If there were one slogan that set our pulses racing in our university days, then it was “Geography Matters!” The title of an Open University publication (Massey & Allen 1984), it captured in just two words the potential, not only of the discipline of geography, weighed down by its centuries of service to imperialism, but also of a way of understanding and being in the world. “Geography matters” was a call to arms, to defend the relevance of the questions that Geography has always raised, regardless of the responses provided over the ages, and to highlight the pressing geographical issues currently on the table awaiting a solution. Over the years, and having gotten to know Doreen and the depth of her spatial thinking, we could not resist doctoring that title and reconverting it into Doreen matters, and so merge the author with her work. Little did we imagine that the happiness with which we took up this task would quickly be converted into such deep sadness as we dedicate Doreen matters in the wake of her death.

In 2012, we published a book on the life and intellectual trajectory of Doreen Massey in Spanish (Albet & Benach 2012). In the process of preparing that book, we undertook an exhaustive reading of her work and we shared many hours of conversation with Doreen that allowed us to explore her ideas further and to learn how to use them in our own work. But, as important as her intellectual legacy is, we liked Doreen for the way she was, for the constant example she gave us of how to belong to an academic world without submitting to its unjust and unjustifiable rules, and how to intervene in political debates and public life with a frank commitment and without personal benefit. As we hope to have captured in the title of this article, Doreen Massey showed us a way of understanding the world that was inseparable from her way of being in it.

In 2005, Massey published For Space, her detailed, personal and theoretical reflection, which was not at all a work on space per se, but rather a work that argued for the “possibilities and potentialities enabled by space(s)” (Anderson 2008: 229).