Relative/Relational Space

In contrast to absolute space, which is fixed, asocial, and timeless, relative or relational space reflects the wide varieties of ways in which distance is measured and conquered, that is, space as socially made and remade over time. Relative space thus portrays geographies as fluid, mutable, and ever changing. (Some observers differentiate relative from relational space, while others treat them as synonymous; see quote by Harvey below.)

The genesis of relative space may arguably be traced to the famed 17th-century intellectual Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton's great rival in the invention of calculus and the founder of a perspective on spatiality sharply at odds with the prevailing Euclidean/Cartesian emphasis on absolute space. In contrast to Newton, who held that space exists independently of how it is measured or what it contains, Leibniz held that time and space are relative, that is, comprehensible only with reference to specific frames of interpretation. Distance, for example, may be understood only through appeal to the space between two or more objects situated in space. Relative space, however, remained subordinate to absolute space [Page 2403]for many years, at least until the massive changes of the Industrial Revolution reworked the meaning of spatiality itself.

Marxism, too, offered a surprisingly early vision of relative space, tying it to the historical process by which capitalism reached out and conquered new spaces, enveloping them within ever-broader spatial divisions of labor. Marx (1973) argued in the Grundrisse that

David Harvey's extension of Marxist analysis into geography, which drew on the influential works of Henri Lefebvre and initiated a simultaneous spatialization of Marxism, linked the construction and reconstruction of relative space to the endless search for ever-greater profits and outlets for surplus value. The need to “annihilate space by time” is thus fundamental to the operation and survival of capitalism on an ongoing basis, that is, its ability to reproduce itself at ever-expanded spatial scales and to accelerate temporal rhythms of capital accumulation. Harvey (2006b) offers useful definitions of absolute, relative, and relational space: