TIME-SPACE COMPRESSION AND THE GEOMETRIES OF POWER

Much of what is written about space, place and postmodern times emphasizes a new phase in what Marx once called ‘the annihilation of space by time’. The process is argued, or more usually asserted, to have gained a new momentum, to have reached a new stage. It is a phenomenon which Harvey (1989) has termed ‘time-space compression’. And the general acceptance that something of the sort is going on is marked by the almost obligatory use in the literature of terms and phrases such as speed-up, global village, overcoming spatial barriers, the disruption of horizons and so forth.

Yet the concept of time-space compression remains curiously unexamined. In particular, it is a concept which often remains without much social content, or with only a very restricted, one-sided, social content. There are many aspects to this. One is, of course, the question of to what extent its current characterization represents very much a Western, colonizer’s view. The sense of dislocation which so many writers on the subject apparently feel at the sight of a once well-known local street now lined with a succession of cultural imports – the pizzeria, the kebab house, the branch of the middle-eastern bank – must have been felt for centuries, though from a very different point of view, by colonized peoples all over the world as they watched the importation of, maybe even used, the products of, first, European colonization, maybe British (from new forms of transport to liver salts and custard powder); later US products, as they learned to eat wheat instead of rice or corn, to drink Coca-Cola, just as today we try out enchiladas.

But there are just two points which it seems particularly important to raise in the current context. The first concerns causality. Time-space compression is a term which refers to movement and communication across space. It is a phenomenon which implies the geographical stretching-out of social relations (referred to by Giddens (1984) as time-space distanciation), and to our experience of all this. However, those who argue that we are currently undergoing a new phase of accelerated time-space compression usually do so from a very particular view of its determination.

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, shadow banking has attracted increasing interest. The discussion focuses mostly on its contribution to the financing of the real economy – mainly in periods in which real bank finance dries up – and on its role as a source of systemic risk: that is, risk for the stability of the finance system (van der Veer et al. 2015). A less researched field is the role played by shadow banking in the laundering of illicit funds. The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on the ML risk of shadow banking and offer a view on whether ML can effectively be mitigated, and to what extent it is worthwhile doing so.

While reference is here generally made to ML, the same applies to terrorism financing too, as both utilize largely the same techniques. Terrorism financing can indeed be described as the inverse process of ML, where licit funds are diverted for the financing of illegal activities. The preparation of bribery offences also involves the diversion oflicit funds into dark pools, which can later be used to bribe officials making the detection of bribery more difficult. Hence, ML means here both concealing the unlawful source of criminal gains and concealing the existence oflicit funds for the purpose of preparing criminal offences.

Shadow banking: a definition

The Financial Stability Board Global Shadow Banking Monitoring Report 2015 describes shadow banking as credit intermediation involving entities and activities outside the regular banking system. It is also often referred to as “market-based financing”. A unique definition does not exist, as shadow banking activities can take very diff erent forms across countries, and definitions focus either on the entity performing the activity or the activity itself. Until 2014, the FSB adopted an entity-based definition and, in 2015, it introduced an activity-based “economic function” measure of shadow banking, which aims to narrow the focus to those parts of non-bank credit intermediation where shadow banking risks – from a systemic risk perspective – are more likely to occur.

INTRODUCTION

As this collection so amply demonstrates, Doreen was a complete geographer whose relational approach to understanding space and places transcended intradisciplinary divides. Her initial path-breaking contribution to the discipline was in economic geography, however, initially through research on the geography of industrial restructuring and the book that the editors of a recent collection of essays on research design and methodology in the subdiscipline claimed “transformed the field … and triggered one of the sharpest paradigmatic shifts in contemporary economic geography” (Barnes et al. 2007: 2) – Spatial Divisions of Labour (Massey 1984b).

UNDERSTANDING UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT: INDUSTRIAL RESTRUCTURING AND SPATIAL DIVISIONS OF LABOUR

Doreen’s early work on the geography of industrial reorganization laid the intellectual foundations for Spatial Divisions of Labour with its overarching argument that space is not passive in processes of industrial restructuring. Early applications of the approach focused on the industrial restructuring of particular sectors (Massey & Meegan 1979). The title of one of the papers from this early research – “Industrial Restructuring versus the Cities” – captures its basic theoretical argument: shifting explanation of employment change away from a purely locational explanation (the characteristics of cities and their residents) to the macro-economy and process of capital accumulation (Massey & Meegan 1978). The same argument was powerfully reiterated in an early use of her notion of “spatial divisions of labour” to understand the UK’s “regional problem” (Massey 1979).

Later work attempted to formalize some of the initial findings on production reorganization through an extension of the empirical research to a range of industries cutting jobs in the UK in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Massey & Meegan 1982). A trinity of forms of production reorganization (“rationalization”, “intensification” and “investment and technical change”), each with potentially distinct uses of space, was identified and used to support the argument that spatial outcomes – the geography of job loss – needed to be understood in the broad causal chain emanating from the macro-economy and process of capital accumulation.

INTRODUCTION

In attempting a critique of a discipline, the fundamental problem always arises that the very concept and definition of disciplines are themselves functions of a particular ideology and epistemology. From the point of view of the critique presented here, the separate existence of an entity called industrial location theory is itself open to question. In different ways, many of the classic theories of industrial location have proceeded as though the object of study was an abstract firm – one without effective structural relationships to the rest of the economy. The specific problem of idealised abstraction will be dealt with later. The immediate question is the related one of the presumed separation of spatial behaviour from the economic system as a whole. In fact, of course, the two are intimately related at all levels. In the first place it is rarely valid to retain a complete distinction between the specifically locational decision of the firm and all its other economic decisions. Secondly there is the fact that the nature of a firm’s behaviour will be influenced by its position within the total economic structure. And thirdly, at a more aggregated level, the spatial shape of the economy is the result not only of specifically spatial forces, but also of the a-spatial dynamic of the economic system having a spatial manifestation.

It is, then, impossible realistically to treat “the spatial” as a closed system. Certainly industrial location theory does not have an object of its own, and in that sense there could never be an autonomous dynamic theory of industrial location. Not all of the work considered here is in contradiction with this view, but the point needs to be borne in mind throughout the following discussion since many elements of the critique spring directly from it.

Nonetheless, there is a body of knowledge called “industrial location theory”, and the spatial expression of the economic system does have to be analysed. Given that, this critique seems a valid exercise to undertake. The bulk of industrial location theory is in fact closely related to economics but only in the sense that it derives very directly from neo-classical marginalist economic theory, sharing its ideology, and consequently its epistemological approach.

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).

‘Space’ is very much on the agenda these days. On the one hand, from a wide variety of sources come proclamations of the significance of the spatial in these times: ‘It is space not time that hides consequences from us’ (Berger); ‘The difference that space makes’ (Sayer); ‘That new spatiality implicit in the postmodern’ (Jameson); ‘It is space rather than time which is the distinctively significant dimension of contemporary capitalism’ (Urry); and ‘All the social sciences must make room for an increasingly geographical conception of mankind’ (Braudel). Even Foucault is now increasingly cited for his occasional reflections on the importance of the spatial. His 1967 Berlin lectures contain the unequivocal: ‘The anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time.’ In other contexts the importance of the spatial, and of associated concepts, is more metaphorical. In debates around identity the terminology of space, location, positionality and place figures prominently. Homi Bhabha, in discussions of cultural identity, argues for a notion of a ‘third space’. Jameson, faced with what he sees as the global confusions of postmodern times, ‘the disorientation of saturated space’, calls for an exercise in ‘cognitive mapping’. And Laclau, in his own very different reflections on the ‘new revolution of our time’, uses the terms ‘temporal’ and ‘spatial’ as the major differentiators between ways of conceptualizing systems of social relations.

In some ways, all this can only be a delight to someone who has long worked as a ‘geographer’. Suddenly the concerns, the concepts (or, at least, the terms) which have long been at the heart of our discussion are at the centre also of wider social and political debate. And yet, in the midst of this gratification I have found myself uneasy about the way in which, by some, these terms are used. Here I want to examine just one aspect of these anxieties about some of the current uses of spatial terminology: the conceptualization (often implicit) of the term ‘space’ itself.

In part this concern about what the term ‘space’ is intended to mean arises simply from the multiplicity of definitions adopted.

On 29 July 1971, Doreen Massey and I boarded a flight from Stanstead airport near London bound for New York City’s Kennedy airport, with an ongoing connection to Philadelphia where we had enrolled in the one-year master’s degree in Regional Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

In those days, cross-Atlantic flights stopped to refuel in Maine or Newfoundland, but it was not the duration of the flight that lingered in my mind. What I most recall is the overwhelming humidity that struck us like a downpour as we exited the plane onto the tarmac at JFK. The sensation of drowning on dry land stayed with me for the next six weeks, as we laboured through what was called a Summer Mathematics Institute, but we called “remedial maths” (mostly calculus, linear algebra and microeconomics).

The culture shocks induced by adjusting to graduate education in the US were immense, but from the outset we were curious and omnivorous consumers facing the smorgasbord of opportunities offered by a challenging (and welcoming) faculty. But looking back, I see that as we learned together, we shared a growing discontent. Neither of us ended up disappointed in the education that Penn provided, and we never would dismiss or disown what we learned that year. Yet neither of us went on to pursue conventional regional science research.

This chapter seeks to explain these outcomes. It is a personal account of twelve transformative months in our lives and education, beginning from the summer of 1971. Needless to say, our experiences differed, and I make no pretense of accurately recording Doreen’s story, nor of providing a comprehensive narrative of my own.

LONDON, 1966–69: INTRODUCTIONS

In the 1960s, London was described as “swinging”, which I experienced as an energetic, experimental and optimistic spirit. Harold Wilson was prime minister, expounding what he called a “white-hot” technological revolution in Britain even though much of his time was spent trying to quell the old-time socialists scattered within the Labour Party. Typical weekends saw large and noisy demonstrations against American involvement in Vietnam.

Fascism was a dictatorial regime that left its negative mark on the country’s culture, society and legislation, but it did not interrupt the process of industrialization, which was resumed immediately after the restoration of democracy, although the general conditions of Italy and the rest of Europe at the end of the Second World War were dismal. This chapter charts the evolution of the Italian economy in the period 1946–2016. I have broken down the period into five phases:

• 1. Reconstruction (1946–51). The birth of the republic and the integration of Italy within the international economy; administration of the Marshall Plan;

• 2. The economic miracle (1952–73). A period of rapid modernization;

• 3. The return of instability (1974–92). Economic growth continues, albeit more slowly; a period of political gridlock and the accumulation of a large amount of public debt; niche firms prosper;

• 4. Incomplete reforms (1993–2007). Continuing political turmoil and persistent high public debt levels; participation in the Eurozone places Italy on an slow and volatile economic path, despite the many reforms enacted and the resilience of Italian industry;

• 5. Italy and the global economic crisis (2008–16). One of the worst performers during the world financial crisis.

This chapter will familiarize the reader with the key events, both domestic and international, that have affected the Italian economy, while Chapters 3–5 will focus in detail on the macroeconomic, microeconomic and social analyses, providing quantitative illustrations.

RECONSTRUCTION, 1946–51

Major political and institutional changes took place in Italy immediately after the Second World War. A referendum was held on 2 June 1946 on whether to retain the monarchy, which had not supported democracy in Italy, or to introduce a republic. Support for a republic prevailed, however with a narrow margin of only 54 per cent of the votes. And for the first time women could exercise their right to vote, which had been acquired by decree during the war. The transition from monarchy to republic was peaceful and on 13 June the king left for Portugal. On the same day the referendum was held, Italians voted for 556 representatives of the newly created Constitutional Assembly, which, over 18 months, drafted the new constitution that came into force on 1 January 1948.

Social capital presents in Italy quite contrasting features. On one side, the country enjoys one of the lowest rates of homicide, suicide and imprisoned people in the world. We have already observed that the health of its people is among the best in the world, with life expectancy among the highest; moreover, Italy records a low level of alcohol consumption (the lowest in Europe), good and varied food (the famous “Mediterranean diet”), limited obesity, widespread home ownership, many opportunities for socially-based entertainment and leisure time; and a strong network of associations and NGOs. On the other side, the country has a very high level of corruption, high tax evasion and the widespread existence of organized crime. Let us begin with social and civic capital and its measurement.

SOCIAL AND CIVIC CAPITAL

The concepts of “social capital” and “civic virtues” as foundations for the economic flourishing of communities go back to the Italian city-states of the Middle Ages, when economic activity was justified by theologians if it aimed at the “common good” (“fare ricca la città” – to enrich the city) and they continued to be elaborated until a much narrower vision of economics prevailed in the nineteenth century in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Since then utilitarianism and self-interest have formed the basis of economic theory, but in Italy economic practice has maintained contact with some of the social roots of that original thinking. The reproposition of social capital as an important determinant of positive economic performance came firstly from the work of sociologists in the 1980s and 1990s (especially Pierre Bourdieu and Robert Putnam). Social capital was defined as the set of factors enabling people to act together effectively in pursuing shared aims and it was based on relationships of trust. There was also an effort to articulate social capital according to its different coverage in society: bonding, when trust and common endeavour is limited to family ties; bridging, when it is centred on local connections; linking, when the extension of connections is unlimited. Bonding social capital, generally, has been viewed negatively, because it can lock groups into sects or clans, and activate conflicts among groups and between groups and the rest of society. Indeed, mafia groups contain bonding social capital, which can hardly be considered valuable social capital.

INTRODUCTION

“Learning from Latin America”. This is the title chosen by Doreen Massey for her article published in Soundings in 2012. In the context of the neoliberal crises in Europe and North America, when competition and subordination among countries was deepening, Massey noticed the construction of other kinds of relations in Latin America during the first decade of the twenty-first century. These relations challenged the geometries of power within states and in the world-system as well. Massey thus invited European countries to look at and learn from the Latin American experience.

From her perspective, governments in the region were striving to expand democratic practices. Some examples are, first, the advancement of social self-organization mechanisms that channelled social demands towards the state; second, the passing of rules aimed at ending the monopolistic control of mass media and opening spaces to a diversity of expressions, mainly the voice of communities; and third, the establishment of cooperation and solidarity bonds through organizations such as UNASUR (Union of South American Nations) or CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean American states including Cuba but excluding Canada and the USA) (Massey 2012b).

It is not common for European intellectuals to show interest in the Latin American experience and to reflect upon it as a model for developing a different kind of relation between European countries themselves. Even critical perspectives have labelled Latin American governments populist, and disqualified them on the grounds that they did not conform to European modes of governance (regarded as the model of civilization and rationality).

The purpose of this chapter is to understand the significance of Latin America in Doreen Massey’s professional trajectory, while outlining some ties between her view of space and discussions and practices in countries where subaltern sectors became protagonists after their conception of space and territorial claims were voiced and heard.

Doreen Massey developed a peculiar sensitivity to the third world and, particularly, Latin America. She understood that conquest and colonization processes across the region in the sixteenth century showed the dark side of modernity (Mignolo 1995).

INTRODUCTION

In the current debate around modernism and postmodernism, which is having its reflection in our field, both sides claim feminism for their own. Moreover, to feminists each offers possibilities. Postmodernism holds out the potential democracy of a plurality of voices and points of view, the end to a notion of science and society which has in fact (to be distinguished from ‘by necessity’) been unremittingly and tediously male, a patriarchal hierarchy with a claim to truth. Modernism, on the other hand, points to the possibility of progress and change. Things may be patriarchal now (including, OK let’s admit it, modernism itself) but they need not always be so; more than that, it is possible to judge between alternatives, and history is on our side.

However, that it may be difficult to choose between the attractions they each at least in their rhetorics appear to offer, has as its other side that both postmodernism and modernism remain so frequently, so unimaginatively, patriarchal. This has been said before about the wider debate (for instance, see Fraser and Nicholson, 1988). If there is one thing which has most certainly demonstrated its flexibility in an age which as a whole is frequently accorded that epithet, it is sexism.

This feature is also disappointingly characteristic of the way in which at least some of the modernism-postmodernism debate has been conducted in our field, and it is the purpose of this paper to examine some of the ways in which this happens and to explore some of its implications. To this end I am focusing on two books which have been published recently: Soja’s Postmodern Geographies (1989) and Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1989). These books have been chosen not because they are in any sense representative of the debate between postmodernism and modernism (indeed there is argument about even how they might be classified) but because they are, or may become, central to the discussion within geography […] For it seems to me that the absence from, indeed denial by, both these books of feminism and the contributions it has recently made, raise issues which are important for all of us, and which range from our style as academics to the way in which some of the central concepts of the debate are formulated.

The great significance of space to Doreen Massey – it is one of the main themes of her lifetime’s work – reflects its relevance to the entire society in which she lived and worked. She was one of the most influential and most respected geographers of her generation, and is one of the most-cited scholars in contemporary geography. The themes she explored in her work had resonance for a large number of people in her academic field, in political life and more widely. This chapter will ask how one can explain the significance of the idea of space for her and those whom she influenced.

EXPERIENCES OF MOBILITY

One should first recognize that Doreen Massey’s life itself involved some abrupt and challenging relocations in space. First the transition from the Wythenshawe housing estate where she grew up, to one of Manchester’s leading state girls’ schools, and then to the upper-middle-class environment of Oxford University, at the “women’s college” St Hugh’s, which admitted its first male students in 1986 many years after Massey’s time there (see McDowell, this volume). Many writers have reflected on the transition from a working-class upbringing to the milieu of a university, and Oxford and Cambridge universities in particular, as a massively disorienting and alienating one, although for many it was also an enabling one. Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and Richard Sennett each wrote about the effects and meanings of cultural relocations like this.

Writers, including several with values similar to Doreen Massey’s, have deployed different intellectual resources to reflect on such transitions. For Raymond Williams, born in 1921 near Abergavenny in Wales, the initial resource was his training in literature and literary criticism. His own working-class origin was a key point of reference for him in his major work on the English novel and on drama (Williams 1968, 1970). He reinterpreted the “Great Tradition” of the novel which he encountered in the Cambridge English curriculum, through the perspective of class relations.

In the debates about such concepts as ‘home’, ‘place’, ‘location-locality’, identity and sense of place and so on, one of the prime contributions of geographers so far, and most particularly of economic geographers, has been to provide a kind of backcloth, more precisely an economic rationale, for some of the senses of dislocation, fragmentation and disorientation that are currently being expressed by so many.

The argument is that we are living through a period (the precise dating is usually quite vague) of immense spatial upheaval, that this is an era of a new and powerful globalization, of instantaneous worldwide communication, of the break-up of what were once local coherencies, of a new and violent phase of ‘time-space compression’.

It is certainly true that these things are going on. The world economy, and the local, regional and national economies (if one can still indeed talk of such things) which make it up, look very different from the way they looked, say, as the world emerged from war in 1945.

I CHANGES IN THE WORLD ECONOMY

The changes even in the last twenty years have been enormous. They are characterized in a variety of ways: as a move from organized to disorganized capitalism, from modern to postmodern, from industrial to post-industrial, manufacturing to service, from Fordist to post-Fordist. The frequency of use of the prefix ‘post’ indicates the prevailing uncertainty about the positive shape of the new (and indicates also, therefore, the fact that it is open to contestation), but one of the key processes universally agreed to be at the heart of it all is globalization. In spite of all the rhetoric (and to some extent the reality) of small firms and of individual entrepreneurship, of flexibility, niche-marketing and decentralization, of the potential importance of local economies and of economies of scope rather than scale, the reality is that within the economic system power is related to size. The key movers within the world economy remain the multinational, now increasingly transnational and global, corporations, and their power is increasing. The internationalization of capital is a process with old roots, but in recent decades it has increased in intensity and scope and changed in its nature.

TWO PLACES

The oft-repeated insistence by Doreen that “place matters” was as true of her life as her academic and political work. She lived the contradiction and inequalities of the UK’s north–south divide in her everyday life: two diverse regions connected by the northwest train line between London and Manchester and onto the Lake District. Doreen was a frequent passenger, often seen on the train, learning Spanish verbs, checking birds that she might see on the way or reading papers, journals or novels. I travelled the same route – sometimes with Doreen, on the way to give a joint talk in Liverpool or Manchester, for example, as well as alone. I too was brought up in the northwest of England, just over the Mersey from where Doreen was born. She grew up in Wythenshawe, a local authority estate in Cheshire that was moved into Manchester in the 1930s, and I grew up in Stockport, an industrial town just in Cheshire, each place about seven miles from Manchester’s city centre. Our joint origins were a source of common pleasure, as well as a basis for our joint interest in the changing UK economy, transformations in the landscape of labour and, in particular, the position of women in the workplace.

What further united us was our educational trajectory, in which social and spatial mobility combined to shift us across the class structure and into the southeast. We both moved from state schools into the elite spaces of Oxbridge, into charitable research organizations where for a time we both worked in London for the sociologist Peter Willmott, and then we both worked at the Open University, committed to increasing opportunities for people who had missed out on a university education when younger or who wanted a second chance at educational achievement. Here, however, we parted company in 1992, after 12 years as colleagues, when I left for Cambridge, seduced (in Doreen’s view) by the fleshpots of a well-endowed institution. She never quite let go of her view that I had betrayed the cause of widening access, despite my frequent protests and insistence that Oxbridge too had a diversity agenda, and of course, we both owed a good deal of our own success as academics to Oxbridge accepting two northern state-schooled girls.