Space1

Professor Nigel Thrift

[Word Count: 12452 words without references]

Abstract: There are many shades and intensities of space. I begin with the most
obvious: how we know where we are. I then transit to how we experience space as
a sensory realm: how we feel where we are. Subsequently, I consider how the
where and the how are being transformed as we move into a period in which our
infrastructures are being inscribed on the planet as a new era known as the
Anthropocene. Then, in the last two sections, I consider how space is stabilized
and parceled out as though it were ours to own by the forces of the state and the
economy.

Main Text

“Every day is a journey and the journey itself is home” (from Matsuo Bashō, Oku
no Hosomichi, 1694)

We live in a world that is fundamentally diverse, a world of innumerable complexity,

with billions of human inhabitants, animals, plants, objects. Such a world cannot be
reduced to one or even a few things, and that is why geography exists. Geography
doesn’t just document the diversity and richness of the world. It doesn’t just celebrate
it. It is about difference and what that means. It is about the connections in each moment
that lead to change. Because things exist in space and as space, they do not – indeed,
they cannot – stay the same. They move. They spread. They stumble. They stutter. They
fracture and they corrugate. They widen their contacts. They multiply discrepancies.
They do all kinds of things that would be impossible if all that we looked at was time,
a dimension which is often wrongly depicted as though it were somehow of greater
significance than space.

And that world’s diversity and richness is stunning in both its scale and extent. Take
the total mass weight of living things on the planet - the weight of life itself. It is
reckoned to be 1.7 trillion tonnes, excluding bacteria. The overwhelming majority of
this quantity is plant life – probably about 99 per cent. The total human mass is about
350 million tonnes. Cows add in another 520 million tonnes. There are about 4200
million tonnes of fish and 2700 million tonnes of ants. Then bacteria weigh in at nearly
the same as all other living things put together, at about 1.3 trillion tonnes (D’Efillipo
and Ball 2013).

Now, take in the fact that there are estimated to be somewhere between 5 and 100
million different species of plants and animals that currently exist (with most experts
fixing on around 8 to 30 million), many of which still remain to be described and
archived (Maro, Tittensor, Adl, Simpson and Worm 2011).

Now, put all of this biomass and all of these species together in a vast network of
different locations where they are mixed together as different ecologies which require

1
Thrift, Nigel. (2018). 'Space', preprint of article in Richardson, D. et al (eds.) (2017) International
Encyclopedia of Geography. People, the Earth, Environment and Technology. New York, Wiley.

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different kinds of interdependence, ecologies which are themselves vital actors since
through them new pressures to adapt and new combinations of life can come into
existence, not least because all of the evidence suggests that these ecologies evolve
towards more and more complexity.

Now stir human beings into the mix. They have had an enormous impact on the Earth’s
surface, as geographers have known for a long time. We live in what is now called the
Anthropocene: a permanent alteration of the geological record resulting from the
actions of human beings. Climate change is perhaps the most obvious example of that
impact. Climate change has been written about in many ways but still the most
extraordinary figure I can muster up is that our global civilization is powered by around
13 terawatts of human-made energy. To give some points of comparison: the flux of
energy from the center of the earth is about 40 terawatts; the primary production of the
biosphere via photosynthesis is 130 terawatts; and, the Earth receives 170000 terawatts
from the Sun (Morton 2009). The point is that human beings already act as an energy
source that begins to compare with the energy generated by plate tectonics. But human
impact on the Earth has been expressed in many other ways too. I will mention just two
of them.

Most particularly, human beings make objects: buildings, tools, machines, and all
manner of general bric-a-brac. By one estimate an average human being will come
across something like 20000 different objects in their lifetime. These objects now
inhabit the world with us – as part of us. Then, human beings move things around – and
around. Objects, of course. But also plants and animals. Now plants and animals can
mix quite well without our help. Indeed, recent scientific studies suggest that epic
journeys by plants and animals - so-called long-distance dispersal - may well have been
a norm of life and a key driver in evolution: plant seeds were carried in the plumage of
ocean-going birds, frogs and mammals as large as monkeys were cast this way and that
by driftwood and icebergs, tiny spiders drifted hither and thither on storm winds, and
so on. These journeys may have been flukes but their consequences were not (de
Queiroz 2014).

All that said, it is clear that human beings have redistributed a large part of the Earth’s
flora and fauna, sometimes gradually, sometimes through ecological blitzkriegs. They
have reassembled large parts of the biosphere in ways which challenge the whole idea
of ‘native’ species (Thompson 2014). Thus, the photosynthetic machines we call plants
have regularly swapped countries and continents. For example, Britain only had 35
native tree species a few thousand years ago but many hundreds of others have now
been added to the roster. Animals have been even more spatially promiscuous. Take
the humble rat. The rat has travelled with human beings wherever they have journeyed
on the Earth’s surface. Indeed, so numerous and well-adapted to almost any conditions
are these fellow travelers that they might well claim to be the main beneficiaries of
human evolution (Zalasiewicz 2009). The Pacific rat (rattus exulans) has travelled all
around the Pacific but its travels have been as nothing compared with the Norway rat
(rattus norvegicus), actually from China originally, which has become common almost
everywhere, and especially in large cities like New York. Or take the starling,
introduced to North America by a Bronx pharmacist intent on bringing to New York
every bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare and now the continent’s most
numerous avian population. Or take that living fossil and geographical adventurer, the
ubiquitous cockroach. The average New Yorker is most likely to encounter the German

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cockroach, which probably originated in Southeast Asia, whilst the “American”
cockroach is actually a native of Africa. And so it goes on.

But it doesn’t end there. We still don’t know a lot of what is in the world. Though the
first age of exploration of the Earth may have ceased, we are now engaged in a second
round. But this one depends on exploring our own social and technical creations as well,
creations that we have made but which are not entirely within our control, some of
which, indeed, could produce Doomsday in one way or another. These creations only
underline that things never just add up in this world, they combine and multiply. There
isn’t anything (including us) that is just one thing. There are no essences, just passages,
as Bashō says. A new age of contingent mapping beckons, a mapping of “us” where
what we are is no longer either certain or restricted to what we used to regard as the
human: the individual human body and “mind”. In a sense, we are all geographers now
trying to make sense of fragmented and therefore partial spaces in which everything is
a part of something else - while also trying to cope with all of the problems the planet
needs to resolve. To paraphrase the philosopher Wittgenstein, we must build the boat
that is supposed to carry us while we are already swimming in the water.

And finally, there is no reason to think that we are it, that human beings are the end
point. We might keep our grip forever and go on to conquer the universe or we might
be the equally temporary equivalent of the formerly ubiquitous but now extinguished
North American passenger pigeon to which we bear quite a few similarities, not least
the fact that we too have descended on the Earth like a plague of locusts. We might end
up like a phantom limb, remembered still but lost from the body of history - and
geography – like the elephants we are so busily and criminally slaughtering. After all,
let’s just remember our place in the scheme of things: ‘take away humans and the
present world will … function quite happily as it did two hundred thousand years ago.
Take away worms and insects, and things would start seriously to fall apart. Take away
bacteria … and the viruses and the world would die’ (Zalasiewicz 2009, 192).

Knowing Where We Are in Space

Maps are important to geographers because geographers tend to think about the world
as terrain to be crossed. Space is hard work. It has to be travelled. It has to be journeyed.
It has to be molded. It has to be experienced. It has to be gripped in some way, even if
that is with the lightest of touches. History is littered with examples of expeditions
getting lost in space and grand navigational blunders leading to nautical and
aeronautical disasters. But we don’t need to opt for such grandiose instances of spatial
delinquency. People still get lost, even now in a world where technology seems to offer
a permanent locational crutch, while many people simply fail to return home from their
journey. Even today, journeying remains a stressful proposition, one which is, in many
parts of the world, time-consuming and in many countries a major cause of death. For
example, about 1.2 million people die on the roads each year globally – they do not
arrive at their destination - but certain countries are far more dangerous to travel in than
others: whereas countries like Great Britain have an annual death rate of 2.75 per
100000 inhabitants, others, like Venezuela, are up in the thirties.

One of the first things human beings needed to know is where they were and where
they were going. And as people began to make longer and longer journeys, the problems
of fixing location and wayfinding became correspondingly greater. There are a lot of

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ways of knowing where is where and many of these do not require all the paraphernalia
we have come to regard as imperative for finding that out. In the past, sophisticated
means of wayfinding existed without any recourse to the battery of devices we now
regard as a normal part of everyday life. Take the example of the sea. People sailed
long distances without charts or any but the most basic of instruments by means of
simple but effective techniques like sun and star sightings, as well as by learning the
habits of wind and water. These skills could be found equally amongst Inuit or
Polynesian or Norse or Medieval navigators, although their exact use varied. Such skills
could be extraordinarily sophisticated and lead to the ability to travel long distances
with relative accuracy. For example, many Pacific Islanders used the rising and setting
stars and a mental system which allowed them to think of their boat as static and the
world as moving relative to the boat, as well as other maritime information like ocean
swells caused by islands. But as navigation improved and became susceptible to
measurement and calculation, so it became possible to take both the old and newly
discovered navigational knowledge and insert it into devices and machines. A whole
history of these almost forgotten devices and machines exists, remarkable in its
diversity, devices and machines which peppered the historical record as navigators
attempted to work out basic problems like the position of the sun and stars, elapsed time
and, of course, longitude: rudimentary compasses, logs, sandglasses, cross-staffs and
back-staffs, quadrants and sextants, watches and chronometers, all now replaced in a
bonfire of space by satellite navigation (Glennie and Thrift 2009).

Often, early nautical travelers possessed only the most rudimentary of maps, pictures
of coastal features and, if you were lucky, a simple chart. But, of course, maps - a part
of the world represented on a paper or other surface - have become the preeminent way
of finding where we are. When was the first identifiable map created? That depends in
part on what is counted as a map. If we take wayfinding maps as the gold standard (in
that, unlike many other early maps they are less easy to contest as recognizably maps)
then the earliest surviving map showing roads and other pathways on either land or
water seems to be a papyrus map from ancient Egypt dating from 1160 BCE (Akerman
and Karrow 2007), although there are earlier examples of ancient non-wayfinding
Babylonian maps on clay tablets dating from 7000 BCE which show parcels of land as
well as evidence of surveying techniques. But maps proliferated as the demand for them
increased (as a result of the needs of the state (and especially colonization), trade and a
host of more mundane everyday concerns), as mapping technology became more and
more sophisticated, and as it became possible to mass produce maps. Now, of course,
we are surrounded by maps. Indeed, it is possible to argue that we have reached an era
of mapping which is as consequential in its way as the great age of mapping that
followed the initial European exploration of the globe. Maps are becoming sewn into
the very fabric of everyday life through their rejuvenation as geographical information
systems which are becoming the locational underpinning to just about everything and,
in turn, have become one of the chief means of cultural experimentation.

Sometimes the history of maps and mapping is downplayed. But that history is, of
course, one of the great human conceptual achievements born out of successive
mathematical and geometrical innovations which gradually locked the world in to the
semblance of a grid on which, at least in theory, everything could be located from
outside its location. They provided a new “grammar of the gaze” (Jacob 2006, 6).

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There is a standard history of the idea of “space” which is often assumed to run
alongside this cartographic history in which a “Newtonian” world view develops, based
on a grid of coordinates which “without relation to anything external, remains similar
and immovable” (Newton, cited in Jammer, 1954, 33). It is a notion subsequently
championed, though only in part, by philosophers like Kant, for whom absolute space
was an a priori form that organizes our cognition - an “intuition” – and is not in itself
cognitive or conceptual at all. But it is also a notion which made its way into science in
the shape of classical mechanics and even religion as evidence of the divine.

One of the problems with this view of the world is that it can be made to suggest that
the Earth is held in a rigid, contained frame. But, beginning in the eighteenth century,
another way of thinking about space began to take hold which privileged relative space
in which space is no more than the relative location of things, a network of places, so
that when motion is ascribed to a body rather than to its reference point that is simply
an arbitrary convenience. This was the view of the philosopher and mathematician
Leibniz. It prefigured Einstein’s invention of relativity theory, which, in turn, was born
out of urgent practical necessity: the practical spatial challenges of the late nineteenth
century provided the essential background to his theoretical breakthrough (Galison
2004). One of the challenges that engaged the younger Einstein was the spatial and
temporal complexity of Europe's burgeoning rail network. Only a century previously,
the continent had had hundreds of time zones, and no universal system for
synchronizing them. Given that local time could therefore vary from town to town,
scheduling rail services was hard but also vital - not least to stop trains from colliding!
Synchronized clocks, set by telegraph, were vital to determine longitude and therefore
provide precise coordinates.

In other words, the history of ideas about space and practical spatial concerns can rarely
be divorced. Again, as this example of spatial measurement and timetabling shows only
too well, geographers as varied in their approach as Torsten Hägerstrand and Doreen
Massey have come to understand that space and time cannot be easily separated out.
Space always has temporal extension and vice versa: neither dimension is privileged
over the other since both depend on each other for their expression. In turn, four
consequences have unfolded.

To begin with, we have come to realize that there is not really such a thing as “empty”
space. Quite the reverse: space is chock full of stuff. We can think of this fullness in
several ways. One is as all the things that are there but of which we have as yet no
conception, just momentary glimpses, what Bruno Latour calls “dark matter”. Another
is as a gathering of matter like the glial cells in the brain. These were first thought of as
being a little like wallpaper – as a necessary but generally unimportant background to
neurons - but now we know that glial cells are themselves important elements of how
the brain functions. Then, we can think of this fullness as all manner of geographies we
can sense but cannot yet fully grasp: for example, according to quantum theory, in the
same moment, the same atomic particle can be in two places far apart. Finally, we can
think of that fullness as being like the light that arises from distant galaxies, echoes of
events long past which ghost everything that we do.

Then, we understand to a much greater degree than formerly large expanses of time and
space which in previous eras would have been much more difficult to conceive of.
Think, for example, of our ability to peer back into the early history of the universe via

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telescopes like the Hubble or the Square Kilometer Array. But it is not just large
expanses of time and space that have become visible. We have also become able to see
and operate in small moments in time, with the result that new spaces have opened up
in this realm too. Many examples of this adage can be found. For example, international
finance often operates in the realm of seconds and even microseconds. But, equally, we
can track the way in which information and trends make their way around the world in
seconds, as in the periodic global twitter storms that can surround the doings of
celebrities - storms that they have often whipped up - or events like the outcome of
soccer matches. In other words, human spatiality has both stepped up and stepped down
a level.

Then again, the link between time and space has become more visible through
movement. As transport and communications technology improve so new perceptions
of movement become possible. In the latest iteration of this process of boosted
journeying, it becomes possible to see each step in the chain of movement of people
and things and to adjust that movement whilst in movement: this logistical thinking has
now become commonplace. But smartphones and tablets, global positioning, instant
geographical search, and the panoply of other technological advances we now regard
as indispensable, have only existed for a very short time within the historical record.
Within my lifetime, people still set out in cities like London with an A to Z gazetteer
or map, a street finder first produced in the 1930s which became indispensable for a
series of generations, just like the Thomas Street Guides that were so familiar in Los
Angeles and other cities of the United States. Even armed with a street finder, drivers
and walkers still navigated with considerable degrees of uncertainty, often roaming up
and down streets searching for the right turn-off and then the right house number. And
they couldn’t call anyone to find out if they were on track until the widespread adoption
of handheld mobile phones (invented in 1973) in the 1990s. Equally, drivers couldn’t
use anything like satellite navigation in their cars until the widespread adoption of these
devices in the late 1990s and early 2000s and walkers couldn’t use simple smartphone
apps like Google Maps until the mid-2000s.

There are still relics of the old way of proceeding, even in the most technologically
enabled cities. For example, in London, the black cab or taxi (from taximeter, the
machine invented in 1891 that measured the distance and time to make a journey)
drivers have to take ‘the knowledge’, a test of their ability to find their way around the
city without GPS which was first introduced in 1851. Not surprisingly, it usually takes
two to four years to pass muster. To become an all-London taxi driver - a Green badge
holder - you need to master no fewer than 320 basic routes, all of the 25,000 streets that
are scattered within the basic routes, and approximately 20,000 landmarks and places
of public interest that are located within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. This is
where the famous Blue Book is required, a handbook for budding taxi drivers which
contains all of these routes and landmarks. Now there is pressure from GPS systems
and apps like Uber and Hailo to automate this process of learning geography. In other
words, London taxi drivers could go the way of other craft workers. Or maybe not:
London’s traffic geography changes so often that ideal routes can switch in the blink of
an eye and automated systems still find that recalibration hard to achieve.

Finally, the question of where we are in space and time has also expanded as aerial
views have become a norm. Being able to see over a space is not a natural right: it had
to be constructed. For a long time, that meant high vistas, towers, and the like. Even

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when the idea of a bird’s eye view became engrained, it was not always easy to portray
particular features like the Grand Canyon. Then, along came balloons. A number of
geographers have considered the early history of ballooning, precisely because it was
the first time that aerial views from above became commonplace: as early as the French
revolutionary era, for example, a group of “aérostiers” was established whose task it
was to sketch the contours of a battlefield and cable them to officers on the ground
(Adey, Whitehead and Williams, 2013, McCormack, 2014). Subsequently, the spread
of aviation and the aerial photograph cemented the view from above – the view from
falling up instead of down - as a normal way of seeing space. Now people all around
the world think of the view out of an aircraft window as somehow natural and rarely
remember the assorted cloudscapes that they traverse. One of the most privileged
moments I can remember was flying into London on November 5 th at a time when, by
ancient custom, bonfires are lit and fireworks are set off. Another was flying past
London when the cloud base was very low and seeing the taller buildings in London
sticking up out of the cloud like jagged teeth. But, at the same time as revealing this
other often joyous way of seeing, it is likely that the view from above also prompted a
greater emphasis on abstract spatial form, on diagrams of the world to which the world
should conform, which has been responsible for some of the worst excesses of “top-
down” state planning (Haffner 2013).

But, in the 1960s another view from above became possible as photographs of the globe
taken from space began to circulate and specifically the Apollo 11 photographs of 1968
of a ‘spaceship’ Earth hanging in the sky as taken from the Moon (Cosgrove 2003).
This view undoubtedly helped to stimulate a rise in ecological thinking about the
fragility (and beauty) of our habitat. But now yet another view of the planet from above
has become the norm: urban networks depicted at night as a weave of artificial light.
Significantly, this latterday view is constructed more as an assertion of a kind of
erstwhile human supremacy: these networks of light are our new pyramids supposedly
marking our supremacy across all of the Earth.

Knowing Space

But, however precise and sophisticated our tools for mapping may be and however lofty
the vantage point we are able to build, surveying where we are isn’t the same as
knowing all there is to know about space, although you might think so from a lot of
what you read. When we live in and encounter space, we are doing more than tracking
its contours. It is what we are. It is the fiber of our being. It is both the folly and the
grandeur of our nature. We are internal to it. All animals, including human beings, have
particular dispositions towards space that are a part of what their bodies are. A
nineteenth century ecologist, Jacob von Uexküll, called the way in which animals live
in different but intersecting lifeworlds, a series of “Umwelten”, as he called them. So
a bee might only fix on just a few cues which go to make up its visual field - bright
flowers, the sun, and so on - which are registered in relatively fixed corridors. A snowy
owl has a quite different spatial footprint and correspondingly different spatial cues –
wintering snowy owls spend 98 per cent of their time sitting still during the day and
probably do most of their hunting after dark using their extraordinarily acute sight and
hearing, and they tend to roam extensively when they hunt (Strycker 2014). A human
being might fix on many more but often markedly different spatial cues, not all of which
are as discriminating as those of the bee or the owl. In other words, living beings see
very different things or they see the same things very differently.

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Human beings aren’t so different from animals, then, in that their spaces of existence
reveal things selectively. At one level, our spatial disposition follows from the immense
debt we owe to sensation in how we move and thereby think: we rely on all manner of
physical forms of intelligence to make judgments, most of which exist at the interface
between our bodies and the animated spaces within which we live. We touch things that
manifest different temperatures and textures, we smell different odors, we see all kinds
of colors, we lift or push against objects and so sense their weight and force. And so
on. In turn, these simple sensations produce all kinds of unconscious effects up to and
including moral judgments (Lobel 2014). At another level of spatial disposition,
philosophers like Heidegger concentrated their attention on how the world shows up -
makes itself present - to us. Heidegger argued that we ordinarily encounter entities like
tools as being for certain kinds of practices (hammering, cooking, writing, and so on).
He asserted that we achieve our relationship with the world around us not through
looking at an entity like the hammer, or through some detached theoretical study of it,
but rather by becoming involved with and skilfully manipulating it. In turn, this
engaged, “ready-to-hand” way that the world shows up to us means that we do not have
a straightforward spatial relation to it of the kind that might be found using a GPS
device. We “dwell” in it in the same sense that to dwell in a house is not merely to be
located inside it but to exist, or to belong, in a familiar place. At one other level, spatial
disposition follows from the ‘atmosphere’ with which we surround ourselves, a bubble
of attentive involvement – of ‘inhabited orbs’ (Sloterdijk 2013, 11) – in which life,
thinking and the formation of these ‘spheres’ amount to the same thing. Living means
building spheres and these spheres, made up of a scaffolding of bodies, things and signs,
form an innate geometry of knowing where and therefore what you are which is both
internal and external. In other words, “we are in an outside that carries inner worlds”
(Sloterdijk 2013, 27): the scratches and scrapes of experience which make up what we
regard as our inner life are made by the way we construct that outside.

The experience of space is a quality that we all think we know well but it is one that
remains very difficult to describe. It is no surprise that geographers have spent so much
time trying to do precisely that, usually by linking it to the body and the web of practices
within which the body exists. This kind of space can never be reduced to an aesthetic
quality or simple utility, though it might have such dimensions. It is not so much
observed as felt in the interaction of body and landscape. Practices of living, inhabiting,
and thinking all have to take place somewhere, whether that somewhere is close and
snug or abstract and exposed, in a relation of connectedness, and the notion of place
provides an orientation to thinking precisely what that connectedness might be.
Philosophers like Heidegger and Sloterdijk have often argued that the problem of
modern life is precisely that place is being reduced to an aesthetic or a utilitarian
dimension, so blocking out a certain kind of freedom to be in place and of place.
Whether this sense of loss, apparently caused by the cannula of “modernity” draining
color out of the world, is a valid one or not, the fact remains that this feeling has been
a staple of Western cultures, echoing down from the time when the opposition between
“culture” and “nature” became established and nature somehow seemed to move
offshore. The sensuous character of life was displaced.

What is clear is that the bodily experience of space – the different sensations it
engenders, the different complexions it lends to life, the different ways that it folds into
how life and its practices show up, its different character, if you like - has varied through

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time (although I suspect that some experiences are held in common, like the aching
void left in space when someone close to us dies.) Let’s take just one obvious example:
different bodily experiences of space in Ancient Greece and Rome. It is a particularly
appropriate example given that Homer is often regarded as the founding father of
geography while Greek geographical knowledge is often thought to underlay the
Roman Empire, as evidenced by Strabo’s Geography. Just as the Ancient Greeks and
Romans had different words for different colors than us, so they had different means of
apprehending space. So there is no word in Ancient Greek that simply and
unproblematically maps onto what we now think of as space and there is a considerable
debate about how accurate Greek maps were. Meanwhile, the Roman “spatium” meant
stretch or extent and again it is not equivalent to what we think of as space. Equally,
Greek and Roman cities and sacred sites were run on different spatial principles which
provoked different bodily experiences of the world. Until recently, such insights have
been difficult to articulate because of the tendency for archaeological excavation reports
to be split by function, thus making it problematic to trace the linkages that produce
that holistic sense of space. But now we have begun to see the range of spatial
experience that was apparent in those times (Scott 2013): for example, towns and cities
in the Roman Empire tended to use the template of Rome whilst Greek towns and cities
were much more varied in style. The Greek agora was genuinely meant to be an open
space (at least for certain classes of persons), whereas Roman public spaces were much
more ordered in terms of which and what activities were allowed. Greek understanding
of geography tended to be based on world maps whereas the Roman understanding of
geography was modelled on itineraries. And so on.

In other words, we need to be careful. As this brief excursion into the historical record
shows, there is no reason to think that the world turns up the same for all people. The
bodily experience of space varies on all kinds of dimensions which are both physical
and cultural, as numerous studies of gender and ethnicity have shown only too well.
But it can vary even more fundamentally. Take the case of those cultures which are
often described as having an “animist” outlook – that is cultures which ascribe
nonhumans like animals and plants an interiority identical to their own. “We are a long
way from the reassuring world of Being and existing beings, of primary and secondary
qualities, of perennial archetypes and of knowledge as revelation. For all those weary
of an overuniform world, that realization is surely a cause for a measure of rejoicing”
(Descola 2013, 143). In animist cultures, animals and plants are “humans in disguise”.
They are persons sometimes thought of as having their own cultures. Humans and
nonhumans differ by virtue of the form of their bodies but the substance of their souls
is counted as similar. So, for example, animals might be thought of as essentially human
but they have been transformed into animal forms by means of the outward clothing of
their skin. Or all beings are thought to be made from the same substances. The result is
that human beings are joined by all manner of other humans – but humans who do not
present a human appearance. And the myths of animist people nearly always remember
a time when humans and nonhumans were not differentiated, and shared “Umwelten”.

And then there is “totemism”. In this scheme of things, each person belongs to a group
which bears the name of, and is linked to, a natural object like an animal or a plant or
an artefact or even a natural phenomenon like a river which is associated with a set of
moral, physical and behavioral attributes, a living expression of certain qualities that
transcend their own existence rather than an individuality with which it is possible to
maintain a personal relationship (as in animism). Here we can see another notion of

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space entirely. The classical example is provided by the indigenous Australian
“dreamtime”, a single word used to sum up many different kinds of experience. In this
experience of experience, primeval beings emerged from the depths of the earth from
specific sites. Some embarked on journeys which left their marks on the landscape and
behind them they strew many of the existing beings of today, all manner of humans,
plants and animals, each with their respective totemic affiliations. These primeval
beings might be human in terms of their behavior, language, and social codes but they
also have the attributes of plants or animals and they are the origin of stocks of spirits
laid down at the sites where they themselves disappeared. “Dreaming” isn’t just ancient
history for when the beings departed they left a legacy of spirits, routes and rituals
which continue to affirm their presence in the present. The paths continue to thread
their way through the landscape, rather like the maps of underground and subway
systems with which we are now so familiar, and indigenous Australian peregrinations
continually reaffirm them. They express a living relationship with the land, with
“country”, understood as an animate entity;

The country may be mother or grandfather, which grows them up and is grown
up by them. These kinship terms impose mutual responsibilities of caring and
keeping upon the land and people … For many indigenous Australians, person
and place, or ‘country’ are virtually interchangeable (Arthur, cited in Nicholls
2014, 4)

Indeed, such cultural differences as these mean that different human beings may
experience the basics of space quite differently. These differences, both biological and
cultural in nature, can be quite extreme. Work in cognitive anthropology shows just
how extreme. For example, the work of Steven Levinson (2003) on certain indigenous
Australian and Mexican groups shows that, because they tend to use absolute rather
than relative frames of reference, they not only have very good senses of direction –
they are able to point the right direction to a place without demur and past events are
directionally anchored in great detail - but they genuinely perceive cardinals like up and
down and left and right in very different ways.

Western cultures often think of technology as the primary determinant of spatial

perception. And that is important, of course. When new technology of various kinds
arrives, space can be perceived in ways that were not possible before. We have noted
the case of maps and measurement. But there are many other examples of how
technology changes spatial perception. Take the faculty of vision. The invention of
spectacles is an obvious but often overlooked example. The invention of oil paints,
crucial to the invention of impressionism, is another. Another example is provided by
artificial lighting. Night time is no longer another country, dark and forbidding. Thanks
to reliable and constant artificial illumination produced by large industrial power
networks, the ‘sphere’, to use Sloterdijk’s term, that we inhabit has expanded its orbit.
The process began in Britain which became a gaslit society when the first public street,
Pall Mall in London, was lit with gas in 1807. Electric lighting arrived in 1878 but did
not find its way into homes on a large scale until after the First World War. Artificial
light has now spread all over the world, producing new apprehensions of how and what
can be seen (Otter 2008). But we should not overestimate this process of enlightenment:
for many people in the world the dark is still dark. For example, in India in 2012, the
largest electrical blackout in human history left 600 million people without power and
therefore light. But discussing the blackout, the economist Amartya Sen wryly noted

10
that the media had neglected an important fact. “Two hundred million of those 600
million people never had any power at all.”

But our apprehension of space is not just about simple advances in technology. It also
follows from accompanying shifts in how people perceive the world, each of which has
a spatial dimension – what is considered to be inside or outside, what is considered to
be public and private, what is considered to be full or empty, what is considered to be
a whole or a part, what is considered to be general or particular, what is considered to
be different or the same, what is considered to be near or far, what is considered to be
small or large, what is considered to be center or periphery, what is considered to be
where or nowhere, what is considered to be separate or juxtaposed, what is considered
to be still or moving. These shifts which can be domestic or global in scale produce
new spatial orders, new placings, new spatial signposts. But dimension is perhaps too
weak a term. What is meant is what is meant by life: the way things are. These shifts
can be very general cultural currents, such as that European complex of arts, sculpture
and building that became known as the Renaissance. They can be artistic movements
like Impressionism or Cubism. But sometimes they stem from just a few small points
of change that become general.

A good example is provided by Pablo Picasso (Clark 2013). Picasso pushed at the
bounds of space all through his career. He tried to identify new ways of thinking about
inside and outside which both acknowledged the domestic interior that had become a
key feature of the inner and outer of European bourgeois life, and its representations in
paintings, and increasingly challenged its ascendancy. Thus, he tried to identify new
organs that linked bodies in different ways which were both inside and outside
conventions of what counted as a room. For example, he conjured up ways of making
sexuality surprising, unfamiliar - even frightening – by draping bodies over and around
spaces so that intimate interiors could become loud exteriors. In his later career, he also
tried to question what we mean by objects by constantly buffeting then common notions
of proximity so as to produce new “inhuman” mixtures. For example, he disrupted the
pure lines through which space could flow unobstructed, the certainties of geometry
which allow us to place and contrast ourselves and adhere, and the pressure of surfaces
and boundaries produced by the containerized nature of so much representation of
room. In doing so, Picasso operated on what might be regarded as the ‘truth’ of space,
trying to paint or sculpt what “really” existed. He provided new kinds of reaching out,
new kinds of limits, new means of looking back, new animations which have allowed
us to produce a new visual vocabulary of space: in other words, he produced a new
cultural “floor” to spatial perception.

The New Geology. Exploring the Space of the Anthropocene

Our technological and cultural perception of locating and knowing space is changing,
then, as we lay down layer upon layer of infrastructure. The world is threaded with
roads and cables, undergirded by pipes and tunnels, saturated by wireless signals,
loaded down with all kinds of built infrastructure, and heated up by all manner of energy
sources. It is criss-crossed by airline routes, lit up by the innumerable street and other
lights mentioned above, and shaken by all manner of artificial sounds.

Geography was often thought to be an offshoot of geology. But what happens when
human beings begin to change the planet to such a degree that they start to create their

11
own geological epoch by building one vast ants nest which extends both down into the
ground and up into the air? We might see human beings as creating a new space, one
with its own atmosphere, its own dynamics – and its own problems. And this new era
is creating a distinct geology. When an alien explorer looks back at the Earth from
millions of years in the future, she or he or it will be able to discern a whole strata based
on the detritus of human habitation, not just buildings but all manner of objects and
even clothes - which could well be interpreted as external coverings periodically
discarded as they grow too tight to fit a growing organism. Though human cities may
not yet be as impressive as biological cities like coral reefs in their scale and longevity,
or the nesting sites of the now extinct passenger pigeon mentioned before, each host of
pigeons weighing down the trees in their millions and covering a space as large as
Manhattan (Strycker 2014), still humanity is catching up fast (Zalasiewicz 2009). And
human cities are giving rise to exactly the same spatial promiscuity with regard to
minerals and metals as has already been noted with flora and fauna.

The geological record will also show other marks and, most particularly, climate change
and mass extinctions. Humans have undoubtedly begun to change the chemical
composition of the atmosphere. At the same time, humans are producing a mass
extinction on the same scale as the catastrophic extinctions caused by asteroid impacts
as they wipe out species directly or simply leave them marooned and so condemned to
fade away. ‘It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all
freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all
reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion’ (Kolbert 2014, 17).

Then how we experience space begins to be mediated to the second or third degree by
infrastructure. Take the case of sound. In the past, the soundscapes of cities left room
for sounds emanating from natural sources. Church bells might produce a periodic
cacophony, the noise of horse-drawn traffic might create a low roar at certain times of
the day, and various shouts and bursts of music interspersed the daily round. But there
were periods of quiet and many acoustic spaces in which sound still consisted of the
wind and birdsong (Glennie and Thrift 2009). Now, things are very different. Places
where the only sound is natural sound are few and far between – a British professor of
acoustic engineering tried to map them. You have to go far into a remote Northumbrian
bog to find the quietest place. Cities are chock full of noises which form their own
acoustic ecology, noises which become their own associative landscapes intensifying
and fading as we move around - from the sound of aircraft overhead through the hum
and honking of traffic to the snatches of music and conversation, each with their own
arcs (Gandy and Nilsen 2014). Meanwhile, the world has become so beset by noise that
great tits are forced to sing faster and higher in the urban din, and robins have taken to
singing at night when it is quieter. Shipping noise disturbs the breeding of whale and
dolphins: whales are having to sing louder and louder - and in some cases have given
up entirely (Cox 2013). Equally, there are radio quiet zones around a few large radio
telescopes to prevent interference from radio waves. And the main reason why we can’t
get away from all this noise is infrastructure.

Infrastructure consists of all of those objects that allow human beings, cars and trucks,
water, electricity, radio signals, information, and the like to flow from one place to
another, to become mobile, to circulate. Mainly they consist of continuous conduits of
one form or another but, increasingly, as wireless has become more common, these

12
conduits have broadened out into signals transmitted from and received by masts,
although the principle remains much the same.

The point is that the earth’s surface has become a hundreds of kilometers high and at
least three kilometer low anthropic stratum which is a bit like a Swiss cheese in its
make-up, a stratum through which pipes and cables crawl, under which tunnels and
boreholes and mineshafts bore down into the earth, on which all kinds of reservoirs and
power sources hold sway and over which aeroplanes and satellites and wireless signals
fly back and forth.

So generic is this infrastructure that we take it for granted, at least until it goes wrong
– think of the burst water main or the power cable brought down by an ice storm.
Equally, we forget that it has its own history. We have already touched upon systems
of lighting with their pipes and cables. But take another example, this time from
transport infrastructure - the humble elevator upon which tall buildings rely for
sustenance. Although records of elevator design date back to Roman times, elevators
(or ‘ascending rooms’) were first commonly used in the nineteenth century when
hydraulic, steam and electric power were all used as sources of lift. In 1852, Elisha Otis
introduced the first safety elevator, which prevented the cab from falling if the cable
suspending it broke and the first such passenger elevator was installed in a building
which still stands in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan in 1857. The first office
building to have passenger elevators, the Equitable Life Building, was completed, again
in New York City, in 1870, and prefigured the growth of the late nineteenth century
commercial “skyscraper” (a term first used then) and the consequent transformation of
the skyline of many cities. The adoption of elevators had many consequences, apart
from creating recognizable “downtowns”. For example, before the use of elevators,
most residential buildings were limited in height to about seven stories. The wealthy
lived on the lower floors, while the poorer residents lived on the higher floors, and were
thus required to climb many flights of stairs. As exemplified by the modern penthouse,
the elevator reversed this stratification (Bernard 2014). Now, as buildings have become
ever taller (with a one kilometer high tower planned in Saudi Arabia), so elevators have
become increasingly complex. Of course, they need to be faster (with speeds of up to
18 meters per second) but they also need to include sky lobbies where passengers can
change lifts to reach higher floors, and means of increasing capacity like double-decker
lifts or multiple cabins in the same lift shaft.

So ubiquitous is infrastructure like elevators - New York has at least 64000 according
to the city’s buildings department - that this infrastructure has become an accepted
feature of the landscape: airports, railway stations, service stations - and elevators -
have all become stock scenes of human conduct, places where we expect certain classes
of drama to play out - meetings and farewells, temporary sojourns where it is possible
to eat or refuel, places to gather and disperse, uneasy encounters and serendipitous
meetings – against a background which is made as predictable as it can be, from the
identical architecture to the uniforms. A French anthropologist, Marc Augé (2009),
once called them “non-places” but as a description that is very far off the mark. Rather,
they are “by-places” which depend on the journeys of people and things for and as their
existence.

And transport infrastructure has all kinds of other effects. Most particularly, in allowing
people to move, it allows all kinds of communities to spread out across the world. There

13
are all of the diasporas which have arisen from population movement, striking in their
extent. In large part, the history of countries like Australia and the United States is the
history of wave upon wave of diasporic communities. Migration has been a constant
condition of human history but it has picked up in pace and volume since the nineteenth
century as movement has become easier and less hazardous. All kinds of discontinuous
diasporic spaces have been created, many based on simple economic incentive but some
the result of concerted state and state-related action like ethnic cleansing (Osterhammel
2014). But movement is also born out of other imperatives too - like tourism, religious
observance (consider the hajj) and all manner of other motives.

Governing Space

In most societies around the world we have come to believe that space can be governed
or owned. We have come to believe that space should bear our indelible mark, the mark
of “territory” (Elden 2013). We do not belong to places, as the indigenous Australian
thinks. No, they belong to us. We contain them rather than they contain us. Why and
how has this container style of thinking, with all of its physical accoutrements, from
fortresses to barbed wire, from passports to border posts, from fences to electronic
surveillance, come about? How have we arrived at a world in which spaces are able to
be stabilized sufficiently that when we draw lines around them, the lines not only stick
but become important icons in their own right?

The answer is multiple but one undoubted answer is through the gradual growth of the
modern state. We should not exaggerate the powers of the state, of course, whether they
consist of organized violence or bureaucratic practices or legal codes or shared norms
or ideologies. Indeed it could be argued that in many countries states didn’t do as much
as has often been argued until relatively recently in the historical record and in large
parts of the world they still don’t. Other structures like organized religion have been
powerful and have continued to exert heft. Part of the reason for this exaggeration of
states’ powers (for example, the idea that states create one type of agent) comes from
the tendency to portray states as unitary authorities bringing one space under the sway
of one will but that is an illusion. The production of state action is distributed amongst
many authors and material artefacts in acts of collective governance which are always
spread across many different types of space, each responding differently even as they
add up to something greater than the sum of the parts. Even when the state is engaged
in the greatest of great projects which look like they are all central diktat and no local
room for maneuver, whether that be the Pyramids or the Three Gorges Dam, the
expertise needed to produce the project is never to be found only at the “center”,
whether that center is a temple or an anonymous set of offices. It depends greatly upon
the skills of the artisans and workers who are there on site. Indeed without this initiative
from below, not much will happen and the conjuring act is to allow input from below
whilst ensuring that power and direction remain at the upper levels. Much of the
bureaucratic weight of empires and other state forms relies on getting this balancing act
right through devices like addresses which exactly locate a destination, files and
paperwork more generally, manuals, offices (with their double meaning) and waiting
rooms, examinations, general notions of conduct and habit and even styles of
communication (from the flowery language of the courtier to the “plain” prose style of
the civil servant), each of which shapes people and space to the state’s will by
manipulating the efforts needed to access and exert power. Connecting and governing
are both sides of the same coin (Joyce 2013).

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Equally, that weight depends upon producing a space in which the state seems to be a
constant companion. Ordering and governing space depends upon naming places and
localities and topographical features and regions and larger areas too, like various kinds
of world region. It depends upon delineating borders. It depends upon producing
uniform and continuous spaces through the use of standardized units of measurement.
So the whole profession of geography as it appeared in the nineteenth century, with its
own research methods, terminology, career paths, academic departments, textbooks and
journals depended upon a practice of exploration which was in part precisely concerned
with what could often be the simultaneous location and naming of places, a kind of
“worlding”, establishing new borders or asserting old ones and producing quotidian
spaces of reckoning. In Britain, for example, what had been the practice of military
mapping of Scotland and then England gradually turned into a more general national
mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey, founded in 1791 though called by this name in
print only from 1810 (Hewitt 2010). In turn, its cartographic practices moved out into
parts of the British Empire like India. But, ironically perhaps, practices that were
conceived with military means in mind were subsequently appropriated for civilian
purposes and not least tourism and hiking which are associated with freedom of
movement rather than binding state grids. A similar process happened in countries like
the United States where state mapping began as a means of inventorying the rapid
expansion of the nation, usually via a characteristic grid form, but became something
less utilitarian as time went by.

And all of this state activity had to be held together by practices of connection and, just
as importantly, non-connection like secrecy: secrecy is a key feature of state power.
States need to keep things out of sight (Galison 2004, Paglen, 2010). And that means
walling off spaces from public view or only allowing unequal access. This practice may
be at odds with modern views of citizenship which rest upon the idea of greater mutual
visibility between state and citizens but the fact remains that modern states keep a good
deal secret just like the states of yore did with their invisible ink and strings of secret
intelligencers, tightly-guarded documents and the pouches of diplomatic couriers. The
intricate patchwork of secret spaces expanded mightily in the Second World War and
now includes defense facilities, many government buildings and bunkers. It also
includes unequal knowledge of individual citizens of the sort that is promoted by the
apparatuses of files, dossiers and constant electronic surveillance. Finally, it includes
the actual removal of knowledge from public view as promoted by the practice of
classification. The net result can sometimes seem baroque: currently, around four
million people hold some measure of clearance to view classified documents in the
United States and thirty three million documents were newly classified in 2001 – a
figure which has almost certainly increased since then (Galison 2004).

Of course, different states hold such geographies of connection and non-connection

together differently. To begin with, just look at the evidence of maps. They often loudly
declare not just that this is my space but also that a particular space is central - and other
spaces are not. Over a long period of time, imperial era Chinese maps are the perfect
example of this statement (Hostetler 2001, Smith 2013). Imperial era Chinese maps
tended to look and feel quite different from Western maps in that they were not gridded
and devoted much more space to written text, given that in China written words counted
above visual images in terms of the weight given to their representational authority. In
these maps, China is always the pivot, and other lands are gathered around at a much

15
smaller scale as a fringe of tributary relationships. When the Jesuits produced maps of
China and the world from their perspective, they were attacked for dislodging the
“Central Kingdom” from its rightful position at the center of things. Equally, the
incentive to seek out knowledge of such foreign spaces seems to have been marginal
since China was so clearly the important space. Thus, “Chinese mapmakers understood
the utility and appeal of accurate measurement, and their colleagues in astronomy
developed sophisticated instruments that made possible the projections and coordinate
systems that Westerners associate with Ptolemaic cartography. But throughout most of
the imperial era, they found no compelling reason to conceive of the world as spherical,
nor did they see any merit in drawing all maps ‘to scale’” (Smith 2013, 87). China was
where it was at.

This may be an extreme case of the state’s spatial narcissism but it is hardly unusual.
Wars, legal cases, boundary disputes, they are all fought as though only some can have
rights to a piece of space and others should be excluded – or even deleted from existence
so that they can never make claims on the state again. So it is that between 1776 and
the present the United States could seize about 1.5 billion acres from North America’s
native peoples, an area 25 times the size of the United Kingdom, with a consequential
decline in the population of native peoples – it is worth remembering that as late as
1750 these peoples had still constituted a majority of the North American population.

But it is important to understand that we live at what is probably the high water mark
of a particular kind of state – the nation state, a spatial form that can be dated to the
Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 which both formalized and then normalized this particular
kind of political geography, although it did not set it in train, as some would have it.
But today political geography is driven by all manner of exceptions to the idea of a set
of contiguous nation states legitimated by legal sovereignty over “their” space and by
constitutions that abjure any other way of thinking - and which are able to claim the
right to indulge in armed conflict with one another as a result. Indeed, this form is, if
anything, becoming defined by the host of exceptions to it: all of the other institutional
bodies whose spaces do not coincide. These spaces are legion and include those of the
numerous international and subnational bodies, global cities like London, New York
and Shanghai, various ecological enclaves, diasporic communities, global brands,
special economic zones, massive computational networks which share files with
abandon, logistical networks, the footprints of satellite surveillance, criminal networks
and clans, financial markets with their server farms and special offshore domains, and
goodness knows what else. This tendency has only been accelerated by the multiple
networks of information technology which allows all kinds of new address to come into
being: land, then sea, then air and now - cloud. The difference is, we have built this
composite space of address and its forms of participation, via server farms and data
centers, millions of miles of cable, the wireless frequency spectrum and, by 2020, an
estimated 1.9 terawatts of power (placing the cloud, if it were a nation state, as the fifth
largest consumer of electricity in the world) and with it we have formed a world in
which not only can we communicate but so can things and not just with us but with
each other, so heralding what might become a post-Anthropocene (Bratton, 2014).

Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised by the increasing diversity of institutional spaces.

Before the seventeenth century, millions of acres weren’t strictly owned by any one
person or institution. Rather, they were subject to a patchwork of rights. Through
history, people have held “rights of common” to carry out activities (to pasture animals,

16
to fish, to take wood for fuel, to take sand and gravel, and so on) in and on particular
pieces of space. Originally, these spaces were appurtenances to other privately held
space but, over time, they have come to be understood as “public”, a word which has
its own geographical history. Thus, the idea of a common was exported by the Puritans
to North America: famous examples include New Haven Green in New Haven,
Connecticut (The Puritans were said to have designed the green so that it was a large
enough space to hold the number of people who they believed would be spared after
the Second Coming of Christ: exactly 144,000), Cambridge Common and Boston
Common, all of which were converted into parks.

But the idea of ownership is not just the preserve of the state, as the examples of many
spaces held in common make clear. It also comes from the notion of an economy, an
economy in which the practices of exchange have become the be-all and end-all. Like
the state, the economy, especially the global capitalist economy, isn’t a natural
construction. It has arisen over many centuries from interactions which have become
increasingly regularized by a network of practices, specialist laws and regulations, by
brute enforcement by empires, by colonial adventures, and, now, by large multinational
corporations which can span the world and create their own owned spaces, both in and
out of any one state jurisdiction.

Trading Space

If we turn to the economy, then, there is another way in which space has become
objectified - as a traded commodity available for exchange, as “land” that can be
“owned” and then “valued”. It is an obsession that is deeply rooted in history – some
of the first known maps are probably records of land ownership – and has produced an
uneasy equilibrium between those who believe in common and privately-owned land
for millennia. At least part of that debate comes from what seems to be a very human
need to close off access, so as to make space “mine” and give it secure title (Linklater,
2014). Notice the quotation marks around the words “land” and “owned” though: in
these days people very often assume that one must mean the other but there are still
many instances of land that is owned in common or in trust and therefore cannot be
trespassed upon. Thus, it has been estimated that nearly 15 per cent of the Earth’s
surface has been preserved for conservation in areas like National Parks. In some
countries - like Scotland, for example - there are universal access rights to most land
and inland water (although there are exceptions) and there are still common grazing
rights in a number of areas of England like the Lake District. But it is also clear that the
majority of land and what is distributed over it is privately owned in some way and has
an explicit economic value, especially if it is thought that the Earth has now effectively
been domesticated for human use by the economy, and that ‘wild’ nature is no more
and can be replaced by human-designed ecosystems. The planet’s main purpose is to
be friendly to humans by accumulating wealth through trade in commodities, including
land, so that humans can be, well, more wealthy.

Everyone talks rather glibly about this process of trade and commodification as a ‘world
economy’ but such an entity exists as a definite object only in the imagination and in
theoretical texts: what actually exists are numerous overlapping spatial networks of
people and things set up to allow predictable exchanges to take place on a continuous
basis (Thrift, Tickell, Woolgar and Rupp 2014), exchanges of consumer goods, money

17
and remittances and pleasurable tourist experiences certainly but also of slaves and
trafficked women, international criminals and drug runners and all manner of pollution.

These networks are vast historical accretions. Take the case of the seas. Nowadays trade
has become a maritime infrastructure in its own right, an infrastructure dependent upon
a forest of rules and regulations that range from the international law of the sea to the
humblest health and safety inspections and regulations. Then there are 100,000
freighters on the seas at any one time carrying nearly everything we eat, wear and work
with crewed by an itinerant population numbering in the hundreds of thousands (George
2013). Then there are the ports, full of specialized equipment ready to load and unload
the containers which are the basic grammar of maritime trade (Levinson 2006). And,
of course, there is all the trade carried out by road, rail and air, which cannot be
mentioned in any detail here.

But this over-the-seas world of trade has not just magicked itself into existence. It has
come about as a result of definite historical processes. To govern spaces like the sea
means being able to define, measure, recognize and enforce boundaries and thus control
movement by means like cartographic, population and navigational data, understood as
a tool and not just as a representation of power. To understand this trading space, we
can return to the map – after all, the power of the map is its ability to qualify movement
- and specifically to the famous Selden map of China, bequeathed to the Bodleian
Library in Oxford in 1654 by an English lawyer, John Selden (Brook 2013, Batchelor
2014). For etched into the history of this unique 16 2/3 square feet map of China we
can also find the classic signifiers of bounded territory - the nation state, the rule of law,
and the corporation - and the consequent enhanced ability to control movement. At the
time Selden owned the map, the British state was experimenting with new models of
bureaucracy which would bind it closer together as a coherent space. The map was in
the ownership of, in the person of Selden, one of the pioneers of the project to allow
nations to own the sea through a dense skein of maritime law, an autonomous legal and
mercantile framework which would allow maritime trade to flourish unencumbered, a
project that had become vital as “ships in their tens of thousands were sailing from
every port of Europe and Asia” (Brook 2013, xxii). Seas could be closed off - the title
of one of Selden’s works was The Closed Sea - and taken in to a coherent space that
could support the growing global ambitions of “empires”, but with the monarchy
becoming the symbol of coherent state authority and not just a political settlement.
Finally, there was the joint-stock company, the progenitor of which, significantly, was
called the Cathay Company, founded by Sebastian Cabot in London (Cabot was the son
of John Cabot, the Italian navigator and explorer whose discovery in 1497 of parts of
North America under the commission of Henry VII of England is commonly held to
have been the first European encounter with the mainland of North America since the
Norse visits in the eleventh century). Significantly, Cabot had also partnered with
Clement Adams to publish London’s first printed world map. The joint-stock company
was not just a tool that allowed the risks of long-distance maritime trade to be taken on
board but was also a means for producing fiscal and commercial autonomy from the
burgeoning state and so establishing the mixed authority between state and economy
that we now take so much for granted. Some of these ideas quite clearly came from an
awareness of the sovereign boundary definition going on in Ming China, with its
dependence on notions of counting population and technical achievements like the
compass.

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In turn, trade has become the means by which we understand the world. It is a part of
how we are. That has been the case for a long time, of course. For example, Europe has
been a trading zone since at least 9000 BCE. But instead of amber, soapstone and shells
brought overland or by sea and made into necklaces, bangles and the like (Cunliffe,
2011), our very bodies are now maps of global trade. Shirts, tee shirts and blouses from
Thailand and China, coats from Malaysia, glasses and contact lenses from Germany,
watches from Switzerland, shoes from the United States: each of us is a lesson in
exchange, a world in miniature. And we live in places chock full with stuff that has
transited from other places and still contains those places’ echoes. This fact is
underlined not just by the constantly changing retail landscape with its standard
grammar of shops and malls and warehouses but by much less imposing but equally
crucial intermediary locations like Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong where cheap
goods are sold cheaply (Mathews, 2011). And that is before we get to the afterlife of
all these things as they pass to other owners as second hand goods, accumulate in
garages and attics, or end up being recycled or cast aside in garbage dumps where they
recreate value as waste – and create records for future archaeologists.

Indeed, this roundelay of trade has produced what some have called a junkyard planet
(Minter 2013). Much but by no means all of what we produce goes into landfill. Cans,
computers and cars rarely end up in landfills. Indeed automobiles are nearly one
hundred per cent recycled. No surprise then that the global recycling industry has a
turnover of $500 billion a year, roughly equal to the gross domestic product of Norway.
It is an industry which forms a trading complex in its own right since it consists in large
part of the complex movement and exchange of goods like paper and cardboard, iron
and steel, aluminum and copper from countries like the United States over the sea to
countries like China - reflecting exactly an imbalance in trade. The United States
consumes and throws away much more than it manufactures. China, meanwhile, is both
the largest exporter of new goods to the United States and the largest importer of US
recyclables. In turn, all kinds of places are linked together.

They are linked in other ways too. For example, new goods are crucial but getting them
or inventing them is no easy matter. Let’s return to the topic of secrets. When a new
product or service is invented it immediately becomes a matter of how easy it is to steal
it away from its originator in a complex geographical game of push-me-pull-you. For
example, nowadays great attention is paid to Chinese economic espionage around the
world but it is worth remembering how active the United States was in illicitly
appropriating mechanical and scientific innovations from the British in the nineteenth
century, often with the encouragement of the US government (Ben-Atar 2006). Keeping
ideas at home was a British national priority: Britain had strict laws against the export
of machines and skilled workers were banned from emigrating. So American industrial
spies were lionized. The British were hardly blameless either. In 1848/9, in one of the
most successful acts of industrial espionage ever carried out, the East India Company,
tiring of the Chinese monopoly on tea which meant that one out of every five chests of
tea manufactured in China was being purchased by Britain, sent the botanist Robert
Fortune to China where, heavily disguised, he stole both the technique for processing
tea leaves and a large collection of tea plants which were subsequently conveyed to
India to be grown, thus breaking the Chinese stranglehold on the global tea market
forever (Rose 2002).

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But trade isn’t only the to and fro of what we regard as “material” goods. There is also
trade in language and more generally in meanings – in signs which work across a series
of different sensory registers (like vision, sound and movement) and different means of
registering them (like books or recordings or films) and which are constantly mobile
and changing - although they may exist within predefined systems of meaning like
textual or filmic conventions, they tend to overflow them. Take the case of language:
we move about constantly so language is always in movement, constantly mutating: the
“most fundamental fact about human communication is its variability” (Levinson 2003,
318). It can be moved about through the myriad interactions of ‘ordinary’ conversation,
with its encyclopedia of verbal and nonverbal cues including particular ways of
organizing and distributing spatial information, but equally it is moved about through
all the means of expression that are currently available: music, dance, all manner of
texts, movies and television, and latterly the internet with its new variants of
communication. In turn, when signs are combined with bodies and emotions they
produce deep and fast-flowing cultural currents that we still struggle to describe, even
as we feel them as the compasses that set our behavior. These cultural currents wax and
wane and join with other currents in all kinds of combinations. Take just the case of
music (Byrne 2012). It’s a set of cultural baggage etched in sound – tempos, melodies,
means of collaboration (from rock groups to orchestras), different kinds of instruments
and contexts (like bars and clubs, opera and concert halls, arenas or outdoors), different
ways of amplifying sounds (from cathedrals to microphones), and emotional reactions
- which has travelled all around the world, just like any other traded goods, through a
mixture of passion and economic calculation: geography and music are now
inseparable. Part of the reason for music’s power as a set of signs is that it is closely
allied to the make-up of particular spaces but can now also transcend them thanks to
technologies of recording – the first sound recording was made in 1878 - which have
themselves acted as means of producing new kinds of music whilst they have passed
music around and around and made it possible to intersperse musical genres to an even
greater extent through techniques like sampling and the influence of all manner of new
digital formats.

To Conclude: CitySpace

And this is where cities come in, as the chief conductors of all the spatial transactions
that define the human planet, from the to and fro of state intelligence through the
vagaries of economic exchange to simply acting as founts of creativity. Rather late in
the day to write about cities, you might think, in any account of space. But, then again,
maybe not. Cities have always been seething multitudes, billions of interactions pulling
together states and economies through great networks of influence and exchange. But
now cities are growing in size and number to the point where the planetary condition is
becoming the urban condition. Cities are becoming states and economies in their own
right as a growing share of the world’s activity flows across national borders both
cementing but also challenging a container view of space. That said, this pervasive
urban condition is much too complicated to be described by concepts like “planetary
urbanization” - the variation in what cities are like and why they exist is too great for
such simple-minded cut-throughs to say much at all - but what cities allow is for senses
of connection to be both strengthened – and subverted. Cities are not merely
quantitative amplifiers but also, because of their great complexity, they are generators
of qualitative change. They both hold things together and allow things to diverge:
everything can become a stakeholder and so everything is put in relation and at stake

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(Bratton 2014). Cities are where questions and questioning chiefly emerge. And there
are plenty of questions to be asked, many of them precisely concerned with how cities
will survive in an era of climate change, population growth, energy deficits, lack of
fresh water and clean air, and sometimes grotesque inequality: after all, so far, the
Anthropocene has been a “filthy undertaking” (Vince 2014, 3).

At their worst, cities can be murderous entities casting people carelessly aside. But at
their best, they will allow us to die another day by finding the answers we need to the
questions we cannot avoid. The time will come when we realize that just having and
owning means that we won’t be heir to much at all. The planet will take it all back.
Let’s hope we can avoid such a bitter inheritance. But to avoid that inheritance means
that we must find new ways of sensing and representing space, ways that recognize that
to love something, you do not have to govern it or own it or trade it. We can’t have it
all. That’s a fact. It’s not just “our” planet. Mutuality needs to replace mastery. We need
to become responsible earthlings before the Anthropocene becomes simply an obscene
blot on the geological record (Ellsworth and Kruse 2013). Geography, the guardian of
difference, can map out the long and no doubt painful road to what could be a
shimmering redemption.

[Cross-References: Place, Space, Maps, Territory, State, Economy]

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Further Reading

None

Keywords

Space, Place, Maps, Territory

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