mandate for creative conceptualization and active theorization, the explanatory incision and persuasive power of which was not to be matched in the wider research programmes that followed. Most conspicuously, the somewhat ill-starred localities research initiative, a national project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK and directly inspired by Massey’s framework, largely failed to deliver, at least in its own terms. Controversial practically from the outset, the localities research programme became the focus for a series of proxy debates around the status of Marxism and postmodernism, the politics of scale, the methodological potential (and limits) of critical realism and structuration theory, and more, not to mention the prosaic, organizational and scientific challenges of managing an expressly polycentric study comprising multiple case-study sites and research teams (see Cochrane 1987; Smith 1987; Bagguley et al. 1990).

While initially choosing to remain one step removed from the debates that roiled around the localities initiative – which her work had been instrumental in launching, but in which she had no direct role – Massey continued to support its programmatic rationale. Nationally oriented political debates were only rarely taking account of the diversity of regional and local experiences, she maintained, often asserting the existence of trends and (causal) connections that simply did not hold across scale and space; there were significant limits to explanations of (diverse) local transformations that were crudely pegged to capitalism in general; and a host of new social movements and municipal-socialist projects had been seeking to harness the local for progressive ends. Empirically, [s]‌omething that might be called ‘restructuring’ was clearly going on, but its implications both for everyday life and for the mode and potential of political organising were clearly highly differentiated and we needed to know how (Massey 1991c: 269). Theoretically and methodologically, Massey was challenging the conflation of the global scale with supposedly general theory claims, or abstraction itself, as well as the false equivalence between the local and the concrete. With a debt to the Grundrisse, she insisted on an understanding of the concrete as the synthesis of multiple determinations, pointing out that abstract analysis might just as well focus on small objects as large ones, as it might on the local as well as the global.

Notwithstanding their operational limitations, the locality projects had not been originally conceived as idiosyncratic case studies, detached from broader explanatory frameworks; by design, they had been concerned to explore the spatial constitution of social processes, and the implications – both causal and political – of different, localized configurations of social relations. From the perspective of the localities research programme,

not only was the character of a particular place [understood to be] a product of its position in relation to wider forces (the more general social and economic restructuring, for instance), but also that that character in turn stamped its own imprint on those wider processes … The facts of distance, betweenness, unevenness, nucleation, copresence, time-space distantiation, settings, mobility and differential mobility, all of these affect how specified social relations work; they may even be necessary for their existence or prevent their operation … [The] fact of spatial variation itself, and of interdependence – of uneven development – has major implications.

(Massey 1991c: 271–2)

Massey’s approach would become synonymous with the slogan geography matters (Massey & Allen 1984). While she went as far as to say that the unique is back on the agenda (Massey 1985: 19), Massey never displayed any interest in the unmoored pursuit of idiographic detail as an end in itself. To the contrary, her position was that places [may be] unique but that does not make them inimical to theory (Graham 1998: 942).

Yet there were influential (mis)readings of Spatial Divisions of Labour, and of the rationale for localities research, in which an alleged departure from Marxian theory was equated with a turn not just towards empirics but empiricism (Smith 1986, 1987; Harvey 1987; cf. Scott 2000). David Harvey contended that, Massey is so anxious to deny structuralist leanings or that the ‘logic of capitalist development’ has any explanatory power in local settings that all theorising disappears between a mass of contingent labour-management relations in place, asserting that her approach had become laden down with a rhetoric of contingency, place, and the specificity of history, to the point that the guiding thread of Marxian argument is reduced to a set of echoes and reverberations of inert Marxian categories (Harvey 1987: 369, 373). However, there is little in Harvey’s critique to suggest (or indeed to recognize) a two-way interplay between the social and the spatial, or for that matter an effort to hold together the general and the particular. Instead, the project was interpreted as a reversal into the cul-de-sac of empirical specificity.

There is no disputing the fact, of course, that Spatial Divisions of Labour explicitly grappled with concrete complexity. As Ann Markusen reflected in a symposium convened to mark its enduring contribution, students sometimes find it difficult to master Massey’s book, not because it is densely written – on the contrary it has a light and colloquial tone – but because the analysis is so complex and multifaceted. Massey’s response to Harvey’s charge that the book was weighed down with contingency and complexity was characteristically forthright: it certainly was and … I meant it to be! (Martin et al. 1993: 70–1). Far from a repudiation, or retreat from, the concerns of Marxian political economy, Massey had in fact been continuing to employ the classic entry points of the capitalist labour process, the social relations of production and the problematic of industrial transformation. Operating from – but reaching beyond – this known analytical territory, she had not just illustrated but elaborated the working out of processes of uneven development, specifying their (somewhat divergent) sectoral dynamics, and breaking down tendential historical claims in favour of a sharper focus on layers of (dis)investment. Not least, her approach was intended to open up and then occupy the space for much less deterministic accounts of place-based conditions and local change. She deftly reworked an Althusserian sense of overdetermination into an alternative conception of spatiotemporal relations, in dialogue with feminist theory and critical realism, by evoking notions such as the combination of layers, the variable intersection of class and gender relations, the specificities of capitalist class divides and allegiances, and the vagaries of localized politics. Massey’s framework put flesh on the bones of sparse formulations like core–periphery and see-sawing capital movements, insisting on the irreducibly sociospatial content of relations that had too often been portrayed mechanistically.

Massey’s project in this period, through Spatial Divisions of Labour and the remit for locality studies, thus is best understood as a dexterous elaboration of Marxian political economy rather than some radical departure from it. She insisted that theory claims had to be read through (and across) conjunctural specificities; theoretical abstractions were not somehow floating above the particular in a general sense. Massey’s intention had never been to abandon received conceptions of the forces and relations of production or the dialectics of uneven geographical development, but instead to operationalize a framework for mobilizing these relatively abstract formulations through the structurally necessary mediations of (industrial) sector and (regional) space. While she did not conceive this work as an escape route from industrial geography, it nevertheless opened the door to quite different ways of thinking – ways of thinking that would soon carry Massey’s own work beyond the relatively restrictive problematic of capitalist restructuring.

A view from somewhere

By the end of the 1980s, with the fall of Communism and triumphalist end of history narratives ringing out from the heartlands of capitalism, geographers and the broader social sciences became immersed in often-fervent disputes over the meaning and status of the watchwords of the time: