Massey, Doreen (1944–)

One of contemporary geography's leading theoreticians, Doreen Massey has made numerous pioneering inroads in the analysis of space and place, including gender relations, globalization, and the nature of places. Massey is simultaneously an influential scholar in geographic thought; urban, economic, and political geography; feminism; and Third World development.

Born in Manchester and educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Oxford, Massey began her career at a London think tank, the Centre for Environmental Studies, from 1968 to 1980. In 1982, she became a professor at the Open University. She cofounded and edits Soundings, a journal of politics and culture. In 1982, she became a fellow of the British Academy, and in 1998, she was awarded the Prix Vautrin Lud (the “Nobel Prize of geography”). In addition to academic work, she is also a social activist and has also conducted extensive fieldwork in Nicaragua, Venezuela, and South Africa.

Much of her early work concerned the dynamics and implications of industrial restructuring and deindustrialization, particularly in peripheral places that attracted only industrial branch plants. British studies of deindustrialization indicated how it occurred differently in different places, with significant variations in the impacts. More broadly, no social process unfolds in the same way in different places. Spatial Divisions of Labor, which Massey published in 1984, was a critical book in the rejuvenation of economic geography. Massey examined changes in the spatial division of labor in Britain, unveiling how different localities experienced different “waves” of investment that powerfully shaped the local landscape, labor markets, gender relations, and [Page 1867]cultures. Over time, each region played different roles in the ever-changing national (and, increasingly, global) market. As successive “waves” were superimposed on one another, each region came to have a unique historical trajectory reflected in how various “rounds of production” were sedi-mented into the landscape. The resulting palimpsests both revitalized an older idea from cultural geography and allowed geography to accept local uniqueness in analytically rigorous terms by embedding local areas within broader notions of uneven spatial development. This line of thought led Massey's contributions to play a major role in the revitalization of regional geography in the 1980s and 1990s. In this reading, space and place are not passive recipients of social change but actively contribute to their making.

Massey is also well known for her work on gender and feminist geographies. Space, Place, and Gender, published in 1994, broke new ground in pointing out the ways in which gender relations are spatially constructed. Broadly, she demonstrated how the home and social reproduction in general were as critical for capitalist accumulation as the workplace. For example, an influential essay titled “A Woman's Place?” examined how changes in the British spatial division of labor reconfigured relations at home, leading at times to local patriarchal family structures and at times ones with relatively equalized gender roles.

Massey's work on place was extended via poststructuralist theory into a notion of power geometries and relational space that called attention to the intertwined scales of the global, national, and local, refusing to see these as a simple hierarchy in which the global determines the local. Massey criticizes notions that maintain place as an island of stability in the constantly shifting oceans of capitalist change. Rather, she promotes a progressive sense of place that links places to other places, a view in which places constantly change, producing and receiving changes through their interactions with one another. A relational politics of place calls into question easy distinctions such as inside/outside, near/far, space/place, and global/local, artificial differentiations that are always embedded in each other and mutually constituted. In For Space, published in 2005, she argues passionately that Cartesian conceptions of space as a passive surface inevitably de-emphasize the temporal flux that is always an inherent part of geographies and simultaneously create a false dichotomy between the local and the global. As an alternative, she suggests three maxims: (1) that space be seen as the product of interrelations, that is, of embedded social practices in which identities and human ties are co-constituted; (2) that space be understood as the sphere of multiple possibilities, that is, as a contingent simultaneity of heterogeneous historical trajectories; and (3) that space must be conceived as always under construction, in the process of forever being made, implying a continual openness to the future. Her latest book, World City, which appeared in 2007, undermines the notion that London and New York dominate the world's financial markets; rather, all places are complicit in this process, and the volume asks readers to consider their role in producing and maintaining global geographies of responsibilities.

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