Time–Space Compression

If geography is the study of how humans are stretched over the earth's surface, a vital part of that process is how we know and feel about space and time. Although space and time appear as “natural” and outside of society, they are in fact social constructions; every society develops different ways of dealing with and perceiving them. For example, how people experience time and space in a nomadic herding society is very different from how they do so in an advanced producer services economy. Thus, time and space are socially created, plastic, mutable institutions that profoundly shape individual perceptions and social relations. Sociologist Anthony Giddens used the term distanciation to describe how societies are stretched over time and space. Because the economy cannot be detached from other realms of social life, time–space compression is more than simply an economic phenomenon. By changing the time–space prisms of daily life—how people use their time and space, the constraints they face, and the meanings they attach to them—time–space compression is simultaneously cultural, social, political, and psychological in nature. This issue elevates the analytical significance of relative space, in which distances are measured through changing metrics of time and cost, above that of absolute space, the traditional Cartesian form that characterized most Enlightenment forms of geography.

Time–space compression is as old as human civilization itself. Early changes in transportation technology such as the wheel and keel, for example, were instrumental in the development of centralized empires. Many cultures (e.g., the Romans) developed road or canal networks to shuttle people and goods between places. The Mongols and Incas created messenger systems using riders on horseback and runners, respectively. The rise of capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution in particular, generated enormous improvements in transportation and communications that significantly reduced travel times between places. For example, the travel time between Edinburgh and London, a distance of 640 kilometers, was roughly 20,000 minutes by stagecoach in 1658. By the 1850s, with the arrival of the steam locomotive, travel time had been reduced by 96% to 800 minutes. By 1988, the rail journey between Edinburgh and London took 275 minutes. When the line was electrified in 1995, travel time was reduced to less than 180 minutes. By airplane, it takes less than 60 minutes today (Figure 1). Thus, although the absolute distance between the two cities remained the same, the relative distance was reduced by 1,940 minutes over 350 years—or roughly 5 minutes per year. [Page 492]

Figure 1 Falling Travel Times Between Edinburgh and London, 1658–1950

Redrawn from Janelle, D.(1969). Spatial reorganization: A model and concept. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 59348–365. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Reprinted with permission of Blackwell Publishing.

Air transportation provides spectacular examples of time–space convergence. During the 1930s, it took a plane between 15 and 17 hours to fly the United States from coast to coast, whereas modern jets now cross the country in roughly 5 hours. In 1934, planes took 12 days to fly between London and Brisbane, Australia, whereas today the Boeing 747 is capable of flying any commercially practicable route nonstop. The result is that any place on the earth is within 24 hours of any other place using the most direct route.

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