Introduction - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 4

remember the past but not predict the future? Other di erences concern their

contrasting degrees of materiality: in Massey's (2005:117) view, “Time is
either past or to come or so minutely instantaneously now that it is impossible
to grasp. Space, on the other hand, is there ” (emphasis in original). Whereas
place can be used in a variety of di

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erent ways, the same cannot be said
about time: the places and spaces “consumed” by time-space compression
are in fact always potentially reusable, whereas the time so invested is not
(Dodgshon 1999). Yet the very concreteness of space is the product of the
multiple histories embedded in the palimpsest that is each landscape: place is
time made concrete, given form and meaning by the trajectories of the people
who have lived in it.
What, then, does it mean to say that time and space are socially con-
structed? To say that time and space are temporally and spatially mutable is
to say that their meanings vary widely historically and geographically. The
“meanings” of time and space—and there are always more than one—
include, but are not limited to, how people measure and de

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ne them, write
about them, feel about them and govern their daily lives with them, use and
deploy them, wield them as instruments of power, resist them, celebrate
and lament them, conquer them and are in turn conquered by them. Time
and space are struggled over, loved, hated, and perceived in countless ways,
they saturate our immediate, daily, and lifelong existence so thoroughly that
we generally don't even think about them. In denaturalizing these intertwined
dimensions, we begin with the recognition that every age and every society
constructs its own sense of them, measures and orders them in ways that it
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finds useful and meaningful. How we experience time and space is contingent
upon the social interpretations that we acquire from birth: they are woven
into the rhythms of everyday life, internalized as “natural” in memory and
the unconscious, structured and given meaning by socially dictated systems
of measurement, organized around the cycles of production and reproduc-
tion, and continually reinforced by patterns of labor, movement, ideology,
family life, governance, and every other institution that requires temporal and
spatial coordination. These experiences are never purely individual, but draw
upon the vast reservoirs of knowledge that make us human. Thus, the social
origins of time and space are hidden by standardized routines within particu-
lar envelopes of space-time, which acquire a durability and appearance of
permanence to those who inhabit them. This process di

ers considerably
within societies as well as among them, i.e., the understanding and meaning
of time and space varies widely among various social groups di

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erentiated by
class, gender, ethnicity, age, and other categories of identity. Our interpret-
ations of time and space will re

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ect, among other things, our sense of self,
i.e., our identity of who we are, where we belong, and what is expected of us;
our location within wider networks of community, the types and numbers of
people with whom we have contact; educational levels; religious background;
access to particular technologies; hopes, fears, and expectations of the future;
our sense of the past and its signi

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fi cance; media portrayals of local and