Geography Reference
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determinism, or even capitalism's relentless search for pro
t. There are many
other forces that fold and distort time and space, including the extension of
power relations over localities, various societies' attempts at colonizing new
spaces (which re
fi
ect a variety of goals and priorities), the interests of states
and merchants in expanding trade networks, religious proselytization, and
the inadvertent readjustment in conceptual understandings of distance peri-
odically introduced by the sciences and arts. These causes must be kept in
mind to avoid reifying time-space compression, that is, representing the pro-
cess as some asocial phenomenon devoid of roots in the world of real human
beings. There is an important analytical corollary to this line of thought:
because changes in the structure of time and space, as well as their cultural
interpretation, have many di
fl
erent origins and roots, it is more helpful to
think in terms of context and con
ff
fl
uence of conjunctures of forces than
speci
c causes.
In examining this topic, there are four pitfalls that have plagued earlier
attempts that must be avoided. First, many accounts of the social nature of
time and space, and thus of time-space compression, are implicitly elitist
(Stein 2001), focusing only on the experiences of the powerful, or of intel-
lectuals, and ignoring how the great masses of people who were neither felt
their sense of time and space transformed. This observation indicates that
there is never simply one time and one space being produced in any society,
but always a diversity contingent on class, gender, ethnicity, and other lines of
social life. Massey (1993:62) is clear that time-space compression never a
fi
ects
all peoples and places equally; rather, “The ways in which people are inserted
into and placed within this 'time-space compression' are highly complicated
and extremely varied.” Similarly, Knowles (2006) stresses that time-space
convergence is always socially and spatially uneven in its manifestation. The
process both
re
ff
ects
uneven spatial development and simultaneously
manu-
factures
it. For example, the shrinking of space among the world's global
cities has coincided with a steady widening of space among economically
marginalized locations in the developing world (Leyshon 1995).
Second, whereas time-space compression has been generally conceived as
occurring in some abstract social space devoid of physical and biological
characteristics, it is important to keep in mind that historically, changes in the
nature of time and space inevitably entailed a reworking of “nature” (which
is, admittedly, a highly problematic concept; see Castree 2005). To cross dis-
tances, to produce places, to experience time is inevitably to draw upon and
be shaped by the biophysical environment: far from unfolding across a non-
existent isotropic plain, real, historical time-space compression took place
within the topographies of continents and oceans, their multiple climates and
ecosystems. For example, colonial and industrial maritime networks of trade,
migration, and investment—all of which generated relational geographies
in their own ways, and thus folded time and space—enfolded forests and
deserts, grasslands and jungles, seas and oceans within changing manifolds of
temporal and spatial distance.
fl
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