Week 5 6 October 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 GEOG 3300 Space, Place & Scale Week 5 Geographies of Production.

Week 56 October 2011

GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & ScaleCopyright © Amy Lavender Harris

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GEOG 3300Space, Place & Scale

Week 5Geographies of Production and Consumption

Department of GeographyFaculty of Liberal Arts & Professional

StudiesYork University

Fall Term 2011-2012

Week 424 January 2008

GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & ScaleCopyright © Amy Lavender Harris, 2008

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Approach Associated Schools

Preoccupations with Place

Descriptive

-Regional Geography (Richard Hartshorne)-Early cultural geographers (Carl Sauer)-Spatial Science (1970s)

-‘ideographic’-‘chorology’-Regions and cultures-Place as a thing: ontologically given-Environmental determinism (although Sauer held that culture transforms nature)-‘Place’ remains largely undefined

Phenomenological

Phenomenology (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard)-Humanistic geographers (Yi-Fu Tuan, Anne Buttimer, David Seamon, Ted Relph, Edward Casey)

-experienced, ‘embodied’ or lived place--’topophilia’ (Tuan)-Home and dwelling-belonging and attachment-‘authenticity’Place as primordial or Place as “mutually constituted” by environment and culture-‘romantic’? Naïve?

Social Constructionist

1. Postcolonial Approaches (race and culture): Said, Bhabha2. Feminism and Embodied approaches (gender, corporeality): Gillian Rose, Doreen Massey3. Marxism (class): David Harvey, Lefebvre

--poststructuraliand postmodern perspectives-Social determinism: places as socially constructed-Spatial ‘turn’ in the cultural and social sciences-Class, gender and race-Transgression and resistance; power and privilege-Postcolonial legacies-‘ungrounded? Incoherent?-What happens to ontology?



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Film (selected scenes) Modern Times (1936)

Spaces of Production

• Workplaces: a factory, and office, a retail store• Universities: “factories of learning”• Housing: public housing, residential suburbs?• Airports• Farms• Movie theatres, theme parks?• Shopping malls• Prisons• Other spaces of production?



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The Production of Space

• “We inhabit the space-time of capital.” (Gidwani & Chari, 2004)

• Cities and historical materialism• Industrial capitalism (from a Marxist perspective) operates

through circuits of capital. Surplus value (profit) is extracted from workers. The logic: material inputs are not particularly flexible (and therefore can produce only a fixed amount of profit), but workers are remarkably flexible.

• Surplus value is also extracted from space: the labour process is also a spatial process.

• David Harvey describes capital as “value in motion.” In other words, it travels through phases in the circuits of capital and also through physical space.

• As capital travels across space and time, it transforms those spaces and is transformed by them.

• In this sense, spaces may be said to be socially produced (Lefebvre)



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Henri Lefebvre

• In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre writes of contemporary cities that “everything here resembles everything else” and adds that “repetition has everywhere defeated uniqueness, that the artificial and contrived have driven all spontaneity and naturalness from the field, and, in short, that products have replaced works. Repetitious spaces are the outcome of repetitive gestures.”

• He asks, “Are these spaces interchangeable because they are homologous? Or are they homologous so that they can be exchanged, bought and sold …?”

• Lefebvre adds that spaces have been reduced to the visual, to spaces of spectacle, to images.

• In summary, contemporary spaces were produced initially through a dialectic between ‘work’ and ‘product’ and ultimately are produced through production alone.

David Harvey on Cities

• [von Thunen’s land rent theory; Chicago School on cities]• Emphasis on structural conditions that produce city spaces

– contemporary cities are not only products of capitalism but are built to facilitate the circulation of capital.

• Harvey on class conflict/domination, urban pathology, banality

• Churches vs corporate headquarters; gentrification.• Urban renewal; slum clearance – 1960s-1970s and now• Movement (shifting) of capital from one circuit to another

– infrastructure; roads; bridges; sports stadiums• Globalization (shift of manufacturing to low wage regions)



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The Space-time of 19th Century Paris

• Until the mid 19th century, Paris resembled many other medieval cities: dense, circuitous streets, chaotic districts, craft manufacturing

• Baron Haussmann’s ‘modernization’ of nineteenth century Paris under Napoleon

• New infrastructure and beautiful boulevards – but also mass displacement of the poor, higher rents, gentrification and the quashing of public protest.

• Baudelaire (poet) – the flaneur; alienation• Now: Harvey on “creative destruction” and the

annihilation of space by time• The obsolescence of industrial cities – rust belts,

‘global’ cities; also, cities built for the private (not public) good



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Source: http://plans.paris.online.fr/gallica/paris-hst1.html



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Photo by Charles Marville



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Source: Wikimedia Commons



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Spatial Dimensions of Alienation

In The Tyranny of Work, political scientist James Rinehart identifies five aspects of alienated labour grounded in Marx’s critique of capitalism. These dimensions can be mapped spatially as well:Dimension of Alienated Labour (Rinehart, after

Marx)Spatial Dimensions (Amy, after an idea)

1. The estrangement of working people from the products of their labour

-Who built the house you live in? Who designed your city? What control do you have over municipal finances are spent? Where do your property taxes go?-Globalization? -Regulation of public and private?

2. The estrangement of workers from the work process itself (no control over how work is done)

Cities designed to facilitate production and consumption rather than livability. Manifestations include zoning regulations, urban sprawl, highways cutting through residential areas.

3. Self-estrangement (work as a means of survival rather than a higher-order source of identity)

Rush-hour gridlock, transit misery, long commutes

4. The estrangement of human beings from their own essence (as people who conceive, plan, and engage in their work)

We become consumers moving ceaselessly from one spectacle or shopping centre to the next.

5. Estrangement of individuals from one another Isolation from neighbours; socio-economic ghettos



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Responses to Alienation?

• Passivity, complacency, consumption, spectacle• Class divisions• “hegemony of the bourgeoisie (Lefebvre, 59)

Or

• Anything that resists or transgresses spatial alienation

• Occupations, strikes, demonstrations• Class solidarity/struggle• Psychogeography? Play?

How do these manifest spatially?



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Situationist Space (Debord)

• Psychogeography and “the hypothesis of psychogeographical turntables.” (think railway roundhouses) and “spontaneous inclinations of orientation”

• Debord’s “theory of the derive” -? “drift”• Space as discourse• A challenge to abstract space / “representations of space”

and a return to “representational space” (as lived) after Lefebvre

• Maps, cities, spaces as narratives, as playful spaces, as sites of discovery, transgression, resistance, even revolution

• Psychogeography helps through the “laying bare” of the social body: hence “Naked City” (see image, next slide)

• Collage and bricolage, fragments• By rupturing the map’s conventions, what else is ruptured?

Hegemony? Relations of production? Public/private distinctions? Time-space continuums?



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Space and Spectacle(Guy Debord)

• Capitalist production and the “banalization” of space• The destruction of the autonomy and quality of places:

homogenization• Geographical distance is eliminated (think global

circuits of capital, flexible accumulation, networked communications)

• As consumers, we are all ‘tourists’ and encounter spaces with “the leisure of going to see what has become banal.”

• ‘Urbanism’ is the ultimate expression of the banalization of space

• But despite the homogenization of space, capitalism reproduces what Debord calls “spectacular separation”



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Space and Spectacle (continued)

• Urbanization reinforces class power and ‘atomizes’ (separates) workers through “sprawling isolation”.

• But we are “isolated together” in “factories and halls of culture, tourist resorts and housing developments” and “right into the family cell.”

• Television, urban sprawl, the “dictatorship of the automobile”, shopping centres and “temples of frenzied consumption” are the mechanisms of this “spectacular separation”.

• As Debord writes, the city consumes itself.• Urban and rural (“town and country”) are both

destroyed and replaced with a “pseudo-countryside” inhabited by a new “artificial peasantry”



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Source: Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Markham-suburbs.id.jpg.jpg



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Debord’s call to arms

• “Proletarian revolution is the critique of human geography through which individuals and communities have to create places and events suitable for the appropriation, no longer just of their labour, but of their total history.” (paragraph 178)

• In practice this might entail: various forms of transgression, resistance, occupation, re-appropriation, revolution.



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Is a Situationist Response Sufficient?

• Is Debord’s psychogeography too playful, too masculine, too white, too bourgeois, too naïve?

• Does it trivialize alienation?• Is it sufficiently ‘revolutionary’?• Is it too revolutionary?• Is capitalism/production the only or most

significant feature of contemporary space? (in other words, do we accept Lefebvre uncritically?)

• Can we truly rewrite our experiences and understandings of space?



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Can we connect Marxist and other conceptions of space?

• Lefebvre, Marx, and … phenomenology? • In “The Question Concerning Technology”, Martin

Heidegger despairs that techne (the bringing forth of the true into the beautiful) is reduced to technology in a regime where everything – nature, humanity, being – is reduced to “standing reserve”.

• The “saving power” of unconcealment• Dwelling? (that which “saves” and lets unfold)

• Heidegger (and Yi-Fu Tuan) are accused of romanticized, naïve views of space/place. But are Marxist perspectives on space too dogmatic, too rigid, too imperative, too materialist?

Week 5 6 October 2011 GEOG 3300 | Space, Place & Scale Copyright © Amy Lavender Harris 1 GEOG 3300 Space, Place & Scale Week 5 Geographies of Production.

Documents

place scale week

production of space

cultures place

nature place

physical space

produced lefebvre slide

circuits of capital

capital travels