Harvey

Harvey, D. 1996. “From Space to Place and Back Again”, in: Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. London: Blackwell.

Harvey’s interest is to show how contemporary capitalism is producing georgraphies of difference, and to look at these differences as not only results of unequal social relations but also as constituting them. The difference he is pointing to includes the way nature and its appropriation is shaped as a locus of difference. In this chapter he concentrates in defining place agains more general theory of space, time and environment. If space is socially produced, places are unstable locus that “had to be secured against the uncontrolled vectors of spatiality” (p 292). In this place can be understood both as a position “within a map of space-time constituted within some social process”, as well as a “permanence” within the space-time flow, and that transforms this flow. This tension can be thought in relation to the fixity of places produced by capitlist expansion and flows of capital circulation, what we can regard as a political economy of capitalists production of place. “Difference and otherness are produced in space through the simple logic of uneven capital investment, a proliferating geographical division of labour, an increasing segmentation of reproductive activities and the rise of spatially ordered (often segregated) social distinctions.” (295). However this process is not uniformly shaped but rather generated within a series of tensions, the major of which is the tension between place bounded investments of capital and the spatial mobility of capital, which generates a constant spatial reorganization. Some of the processes linked to this are the transformation of time-space in relation to speeding in the mobility f capital, isolation as “protectionist” strategy against this flows, competition for capital among different places, overinvestment in place has made it more difficult to now find “profitable locations.” These movements of capital are not passively accepted by people, but result from a combination of cooptation and coersion of capital. He understands this tension as the cause for a strong emergence of place as a problem for social sciences, in this many works search for “roots” and reinforcing the “dwelling” as ways to reassure a lost sense of identity and reestablishes connection with a world in motion from which people have been dispossessed. Also environmental movements represent an opposition to the capitalistic place construction, as it proposes to produce knowledge of the particularities of a place and that place formation, along an unmediated sensuous interaction of body and world in an ecological sensitivity, as a way of un-alienated interaction with enviros, but it does not regard that this within commodity fetishism (consuming landscapes as sensuous as a chocolate?) which ends up fetishizing the body. It also does this by a re-sacralization of place a search for a genius Loci as a determinate identity of place, but this rises the question of whose identity we are representing and whether this loci represents the inevitable conflict or rather erases it. This is a process also happening in the shaping of a “community” as a localized entity, which can be both used as a way of creating docile bodies for power exploitation, and revolutionary forces with deep transformative potential in other extreme case. The tension between a Marxist analysis of production and heidegger emphasis in dwelling, shares an interest in “production as a privileged moment of sensual engagement with the world” with Marx. For Marx politics of exploitation and fetishism are place based, as for Heidegger place based experience is an escape form capitalist relations, ultimately Marx’s critique is that sensuous experience is in capitalism inside fetishistic relations. This is pointing to the fact that in capitalism there is an ongoing tension between sensuous and social relations in place [yes this is what Lefebvre is pointing to], thus place is dependent of the relations of space likewise space is dependent on the network of relations going on in place. Everyone who moves to establish difference contemporarily has to engage in social practices that mediate the power of capital, thus cultural politics and political economy are intertwined processes of place production. But to consider that places within themselves have power is a to fall in a misleading fetishism, that reproduces the logic of the construction of secure places as a production or resistance to power. In all cases places are understood within “heterogeneous mental maps of the world each of which can be invested with all manner of personal and collective hopes and fears” (321), thus place making is as symbolic as it is a result of material practices. Likewise place base social movements though are good in fighting for the control over place, they easily slide into “parochial politics” which are easily rearticulated by capitalist accumulation, which manages fragmented universal space.
Conlcusion: Places as social constructs, have to be understood as such. “There are ways to provide a materialist history of this literal and metaphorical geography of the human condition and to do it so as to shed light on the production of historical-geographical difference. An understanding of that process makes it possible to ground a critique of both the chimerical ideals of an isolationist communitarian politics and the inevitable insensitivities of any kind of universal emancipatory politics.” (325) In this it has to be considered that to represent “other” places as stereotypically different is a first step into the production of exclusion and a self-definition. How to rethink place is of course of political relevance, but we cannot do this by disinvesting them form space and spatial struggles . Rereading the historical production of spatial difference is a “crucial preliminary step towards emancipating the possibilities for futue place construction. And liberating places –materially, symbolically and metaphorically- is an inevitable part of any progressive socio-ecological politics.” (326)

Critique: Though Harve is in a way mirroring the homogeneization of space under capitalism he kind of falls into the trap of not offering a model to think of difference outside capitalism. There is a tension between difference created by economic flows and other lines of difference which are implicated but not just effects of political economy. In this if place based identities have potential for deeply transformative movements it is not so clear how this shift outside capitalism can be made when capitalism appears as such a uniform, unmediated and universal force. All this does not mean that Harvey does not make a contribution into thinking the newness in a broad sense of capital spatial reconfiguration, his analysis would needs to be refined to be more specific, for instance take into account the difference of spacial fragmentation and competition for resources in "central" and "peripheral" regions (o west and others) and the way difference in terms of a capitaist but also against a western -bourgeoisie- statal model is not just any form of unequal distribution of capital and cultural meanings but one generating a series o intertwined forms of power .