Doreen Massey (geographer)

Career

Massey was born in Manchester and spent most of her childhood in Wythenshawe, a large council estate. She studied at Oxford and later at the University of Pennsylvania, from which she received a Masters in Regional Science. She began her career at a thinktank: the Centre for Environmental Studies (CES) in London. CES contained several key analysts of the contemporary British economy, and Massey established a working partnership with Richard Meegan, among others. CES was closed down. She was then Professor of Geography at the Open University.

Massey retired in 2009 but remained a frequent media commentator, particularly on industry and regional trends. As Professor Emerita at the Open University she continued her speaking engagements and involvement in educational TV programmes and books.

Scholarship

Doreen Massey's main fields of study are globalisation, regional uneven development, cities, and the reconceptualisation of place. Although associated with an analysis of contemporary western capitalist society, she also worked in Nicaragua, South Africa and Venezuela.

Economic geography

Her early work at CES established the basis for her 'spatial divisions of labour' theory (Power Geometry), that social inequalities were generated by the unevenness of the capitalist economy, creating stark divisions between rich and poor regions and between social classes. 'Space matters' for poverty, welfare and wealth. Over the years this theory has been refined and extended, with space and spatial relationships remaining central to her account of contemporary society.

Sense of place

While Massey has argued for the importance of place, her position accords with those arguing against essentialised or static notions, where:

Massey used the example of Kilburn High Road in north west London to exemplify what she termed a 'progressive' or 'global' sense of place, in the essay 'A Global Sense of Place'. In a Podcast interview with Social Science Space Massey talks about the idea of physical space being alive "A lot of what I’ve been trying to do over the all too many years when I’ve been writing about space is to bring space alive, to dynamize it and to make it relevant, to emphasize how important space is in the lives in which we live. Most obviously I would say that space is not a flat surface across which we walk; Raymond Williams talked about this: you’re taking a train across the landscape – you’re not traveling across a dead flat surface that is space: you’re cutting across myriad stories going on. So instead of space being this flat surface it’s like a pincushion of a million stories: if you stop at any point in that walk there will be a house with a story. Raymond Williams spoke about looking out of a train window and there was this woman clearing the grate, and he speeds on and forever in his mind she’s stuck in that moment. But actually, of course, that woman is in the middle of doing something, it’s a story. Maybe she’s going away tomorrow to see her sister, but really before she goes she really must clean that grate out because she’s been meaning to do it for ages. So I want to see space as a cut through the myriad stories in which we are all living at any one moment. Space and time become intimately connected."

Awards and Honours

♯ Doreen Massey declined the award of an Order of the British Empire (OBE)

Books