Picking up this book again has been a curious form of time-travel. Doreen Massey was our friend, mentor and comrade for over thirty years, and our ideas and concerns evolved in tandem over those decades. Now to go back and confront some of Doreen’s earliest work has been an eye-opener about where we all started, our relative naiveté in many respects, and the recurring need to reflect on the basic elements of one’s intellectual edifice. The thinking at work in Capital and Land reflects a very different time and place from today, for better and worse.

One thing that jumps out from the pages of Capital and Land is the clarion voice of Doreen’s authorship. The book is alight with good sense and careful reasoning, backed up by serious research. There is little to quibble with in how Massey and Catalano go about their business of investigating capital and land in postwar Britain. The study is well grounded in empirical data about landownership and rents. The authors are extremely precise in their delineation of different categories of ownership, both empirically and theoretically, and they are determined to tease out in a rigorous way the modes of landownership pursued by various forms of capital (i.e. agrarian, industrial and financial).

One thing that surprises is how much empirical data on land ownership the authors were able to muster. If one were to try to update this work, one would still run into a wall of data silence. Property ownership continues to be a taboo subject in terms of published, publicly accessible data. There is a better chance of getting details on CIA black sites (Paglen 2009). In California, for example, landownership filings are masked by all sorts of false-fronts registered to corporate attorneys, untraceable entities and offshore holdings. This informational black hole is only likely to get worse in the present political conjuncture.

On the theoretical side, the authors offer a remarkable short course in Marxism, including the transition from feudalism to capitalism – which was still relevant to understanding the origins of certain categories of land ownership in the UK, even if their economic and political salience had been transformed.

SETTING THE SCENE

The late 1960s/early 1970s was a turbulent time. Although it may seem hard for those who weren’t around at the time to believe it now, there was then quite a lively debate in geography about how best to understand uneven development and which theoretical positions gave most traction on this issue. The theories developed in geography and regional science in the 1960s effectively assumed away issues of uneven development in the real world; economic life was seen as conducted on a featureless isotropic plain. While initially seen as an exciting and important development in a discipline that had been – to say the least – theory-light, it soon became clear that such an approach to theory was more concerned with models of how the geometry of the economic landscape “ought to be” given a set of precise and restrictive assumptions (see Chorley & Haggett 1967) than with understanding the social processes that created uneven development registered in empirically observable differences between places in the real material world. The change was exemplified in the contrast between David Harvey’s Explanation in Geography (1969) and his later books Social Justice and the City (1973) and more powerfully in The Limits to Capital (1982).

But this was not simply a debate within the narrow disciplinary confines of geography. The changes in geography also have to be situated in the context of broader changes that were then sweeping through the social sciences more generally, and in particular the rediscovery of Marxism and other strands of heterodox political economy. There had long been a recognition of the importance of uneven development at the global scale within Marxian political economy. Mandel’s work beginning in the 1960s in Belgium (1963, 1968, 1970, 1975) was seminal in drawing attention to the significance of intranational as well as international uneven development to the accumulation process. For Mandel, the unevenness of development between different parts of a single country was an essential precondition for capital accumulation, the significance of which had been greatly underestimated in previous Marxian analyses.

The Italian economy today does not enjoy a good press and gets very poor ratings from international agencies. There are two main reasons for this. Over the short run, this has been a consequence of the world financial crisis, which has hit Italy much harder than other countries. In 2007, Italy’s per capita income was 107 (with the European Union average = 100), while France’s stood at 108, Germany’s at 117, the UK’s at 111, and Spain’s at 103. In 2016, the respective positions were: Italy 96, France 105, Germany 123, UK 108, Spain 92, which shows that only Germany, among the biggest of the EU countries, has overcome the crisis, while the other countries have lost percentage points, with Italy and Spain the most severely affected. This book will offer plenty of arguments to explain the grim performance of Italy since the crisis, while also explaining why Italy is still in the G7, why it is still one of the largest economies of the EU and still remains a major exporter of manufactured goods, despite having lost 25 per cent of its manufacturing production since the crisis, chiefly as a result of a major shrinking of its domestic market.

Secondly, and more profoundly, over the long-run the Italian economy has never fitted the standard US growth models based on big business, standardization, economies of scale and transnationalism. Although this lack of fit did not prevent the country from modernizing and growing, it did result in a vast underevaluation of the Italian economy by international bodies that often left Italy out of international comparisons or alternatively negatively commented upon, even when it performed well. Some years ago The Economist compared the Italian economy to the leaning tower of Pisa suggesting that it was always on the brink of falling to pieces. One could point out that Pisa’s tower has been standing for seven centuries, and was recently consolidated so that it cannot fall down, at least for the foreseeable future and can be safely visited by masses of people. However, the image of fragility is the one that circulates: Italy as a country that cannot be relied upon, because it is not “stable” or “sustainable”, both politically and economically.

We have already seen in Chapter 3 the basic demographic indicators for the country: a long life-expectancy, a very low fertility rate, an unsatisfactory rate of women employment and substantial immigration. In this chapter I will focus first on the family, beginning with its strong traditional role, before examining its changed composition, how it has fared in the face of economic crisis, and the position of women. I will then consider education and human capital, before discussing the issue of immigration, with special attention given to the recent migrant crisis and the resumption of Italian emigration abroad.

FAMILY, AGE AND GENDER

Italy has shared the “nuclear” form of the family since the Middle Ages, with a propensity to retain very strong family ties. These ties can tend towards nepotism and even to amoral familism, however, in its positive version family ties have guaranteed a network of support and friendship that has lasted to this very day, although the situation of the Italian family is today very different with 58 per cent of “households” comprising one or two people and only 6 per cent having more than four members.

Over a third of households have a family head over 65 years of age. When we take into account that Italy has 3 million seriously disabled people (2.2 million over 65 years of age) and only 2 million receive state assistance, and only 22 per cent of children under the age of three attend preschool, it is easy to understand that the majority of families are engaged in the care of children and old people. Some resort to private help, although there is no clear information about the size of that help. In 2016 the Italian National Agency for Pension Schemes (INPS) reported 900,000 people enrolled as home helpers whose social contributions are paid by families, but it is well-known that there are an additional 600,000 “badanti” (caregivers to old people in their houses), mostly Eastern European migrants, who do not have an official contract of employment, plus an unknown number of child-minders who look after small children when parents are at work.

Doreen Massey changed geography. As a creative scholar, an inspiring teacher, and a restless activist, she initiated new ways of seeing, understanding, and indeed changing the world. She launched critiques, both in the relatively small world of economic geography and the much bigger worlds of social theory and progressive politics, that would prove to be truly transformative; she developed arguments against a host of establishment and orthodox positions that left something better and more productive in their place; she confronted structurally-embedded power relations, most notably of class and gender, while steadfastly resisting political and analytical foreclosure; and she started conversations that continue to resonate and reverberate, not least those around the protean potential of place, even in these challenging times.

“There is no point of departure” is a line that Massey liked to quote from Louis Althusser (1971: 85; Massey 1995c: 351; Featherstone & Painter 2013). For her, it meant that socially-made historical geographies really matter, always and everywhere, and that futures are neither singular nor pre-given. Her own life was a case in point. The product of an “ordinary place” (Massey 2001: 459), a public-housing estate just south of Manchester, Doreen Massey knew where she came from and for that matter, which side she was on. “I’m from the North West [of England] and have lived with, through and kind of in combat with regional inequality [since] my childhood”, Massey once explained (Massey with HGRG 2009: 405). Out of the conformity of postwar Britain, Massey fashioned a transformative trajectory not least, she later reflected, by participating in political movements “in the late 60s and the 70s with the emergence of Marxism, feminism, sexual liberation, being part of the GLC [Greater London Council] in the 1980s, or the kind of stuff that has happened more recently”, from Chavismo in Venezuela to the Occupy movement in London (Ibid: 403, 405; Featherstone et al. 2013: 253, 257).

From her adopted home of Kilburn, in North London, she would sometimes commute to work at the Open University with her longtime friend and collaborator, Stuart Hall.

INTRODUCTION

Doreen Massey was an intellectual powerhouse and feminist inspiration in so many parts of the discipline of geography and to so many people (like us). As a feminist and a Marxist, she refused the unspecified grand narratives of theory, a journey that catalysed the writing of Spatial Divisions of Labour (1984b). In the book, her careful account of the historical and material (re)making of place, and the selection of production sites based on the features of a place, had a major impact on the industrial location literature (cf. Massey 1973). Spatial Divisions of Labour came out in second edition in 1995, and was a foundational text for one author’s (Hyndman) graduate research, facilitating her “conversion” to a PhD in geography.

For the second author (Mountz), Doreen Massey’s writing offered one of her earliest encounters with feminist geography. While she discovered Massey as an undergraduate student, Massey’s geographical thinking about gender drew her into graduate study in geography. As a feminist, Massey critiqued David Harvey and Ed Soja’s influential books (The Condition of Postmodernity and Postmodern Geographies, respectively) for their high theory that subsumed patriarchy to relations of capital, thus enacting “flexible sexism”. The phrase was a reference to – and critique of – the shortcomings of emerging concepts of capitalist restructuring at the time, wedded to the term “flexibility” (e.g. Harvey’s “flexible accumulation”) but indifferent to the centrality of social difference in achieving its effects. In so doing, she reminded economic geographers who might otherwise ignore gender relations that “it is often forgotten to what extent women were the first labour-force of factory based capitalism … it was in the cotton industry around Manchester that the challenge was first laid down” (Massey 1994: 195). She also positioned her work early on as scholarship influenced by political economy, poststructuralism and feminist thinking. In this sense, she was a hybrid, expansive thinker and this was exciting. Her conception of place as produced by and productive of social, cultural, political and of course economic relations is perhaps best known and illustrative of this hybrid conceptual framing.

The debate around the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) continues to be dominated by familiar one-sided positions. On the one hand a direct line can be drawn from Ross Perot’s “giant sucking sound” (New York Times 1992) to Donald Trump’s (2016a) representation of NAFTA as “worst trade deal in history” benefiting Mexico at the expense of the US. Early accounts of NAFTA as a win–win-scenario, on the other hand, are continued today by representations of an ever-deeper global division of labour characterized by interlocking supply chains. Both sides mobilize their trivial geographies: a deeply entrenched methodological nationalism turned political chauvinism and contrasting imaginations of globalization as “the economic equivalent of a force of nature” (Clinton 2000). But the NAFTA debate demonstrates also that the zeitgeist has changed during the last 25 years or so. Tales of economic laws of nature are increasingly eclipsed by a mix of frustration and anger that is predominantly inward-looking and driven by diffuse longings for the good old Fordist times.

Doreen Massey would have been critical of this development, but almost certainly not too surprised. It seems to be increasingly difficult to avoid the impulse to either succumb to a globalizing neoliberal vision or fall back to methodological nationalism. As different as they seem to be, both positions are connected to models of development that are part of the same trajectory of modernization. This is why Bruno Latour has referred to this view as “modernizing the modernization” (Latour 1998: 1). One way to escape this dilemma is to recall Massey’s repeated reminder of the “structured divides, the necessary ruptures and inequalities, the exclusions, on which the successful prosecution of [capitalist modernity] itself depends” (Massey 2005: 84) and her earlier insistence that “globalization of social relations is yet another source of (the reproduction of) geographical uneven development, and thus of the uniqueness of place” (Massey 1991a: 29).

The Mexico–US border has long been a paradigmatic site on which to study these inequalities.

SOME DEFINITIONS AND THEMES

The term ‘regionalism’ is a very inadequate one. Recent discussions in the CSE Working Group, however, failed to come up with anything that was both more accurate and less than a paragraph long. For the purposes of this survey, ‘regionalism’ is taken to refer to the analysis of intra-national spatial differentiation. Its concern is to study the mechanisms by which the process of accumulation generates uneven spatial development, and the effects of such unevenness on the development of a national social formation and particular areas within it. The scale is intra-national in the sense that it is at this level at which the spatial unevenness which is the focus of attention occurs. This does not mean, however, that such differentiation is produced solely by mechanisms defined at the national or intra-national level. Spatial unevenness in the process of accumulation, within a social formation, may just as well be dominantly the product of mechanisms operating at an international scale. The object of study, however, is spatial uneven development and its effects within a national economy. Such effects may occur at any spatial level within the social formation, from inequalities between major regions to patterns of growth and decline of particular cities (1).

The process of accumulation within capitalism continually engenders the desertion of some areas, and the creation there of new reserves of labour-power, the opening up of other areas to new branches of production, and the restructuring of the territorial division of labour and class relations overall. The geographical distribution of population is typically far more than a general tendency to agglomeration superimposed on a “territorial division of labour, which confines special branches of production to special districts of a country” (Capital 1, p.353), as occasionally implied by Marx. Even in those few areas where particular branches of production have entirely dominated the economy, it is not possible simply to assume that such areas will be the same as others equally so dominated. It is more than the branch of production which determines the characteristics of a region.

Like several of human geography’s other luminaries of the past half-century, Doreen Massey had a deep, career-long interest in the question of uneven geographical development. It was always with her, animating her politics as much as her research practice, from the early 1970s through to the early 2010s. Embracing the challenge of understanding uneven geographical development as a concrete abstraction, Massey approached it by way of iteration between theory and particular empirical and political contexts: it was first and foremost uneven development in Britain that exercised her, and her ability to show how her particular conceptualisation of uneven development – which she coined “spatial divisions of labour” – helped explain the consequential particularities of the British case has inspired a generation of economic geographers. Developed in and “of” Britain, the idea of spatial divisions of labour nonetheless could be (and has been) mobilized to illuminate actually-existing economic-geographic realities much further afield. And at its core is the region. Uneven geographical development is, for Massey, a complex, continuous and multi-layered dynamic of regional restructuring. This dynamic is the common thread running through the six chapters in Part 1 of this book.

As ever with original thinkers such as Massey, the stimulus to innovative theorization was a realization that existing approaches to understanding the object of interest – in her case, pronounced intra-national spatial variegation in economic processes and outcomes – were simply not up to the task. Most obviously this was true, in Massey’s view, of the prevailing economic orthodoxy, neoclassicism, the paradigmatic dominance of which was to be seriously challenged by the modestly titled “Towards a critique of industrial location theory” (Chapter 2). But, significantly, she also thought it was true of the array of heterodox economic approaches that were in circulation during that period – the 1970s – when she began to explore uneven development and to develop her own unique approach to its conceptualization, a process that began in an appropriately grounded way in “Regionalism: some current issues” (Chapter 5; see also Chapter 14).

As Massey saw it, the principal cause of the inadequacy of these various approaches was their weak or simply flawed conceptualization of space. If, as she would later famously insist, geography matters, then neither neoclassicism nor existing heterodoxies adequately showed how or why.

The miners’ strike seems to epitomize those aspects of the labour movement and class politics that certain interpreters have found ‘old fashioned’, sectional and, by implication, bankrupt. Male manual workers, the old working class with a vengeance, fighting to save jobs in what is officially described as a declining industry, stateowned and located in isolated declining regions. And yet around this struggle a massive support movement has grown up – almost unreported – with as broad a social and geographical base as any post-war radical political movement.

THE COALFIELDS

The social structure of the mining communities reflects the industry which is their livelihood: lack of white-collar jobs, their proletarian nature, the overwhelming dominance of male, manual labour. The regions are distinctive in other ways too. They are predominantly white; they are socially conservative; traditional sexual divisions of labour – woman as homemaker, man as bread-winner – have been deeply ingrained and only recently begun to break down.

Their politics have been workplace-based. They are the fiefdoms of one of the most important unions in labour movement history, symbolizing – at least for men – the old strengths of a solidarity born of mutual dependence at work, and the reliance of a whole community on a single industry. The themes of discipline and collectivism run deep and strong in the political atmosphere. These are regions owned, regulated, fed and watered by the central state. The industry is nationalized, high proportions of the inhabitants live on state subsidies, and for an alternative to work in the pit they appeal to state regional policy. They have voted Labour for years, through thick and (mainly) thin. And the local state, for ages too, has been in the hands of the Labour Party right wing. They are the heartlands of labourism. What this means is that the strike is taking place in some of the most self-enclosed and socially homogeneous regions of the country. And indeed that geography is part of the rationale and the character of the strike. The one-to-one relationship between community and coal, at least for male employment, has been one of the bases of its solidarity.

When you’ve known someone for a long time it’s hard to separate the person from their work. And in Doreen’s case it would be unfair too, because her influence extended beyond her writing to her way of being – as an academic, an activist and a person. From a working-class background, she grew up during the exceptional decades of growth and increasing equality that followed the Second World War. Like many others, she celebrated the end of deference; she showed that one could be excellent without being elitist, and profound without being pompous or obscure. There was nothing incongruous in laughing at a silly joke one moment (often a Pythonesque send-up of academia) and being completely serious the next; in fact this was the way to work and live. Round about 1989, Doreen and I and Open University colleague John Allen formed our own discussion group – “The Brighton Pier Social Theory Group” – that met several times in Brighton, and once in Copenhagen. The ingredients of the meetings were social and spatial theory, ontology, coffee and pastries, and irreverent laughter, combined in any order. While being with her could be fun, she could also be scarily intense, with a formidable ability to encapsulate the complex briefly and to zero in on the weakness of others’ ideas, so you often felt you needed to be on your toes when you were with her. She had an insatiable appetite for learning, for writing, for engaging in politics, and getting the most out of life. While her championing of the importance of space linked her firmly to geography, she was also a post-disciplinary thinker whose work defied identification with any single - ism, and she was exceptionally widely read. Whether the subject was space, politics, social theory, Marx, feminism, Bergson, geology, or bird watching – all were approached with her inimitable relish.

Her range of interests was wide, but she always strove to find connections, relations among things. Hence her overtures to physical geography (Massey 1999g). She used to carry a geology map of the UK with her in her travels so she could check out the underlying rocks wherever she was.

My overriding concern in this address is with how we might (in this day and age, and in the context of the debates in which we are currently engaged and the challenges which we face) think about space/spatiality. ‘Space’ is one of those most obvious of things which is mobilised as a term in a thousand different contexts, but whose potential meanings are all too rarely explicated or addressed. As Grossberg has written:

My particular interest […] is to explore the connections between this question of how to conceptualise space on the one hand, and, on the other hand, first how social science theorising is conducted, and second how both these things are related to what appear to be significant current shifts in political philosophy and political thinking more generally. The connection to theorising in the social sciences (the challenge of spatialising social theory) is taken up in the paper: ‘Imagining globalisation: power-geometries of space-time’ (Massey 1999a). The relationship to shifts in approaches to politics is the central focus of this current paper.

THREE PROPOSITIONS

To initiate the argument, then, the following are three propositions about how space could be conceptualised:

• i. space is a product of interrelations. It is constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny. This is a proposition which will come as no surprise at all to those who have been reading the recent Anglophone literature!;

• ii. space is the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity: it is the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; it is the sphere of the possibility of the existence of more than one voice. Without space, no multiplicity: without multiplicity, no space. If space is indeed the product of interrelations, then it must be predicated upon the existence of plurality. Multiplicity and space are co-constitutive;

• iii. finally, and precisely because space is the product of relation-between, relations which are necessarily embedded material practices which have to be carried out, it is always in a process of becoming; it is always being made. It is never finished; never closed.

In the 1980s and 1990s, academics increasingly turned to space as an explanatory concept. In cultural studies and political philosophy, space was mobilized primarily as a metaphor to aid in conceptualizing the “posts” of poststructuralism and postmodernism, while the social sciences repurposed space to make globalization tractable. As Henri Lefebvre observed, space was at once conspicuously absent and on every page of much social theory. But for Massey, the crux of the problem was not that the idea of space being circulated was vague. Rather, the problem was that the term was utilized to indicate a sphere of closure, of stasis, and, fundamentally, an absence of politics. Over numerous publications, Massey detailed the stakes involved in perpetuating this theoretical blind spot and offered a positive and dynamic theory of space instead. She argued that space was the product of relations and multiplicity; space was thus the condition for imagining a future not already foretold by the dominant temporal frames of modernism (i.e., progress, development, ‘the West’). Central to Massey’s theory of space was the problematic of hierarchical dualisms. Space and time were framed in Western thought in ways not only analogical to other central dualisms (man/woman, culture/nature, reason/emotion, etc), but also in combination with them; it was these combinations, of economic inequality with racial oppression, for example, that produced spatial relations of domination and subordination. Massey thus insisted upon an understanding of space that was shot through with the symbolic and material conditions of exclusion and oppression, on the one hand, and the potential of forging “relations otherwise,” on the other.

The essays in this section offer the reader a view of the arc of Massey’s thought on space as a relationship of power. Her approach to space developed first and foremost in the wake of the radical turn in geography of the 1970s. During that decade, the discipline was upended by a rejection of the quantitative revolution and an embrace of social constructivist approaches to spatial forms. The implications of this epistemic shift were profound: rather than search for spatial causes of observed spatial patterns, radical geographers, influenced by the work of Marx, instead identified generalizable spatial dynamics of capitalist restructuring.