Former US Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill is credited with the observation that “all politics is local”. Geographer Doreen Massey, more than anyone, has brought clarity to the complicated conceptual and political questions that this well-worn phrase brings in its train. Her work addressed questions such as: What is the local? How do we conceptualize places? Can politics be simultaneously rooted and progressive? What kinds of complications do feelings of belonging, home, and place bring in a globalizing capitalist world? Are such attachments bound to be reactionary and/or exclusionary? How do we theorize in ways that take into account social inequality and differences of all sorts? In addition to developing carefully worked-out, politically progressive, arguments on these issues, Doreen Massey articulated her arguments in distinctive ways. Doreen Massey’s voice and her presence were different from those of other leading scholars, and this difference mattered.

PLACE, DIFFERENCE AND DEBATE

Questions about the local, and about place, globalization and difference remain important questions, but they were especially pointed in the 1980s and early 1990s. I will start by discussing the significance of Doreen Massey’s thinking through personal recollections of the impact of her thinking on me as a young geographer during those very stimulating times. In the mid-1980s, I was teaching at a technical college in Cambridge (1986–7 academic year) and I used to sneak into Open University lectures and other free talks at Cambridge University given by the likes of Derek Gregory, David Harvey and Edward Soja. Their lectures were all about retheorizing capitalism, about structure and agency, and about the role of space in social life. These scholars (among others) were bringing ideas about postmodernism and postmodernity into geography. Their readings of French and German theorists and their arguments about space and how the experiences of space and of time were changing seemed fresh, exciting and important – and they certainly changed geography.

The end of the decade, 1989 to be exact, saw the publication of Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies and David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity.