Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
2
Theorizing time-space
compression
There are several ways to understand how time and space are compressed,
and what that means for the people who experience it. Each perspective o
ff
ers
insights and su
ers from weaknesses. How we theorize this issue speaks vol-
umes to how we view time and space, their social production and malleability.
I begin, however, on an historical note.
One of the most famous debates in the intellectual history of time and
space took place in the seventeenth century between two geniuses, Isaac
Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Newton, greatly in
ff
uenced by the recent
popularity of the clock, viewed time and space as abstract, absolute entities
that existed independently of their measurement, that is, their existence was
absolute, for their reality remained real regardless of whatever they contained
or how they were measured. Leibniz, in contrast, held that time and space
were relational, i.e., comprehensible only with reference to speci
fl
c frames of
interpretation: distance, for example, could only be understood through
appeal to the space between two or more objects situated in space. Space and
time, therefore, had no independent existence, but were derivative of how we
measured them. Eventually, for reasons having little to do with inherent intel-
lectual merit and much to do with the emergence of early capitalist modern-
ity, Newton's view triumphed (about which more later). As we shall see, this
debate is of no small importance to how we view space today.
fi
Early conceptualizations
Theorizations of time-space compression have a longer history than is gener-
ally recognized. The notion of measuring distance using time, for example, is
re
ected in the work of Götz (1888), who drew isochronic maps of travel
times to and from selected points at several moments of human history (sev-
eral of which are used here). Similarly, Schjerning-Charlottenburg (1903)
constructed maps of Berlin as its commuting distances exploded in the face
of intense modernization (Figure 4.8, on pages 119-22). Boggs (1941, 1945),
another unsung hero of this tradition, of
fl
ered an early summary of relational
space under the impacts of rapid declines in transportation costs and times,
producing isotachic maps of the U.S. that exhibited the di
ff
ff
erent travel speeds
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