GEOGRAPHIES OF RESPONSIBILITY

GEOGRAPHIES OF RESPONSIBILITY
by
Doreen Massey

Massey, D., 2004: Geographies of responsibility. Geogr. Ann., 86

B (1): 518.
ABSTRACT. Issues of space, place and politics run deep. There
is a long history of the entanglement of the conceptualisation of
space and place with the framing of political positions. The injunction to think space relationally is a very general one and, as
this collection indicates, can lead in many directions. The particular avenue to be explored in this paper concerns the relationship
between identity and responsibility, and the potential geographies
of both.
Key words: space, place, identity, responsibility

Changing identities
Thinking space relationally, in the way we mean it
here, has of course been bound up with a wider set
of reconceptualisations. In particular it has been
bound up with a significant refiguring of the nature
of identity. There is a widespread argument these
days that, in one way or another, identities are relational. That, for instance, we do not have our beings and then go out and interact, but that to a disputed but none-the-less significant extent our beings, our identities, are constituted in and through
those engagements, those practices of interaction.
Identities are forged in and through relations
(which include non-relations, absences and hiatuses). In consequence they are not rooted or static, but
mutable ongoing productions.
This is an argument which has had its precise
parallel in the reconceptualisation of spatial identities. An understanding of the relational nature of
space has been accompanied by arguments about
the relational construction of the identity of place.
If space is a product of practices, trajectories, interrelations, if we make space through interactions
at all levels, from the (so-called) local to the (socalled) global, then those spatial identities such as
places, regions, nations, and the local and the global, must be forged in this relational way too, as internally complex, essentially unboundable in any
absolute sense, and inevitably historically changing (Massey, 1994; Ash Amin in this issue).
These theoretical reformulations have gone
alongside and been deeply entangled with political
Geografiska Annaler 86 B (2004) 1

commitments. What one might call the more general rethinking of identity engaged with a number
of currents, from a determination to challenge the
hegemonic notion of individuals as isolated atomistic entities which took on (or were assigned) their
essential character prior to social interaction,
through re-evaluations of the formation of political
identities, to the fundamental challenges presented
by second-wave feminism and by some in postcolonial studies. For these latter groups, rethinking
identity has been a crucial theoretical complement
to a politics which is suspicious of foundational essentialisms; a politics which, rather than claiming
rights for pre-given identities (women, say, or
gays, or some hyphenated ethnicity) based on assumptions of authenticity, argues that it is at least
as important to challenge the identities themselves
and thus a fortiori the relations through which
those identities have been established. It is worth
noting a number of points immediately. First, that
although there are in the wider literature many disagreements about this, and many variations in emphasis, I take identity here, along with the practices of its constitution, to be both material and discursive. Second, it might be noted that this reformulation of identity itself already implies a
different spatiality, a different geography of identities in general. Third, the political abandonment
of the security of a grounded identity in what we
might call the old sense has been difficult. The long
and fraught debates over the political stakes at issue
in the ability, or not, to mobilise the term women
are just one case in point. It has been a discussion
which entailed not only theoretical confusions, and
clashes between conceptual positions and the demands of real politics, but as if that were not
enough also huge emotional challenges and upheavals, not least about how one conceptualises
oneself. Linda McDowells paper (this issue) explores an acute situation in this regard, and draws
a clear connection between the conceptualisation
of identity and the changing demands on policy and
politics. Here, then, is another aspect of the connection between thinking relationally and the affective dimension of politics of which Nigel Thrift
5

DOREEN MASSEY

writes in this issue. It is important to mention this

here because the politics associated with the rethinking of spatial identities have been, and continue to be, equally emotionally fraught and liable to
touch on deep feelings and desires not always immediately associated with the political. Rethinking a politics of place, or nation, is an emotionally
charged issue.
But that is what thinking place relationally was
designed to do to intervene in a charged political
arena. The aim initially was to combat localist or
nationalist claims to place based on eternal essential, and in consequence exclusive, characteristics
of belonging: to retain, while reformulating, an appreciation of the specific and the distinctive while
refusing the parochial.
This then has been a theoretical engagement pursued through political entanglement, and what I
want to do in this paper is to push further this pondering over the spaces and times of identity and to
enquire how they may be connected up with the
question of political responsibility. The political location that has sparked these enquiries is London:
global city and bustling with the resources through
which the lineaments of globalisation are invented
and coordinated. This, then, is a place quite unlike
those regions considered by Ash Amin in his paper,
and in consequence the challenges it poses, both
conceptually and politically, though within the
same framework are rather different.
The question
This destabilisation and reconfiguration of the notion of identity can lead in many directions, both
conceptually and politically.
It can, on the one hand, turn us inwards, towards
an appreciation of the internal multiplicities, the
decentrings, perhaps the fragmentations, of identity. It is in this context that we consider place as
meeting place and the inevitable hybridities of the
constitution of anywhere. It is this which Ash addresses in his discussion of a politics of propinquity: the necessity of negotiating across and among
difference the implacable spatial fact of shared turf.
If places (localities, regions, nations) are necessarily the location of the intersection of disparate trajectories, then they are necessarily places of negotiation in the widest sense of that term. This is an
important shift which renders deeply problematical
any easy summoning of community either as preexisting or as a simple aim (Amin, 2002). In London, with the cultural multiplicities of its postco6

lonial global status, that is an argument of peculiar

force. Indeed, it may be argued that London/Londoners have begun to assume an identity, discursively, within the self-conception of the city, which
is precisely around mixity rather than a coherence
derived from common roots.
Now, it is perhaps in these terms, concerning the
internal construction of the identity of place, that
many of our threads of thinking about ethics have
evolved. The old question of the stranger within
the gates. Many of our inherited formulations of
ethical questions have that particular imaginative
geography: the Walled City (and who shall come
in), the question of engagement in proximity, the
question of hospitality. Jacques Derridas On Cosmopolitanism, with its consideration of open cities
(villes franches) and refuge cities (villes refuges), is
a recent example. These questions are important
and are by no means going away (Critchley and
Kearney, in the Introduction to Derrida, call them
perennial). Thinking in terms of networks and
flows, and living in an age of globalisation, refashions, but does not deny, a politics of place (see also
Low, 1997). Propinquity needs to be negotiated.
However, there is also a second geography implied by the relational construction of identity. For
a global sense of place means that any nation, region, city, as well as being internally multiple, is
also a product of relations which spread out way beyond it. In his paper Ash Amin has broached a politics of connectivity, and it is this issue which I
wish to pursue. London, as a whole, is a rich city,
certainly not a place on the wrong end of uneven
development, with huge resources and a self-declared radical mayor who has proclaimed his desire
to work towards London being a sustainable world
city. There are certainly, in principle, more choices
available to London than to the regions in the north
of England. It is a city which exudes the fact that it
is, indeed, a globally constructed place.
So, if that is the case, if we take seriously the relational construction of identity, then it poses, first,
the question of the geography of those relations of
construction: the geography of the relations
through which the identity of London, for example,
is established and reproduced. This in turn poses
the question of what is the nature of Londons social and political relationship to those geographies.
What is, in a relational imagination and in light of
the relational construction of identity, the geography of our social and political responsibility?
What, in other words, of the question of the stranger
without?
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On not opposing space and place

One of the difficulties of addressing this question
stems from the way in which, in much academic literature and in many political discourses, local
place is posited as being so much more meaningful
than space. A regular litany of words accompanies
the characteristic evocation of place; words such as
real, grounded, everyday, lived. They are
mobilised to generate an atmosphere of earthiness,
authenticity, meaning. And over and again that evocation is counterposed to space which is, in consequence, understood as somehow abstract. So Edward Casey writes, To live is to live locally, and to
know is first of all to know the place one is in
(1996, p. 18). Or again, Arif Dirlik proposes that
Place consciousness is integral to human existence (1998, p. 8). Or finally and I cite this one in
particular because they erroneously attribute the
sentiment to me Carter, Donald and Squires in
their collection called, precisely, Space and Place
state that place is space to which meaning has been
ascribed (1993, p. xii). I want to argue that this line
of argument is both intellectually untenable and politically problematical.
A first and obvious question concerns the universalising discourse in which so many of these
claims are lodged. Place is always meaningful? for
everyone everywhere? It is always a prime source
for the production of personal and cultural identity?
It is worth exploring this further.
One aspect of this universalisation of the meaningfulness of place concerns, ironically, the production of difference (and in this discourse the local is frequently invoked as the source of differentiation). Place is posited as one of the grounds
through which identity is rooted and developed.
The preceding quotations already hint at this, and
Charles Tilley makes the point directly: Personal
and cultural identity is bound up with place; a topoanalysis is one exploring the creation of self-identity through place. Geographical experience begins
in places, reaches out to others through spaces, and
creates landscapes or regions for human existence
(1994, p. 15). This feeding of place/placedness into
identity may occur both at the level of individuals
and at the level of cultures, as Tilley argues. The
establishment of place, through renaming, through
the claiming of territory and so forth, may also be
a significant stake in the establishment of political
identities. National liberation struggles have long
wrestled with this. And Arturo Escobars analysis
of the Process of Black Communities local strugGeografiska Annaler 86 B (2004) 1

gles along the Pacific Coast of Colombia argued

that they had as one of their axes of orientation a
struggle for territory: The struggle for territory is
thus a cultural struggle for autonomy and self-determination (Escobar, 2001, p. 162). Examples
abound.
Such struggles over place, and the meaningfulness in and of place, return us to the argument in the
previous section that in any even minimal recognition of the relational construction of space and of
identity, place must be a site of negotiation, and
that often this will be conflictual negotiation. This,
then, is a first move away from the universalising/
essentialising propositions implicit in some of the
evocations of the meaningfulness of place. It may
indeed, further, be a crucial political stake to challenge and change the hegemonic identity of place
and the way in which the denizens of a particular locality imagine it and thereby avail themselves of
the imaginative resources to reconstruct it. Indeed,
the process of what they call resubjectivation is an
essential tool in J.K Gibson-Grahams attempt to
work through an active politics of place in the context of globalisation. We shall return later to consider their important work in this regard. But the
point for now is that this relationship between place
and identity, in its many potential dimensions, is indeed significant if not in the manner proposed by
writers such as Casey. One implication of this is
that it matters very much how both place and
identity are conceptualised.
A second set of questions which must be posed
to the characteristic counterposition of space and
place takes us back, again, to relational space. If we
sign up to the relational constitution of the world
in other words to the mutual constitution of the local and the global then this kind of counterposition between space and place is on shaky ground.
The lived reality of our daily lives, invoked so often to buttress the meaningfulness of place, is in
fact pretty much dispersed in its sources and its repercussions. The degree and nature of this dispersal
will of course vary between individuals, between
social groups and between places, but the general
proposition makes it difficult seriously to posit
space as the abstract outside of place as lived.
Where would you draw the line around the
grounded reality of your daily life? As Ash Amin
argues in this volume, the habitual now routinely
draws in engagement at a distance. The burden of
my argument here is not that place is not concrete,
grounded, real, but rather that space global space
is so too.
7

DOREEN MASSEY

There are a number of ways into this proposition.

The work of Bruno Latour provides one of them. At
one point in We Have Never Been Modern (1993)
he asks if a railway is local or global (p. 117). His
reply is that it is neither. It is global in that in some
sense it goes around the world; you may travel on
it from Paris to Vladivostok (and the fact that this
example misses out the whole of Africa and Australasia, as well as some other places, is only a particularly clear case of globalisations very selective incorporation of the global). However, and this
is the crucial point here, the railway is also everywhere local in the form of railway workers, signals,
track, points, stations. What Latour emphasizes
wonderfully here is the groundedness, the emplacement, even of so-called global phenomena.
The same point has frequently been made by geographers such as Kevin Cox (see his 1997 collection
Spaces of Globalisation: Reasserting the Power of
the Local), and about those iconic sectors of globalisation finance and high technology. Could
global finance exist without its very definite
groundedness in that place the City of London, for
example? Could it be global without being local?
This, however, is to deal with only one part of the
evocative vocabulary of place. It is to talk of
groundedness. What I want to argue here is that this
in itself begins to highlight a terminological slippage in some of the discourses about the meaningfulness of place. To speak of groundedness is to do
just that and that alone. One important dimension
of the phenomenological position is that the meaningful relation to place is intimately bound up with
the embodied nature of perception. In other words,
it is based in the fact of groundedness, of embodiment. One direction in which to take this argument
is that every groundedness, through that very fact of
emplacement, is meaningful. A Heideggerian line
of thought might follow this thread. To do so, however, means to abandon space altogether; for there
is only place (Ort). Certainly there cannot be a dichotomy between meaningful place and a space
which is abstract.
As we have seen, however, this is a dichotomy
which is not only retained but which figures widely
in the debate about place, and particularly in the
context of globalisation. Here it must be that only
certain forms of emplacedness and embodiedness,
certain specifiable relations of situatedness, can entail meaningfulness and the creation of identity.
Thus Arturo Escobar, who earlier in his major article on this issue cited the phenomenological approach to the meaningfulness of place, writes that
8

capital operates at the local level [i.e. it is grounded] but cannot have a sense of place certainly not
in the phenomenological sense (2001, p. 165).
This is an important point embodiedness, then,
has to be on certain terms to result in meaningfulness. (Some of the more universalist phenomenological claims seem to me to begin to unravel at this
point.) And Arif Dirlik writes of the essential
placelessness of capitalism (cited in Gibson-Graham, 2002, p. 34) here, again, place must be distinguishable from simple locatedness.
Yet there are still, it seems to me, uneasinesses
in this argument which it may be important to address. Escobar, again, writes that From an anthropological perspective, it is important to highlight
the emplacement of all cultural practices, which
stems from the fact that culture is carried into places by bodies (p. 2001, 43). But then, capitalism
is a cultural practice, or at least it has its cultural
sides, and indeed these vary between places. The
vital confrontation between Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism and the continental European attempt to hold
on to a more social democratic form is one obvious
case in point. Capitalism too is carried into places
by bodies. Indeed, politically it is important that
this is recognised, in order to avoid that imagination of the economy (or the market) as a machine,
a figuring which renders it unavailable to political
debate.
My aim here is not really to take issue with authors with whom I agree on many counts but to indicate some worries about the kinds of argument
that are being mobilised about the nature of place
and the local and to suggest that there are questions
which remain unaddressed about the relations between place, embodiment and meaning.
This, however, is important to the argument here
less in terms of challenging the basis of the meaningfulness of place than in beginning to explore its
potentially wider ramifications. If space is really to
be thought relationally, and also if Latours proposition is to be taken seriously, then global space is
no more than the sum of relations, connections, embodiments and practices. These things are utterly
everyday and grounded at the same time as they
may, when linked together, go around the world.
Space is not the outside of place; it is not abstract,
it is not somehow up there or disembodied. Yet
that still leaves a question in its turn: How can that
kind of groundedness be made meaningful across
distance?
This is an issue because, certainly in Western societies, there is a hegemonic geography of care and
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GEOGRAPHIES OF RESPONSIBILITY

responsibility which takes the form of a nested set

of Russian dolls. First there is home, then perhaps
place or locality, then nation, and so on. There is a
kind of accepted understanding that we care first
for, and have our first responsibilities towards,
those nearest in. There are two qualities of this geography which stand out: it is utterly territorial, and
it proceeds outwards from the small and near at
hand.
There are many reasons for that Russian doll
geography. There is, undoubtedly and with recognition back to the preceding arguments, the still-remaining impact, in this world sometimes said to be
increasingly virtual, of material, physical proximity. There is the persistent focus on parentchild relationships as the iconic reference point for questions of care and responsibility (see Robinson,
1999 for a very insightful critique of this, and of its
effects). (This is a focus already geographically
disturbed by the numerous family relations now
as a result of migration stretched over truly global
distances.) There are all the rhetorics of territory, of
nation and of family, through which we are daily
urged to construct our maps of loyalty and of affect.
There is the fact that, in this world so often described as a space of flows, so much of our formal
democratic politics is organised territorially and
that spatial tension is at the heart of the questions
being asked in this paper. It has also been suggested
that this focus on the local, and the exclusive meaningfulness of the local, has been reinforced by postcolonialism and poststructuralism through a wariness of meta-narratives.
There are, then, many reasons for that territorial,
locally centred, Russian doll geography of care and
responsibility. None the less, it seems to me, it is
crucially reinforced by the persistence of the refrain that posits local place as the seat of genuine
meaning and global space as in consequence without meaning, as the abstract outside. Murray Low
has counterposed the relational understanding of
space and place which underlies this present volume to another powerful and influential discourse
through which, he argues, there has been a reassertion of closeness or face-to-face interaction in
various forms as a source of morality in social life
(Low, 1997, pp. 260261). He cites Bauman (1989,
1993) in this regard, and counterposes Baumans
position to the reconceptualisation of place as advocated here1 not to deny the difficulties involved
in reorienting ethical conduct and political value
away from immediate relationships and contexts,
but to insist that the draining of distanciated and
Geografiska Annaler 86 B (2004) 1

multiply mediated political and social relationships

of the possibility of embodying democracy or social justice is a key feature of the politics of place
(p. 265). I would want to open up the possibility of
an alternative politics of place which does not have
these characteristics, but the central burden of
Lows argument is correct and important. Indeed
opening up a politics of place which does not deprive of meaning those lines of connections, relations and practices, that construct place, but that
also go beyond it, is a central aim of this paper. If
that is impossible, as some of the counterpositions
of space and place would seem to imply, then how
do we maintain a wider politics? How then is it possible to respond to the challenge in John Bergers
oft-quoted comment that it is now space rather
than time that hides consequences from us?
Identity and responsibility
There are, in fact, many resources to draw on here.
One of the most striking, and one which links up
many aspects of the debate within geography, is the
work of feminist philosophers Moira Gatens and
Genevieve Lloyd. In their book Collective Imaginings (1999) they have attempted to reformulate the
notion of responsibility by thinking it through the
philosophy of Spinoza. Their Spinozistic responsibility, as they call it, has a number of characteristics which cohere with the arguments being developed here. First, this is a responsibility which is
relational: it depends on a notion of the entity (individual, political group, place) being constructed
in relation to others. Second, this is a responsibility
which is embodied in the way place is said to be
embodied. And third, this is a responsibility which
implies extension: it is not restricted to the immediate or the very local.
What concerns Gatens and Lloyd, however, is
extension in time and, in particular, present responsibility for historical events. Their specific interest
is in the potential white Australian collective responsibility towards aboriginal society for historical events. They write:
In understanding how our past continues in
our present we understand also the demands
of responsibility for the past we carry with us,
the past in which our identities are formed. We
are responsible for the past not because of
what we as individuals have done, but because
of what we are.
(Gatens and Lloyd, 1999, p. 81)
9

DOREEN MASSEY

Responsibility, in other words, derives from those

relations through which identity is constructed. My
question is: Can the temporal dimension of responsibility drawn out by Gatens and Lloyd be paralleled in the spatial and in the present? For just as
the past continues in our present (a very Bergsonian reflection) so also is the distant implicated in
our here. The notion of responsibility for the past
has led to a spate of apologies for it. Apologising
does not always amount to the same thing as taking
responsibility. But were the distance to be spatial,
and in the here and now rather than imagined as
only temporal, the element of responsibility the
requirement to do something about it would assert itself with far greater force. The identities in
question, including those of place, are forged
through embodied relations which are extended
geographically as well as historically.
I believe this can be usefully linked up, also, to
Gibson-Grahams writing in this area. Her argument is that one necessary component in the project
of re-imagining the power differential embedded
in the binaries of global and local, space and place
(p. 29) is a reformulating of local identities. For her
a central aspect of this resubjectivation is an imaginative leap in which we can learn to think not
about how the world is subjected to globalization
(and the global capitalist economy) but how we are
subjected to the discourse of globalization and the
identities (and narratives) it dictates to us (pp. 35
36; emphasis in original). As with the work of Gatens and Lloyd, I want to twist this in a slightly different direction. For while we are indeed all discursively subject to a disempowering discourse of the
inevitability and omnipotence of globalisation, materially the local identities created through globalisation vary substantially. Not all local places are
simply subject to globalisation. The nature of the
resubjectivation required, and of the responsibility
implied, in consequence also varies between places. This thread of argument will be taken up again
centrally in the next section.
The persistence of a geographical imaginary
which is essentially territorial and which focuses
on the near rather than the far is, however, also evidenced even in the work of Gatens and Lloyd. For
when they do touch upon the spatial, in this question of the construction of identities, they write that
the experience of cultural difference is now internal to a culture and they cite James Tully: Cultural
diversity is not a phenomenon of exotic and incommensurable others in distant lands. No. It is here
and now in every society (Tully, 1995, p. 11). But
10

why oppose these things? The internal hybridity of

place is incontestable. But cultural difference is implacably also very different others in very distant
lands. In our current concern for hybridity at home
we must not forget that wider geography.
Fiona Robinson has tackled some of these issues
head-on. In her book Globalizing Care: Ethics,
Feminist Theory and International Relations
(1999) she challenges the assumption that the base
model for relations of care is the family. By releasing responsibility and care from that imaginatively
localising and territorialising constraint, but at the
same time holding on to the groundedness it is said
to represent, she argues for the possibility of a more
extended relational groundedness, and thus provides yet another component for the project to rethink relations at a distance; the question of the
stranger without.
On not exonerating the local
There is one other thread which is crucial to the argument (i.e. to addressing the question of the geographies of our political responsibilities). Once
again it turns upon the troubled nature of the pairing of local/global.
There is an overwhelming tendency both in academic and political literature and other forms of
discourse and in political practice to imagine the local as a product of the global. Understanding place
as the product of wider relations has often been
read as understanding place as having no agency.
All the agency somehow lies beyond (the incoherence of this position, given the critique of the space/
place dichotomy advanced in the second section of
this paper, is evident). As Escobar characterises the
classic mantra: the global is associated with space,
capital, history and agency while the local, conversely, is linked to place, labor, and tradition as
well as with women, minorities, the poor and, one
might add, local cultures (2001, pp. 155156).
Place, in other words, local place, is figured as inevitably the victim of globalisation.
However, in recent years there has been something of a fightback on this front. The work of Gibson-Graham has been important in articulating an
argument that the local, too, has agency. She also
argues, crucially, that it is important both theoretically and politically to distinguish between various
contrasting formulations of this agency. As she
points out, even those positions most concerned to
assert the overwhelming power of the global
(where the global is a force, the local is its field of
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GEOGRAPHIES OF RESPONSIBILITY

play; the global is penetrating, the local penetrated

and transformed, p. 27), the local is not entirely
passive. In these worldviews the agency of the local
consists in moulding global forces (which arrive
from outside) to specific circumstances. Local
place, here, is the locus of the production of heterogeneity. This is its role in life. It is an endless
theme of cultural studies. Moreover, on some readings, even this agency is promptly snatched back
again since it may be argued that this kind of differentiation is just what capitalism wants: whatever
the local does will be recuperated; the global will
reign supreme. This is not only a diminished understanding of the potential of local agency; it is also, I would argue, a very diminished understanding
of spatialisation, in terms simply of inter-local heterogeneity.
Gibson-Graham, Escobar, Harcourt and many
others want to go beyond this very limited view of
local agency. For Gibson-Graham one of the critical issues here concerns the re-imagining of capital and the global away from being seamless selfconstituting singular identities, and the assertion of
the presence in their own right of other forms of
practice, other ways of organising the economic. It
is a form of re-imagination, of an alternative understanding, which she argues is an essential element
in the redistribution of the potential for agency: an
attempt to get out from under the position of thinking ones identity as simply subject to globalisation; it is a process which goes hand in hand with
inhabiting that reforming identity through engagement in embodied political practice. The stress on
the embodiedness of all this, again, is interesting.
Of her opponents, the globalists, Gibson-Graham
writes of the rejection of local politics as seeming
to emanate from a bodily state, not simply a reasoned intellectual position (p. 27). This is an arresting observation, which resonates with all those
arguments about Western sciences desire for removal from the world (the messiness of the local);
it may be, as I shall argue below, that there is also
something else at issue.
These arguments in favour of both recognising
and acting upon the potential for local agency are
extremely important and I should like to take them
off in some rather different directions. Once again
this returns us to the nature of agency.
In much of this literature the agency, or potential
agency, imputed to the local could be characterised
either in terms of resistance and fightback (i.e.
fending off in some way the global forces) or in
terms of building alternatives (itself characterised
Geografiska Annaler 86 B (2004) 1

as taking advantage of those areas of economy and

society which are not simply subject to globalisation). None of the authors whom I have cited are
arguing for a politics which simply posits the local
(good) against the global (bad).2 Nor is this a localism based on any kind of romantic essentialism of
place. It is, none-the-less, a politics which is characterised over and over again as a defence of
place.
However, if we take seriously the relational construction of space and place, if we take seriously the
locally grounded nature even of the global, and take
seriously indeed that oft-repeated mantra that the
local and the global are mutually constituted, then
there is another way of approaching this issue. For
in this imagination places are criss-crossings in
the wider power-geometries which constitute both
themselves and the global. In this view local places are not simply always the victims of the global;
nor are they always politically defensible redoubts
against the global. For places are also the moments
through which the global is constituted, invented,
coordinated, produced. They are agents in globalisation. There are two immediate implications.
First this fact of the inevitably local production of
the global means that there is potentially some purchase through local politics on wider global
mechanisms. Not merely defending the local
against the global, but seeking to alter the very
mechanisms of the global itself. A local politics
with a wider reach; a local politics on the global
and we do need to address global politics too. This,
then, is a further, different, basis for the recognition
of the potential agency of the local.
The second implication of this line of reasoning
returns us again to the central question of this paper.
If the identities of places are indeed the product of
relations which spread way beyond them (if we
think space/place in terms of flows and (dis)connectivities rather than in terms only of territories),
then what should be the political relationship to
those wider geographies of construction?
Now, this is a general proposition. However, different places are of course constructed as varying
kinds of nodes within globalisation; they each have
distinct positions within the wider power-geometries of the global. In consequence, both the possibilities for intervention in (the degree of purchase
upon), and the nature of the potential political relationship to (including the degree and nature of responsibility for), these wider constitutive relations,
will also vary. As Escobar points out and exemplifies so well, one of the significant implications of
11

DOREEN MASSEY

thinking globalisation in terms of genuinely relational space is the multiplication, and diversification, of speaking positions. For him, this suggests
above all a consideration of local cultures: one has
to move to the terrain of culture (2001, p. 165).
Gibson-Graham would add to this the very different articulations in different places of capitalist and
other forms of economy. While these things do
clearly differentiate places, what needs to be added
to them as a further source of differentiation is the
highly contrasting position of places in different
parts of the world in terms of the patterns and power
relations of their wider connectivity (a point well
argued by Eugene McCann, McCann, 2002). Put
bluntly, there is far more purchase in some places
than in others on the levers of globalisation.
It is no accident, I think, that much of the literature concerning the defence of place has come
from, or been about, either the Third World or, for
instance, deindustrialising places in the First
World. From such a perspective, capitalist globalisation does indeed seem to arrive as a threatening
external force. Indeed, in his appreciative commentary on Dirliks argument that there has been in recent years in academic writing an erasure of
place, Escobar argues that this erasure has been an
element in Eurocentrism. The argument is a very
important one:
The inquiry into place is of equal importance
for renewing the critique of eurocentrism in
the conceptualization of world regions, area
studies, and cultural diversity. The marginalization of place in European social theory of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has
been particularly deleterious to those social
formulations for which place-based modes of
consciousness and practices have continued to
be important. The reassertion of place thus
appears as an important arena for rethinking
and reworking eurocentric forms of analysis.
(Escobar, 2001, p. 141)
There are a number of points here, to take the argument further. First, and somewhat parenthetically, the very term eurocentrism here carries its own
ironies. For the argument seems to refer mainly to
the USA, as does Escobars detection of a possible
return to place through analysis of sessions at the
AAG. In contrast, in Spanish geography there is
relatively little concern for space, in the sense
meant in this discussion, but rather an overwhelming focus on territories (Garcia-Ramon, personal
12

communication). In Germany the concern with regions continues strongly. In the UK there was the
major programme of localities studies. As has been
pointed out there are notable differences between
geography in the USA and that in anglophone Europe, with non-anglophone Europe having its own
variations again (see Massey and Thrift, 2003). It is
not possible to generalise from the USA to the
whole of the First World.
Second, it is important to register that Escobar is
careful not to fall into an essentialising or simply
bounded understanding of place. (None-the-less it
is worth considering whether the kind of formulation used by Jos Bov the defence of variation
might be preferable.) And although the burden of
his article is about the defence of place, he does later broaden his formulation: it is necessary to think
about the conditions that might make the defense of
place or, more precisely, of particular constructions of place and the reorganization of place this
might entail a realizable project (Escobar, 2001,
p. 166, emphasis in the original). This expansion is
crucial.
Third, it may well be that a particular construction of place is not defensible not because of the
impracticality of such a strategy but because the
construction of that place, the webs of power relations through which it is constructed, and the way
its resources are mobilised, are precisely what must
be challenged. I am thinking here of a particular
place. As pointed out at the beginning of this meditation on the geographies of responsibility, the immediate provocation has come from trying to think
what a politics of place might look like for London.
London as a node within the power-geometries
of globalisation could hardly be more different
from those Pacific rainforest places in Colombia of
which Escobar writes, nor from some of the places
of disinvestment in which Gibson-Graham has
worked. Of course, it is internally differentiated, violently unequal and occasionally contested. But
without doubt London is also a place in which
certain important elements of capitalist globalisation are organised, coordinated, produced. This
place, along with a few others, is one of their most
important seats.
The work of Saskia Sassen (1991, and subsequently) has been of particular importance in establishing the nature and significance of those places we call global cities. From her book The Global City onwards she has stressed the strategic role
of these places as command points within the global economy, as key locations for finance and proGeografiska Annaler 86 B (2004) 1

GEOGRAPHIES OF RESPONSIBILITY

ducer services, as sites of production and innovation, and as markets. Such places, then, do not fit
easily into the generalised understanding of the local as the product of the global. It is from these local
areas that much of what we call the global stems. In
the Introduction to their edited collection Global
City-Regions (2001), Allen Scott and colleagues allude to the same point a number of times the enormous resources concentrated into these cities
which are mobilised to produce and coordinate
globalisation: they function as essential spatial
nodes of the global economy and as distinctive political actors on the world stage (p. 11). Global cities, then, are not only outcomes of globalisation.
Moreover, it is the very fact of globalisation, the increasing degree of spatial dispersion, which has
been reinforcing of their centrality (Sassen, 1991;
Scott, et al. 2001). There is a virtuous circle in
which these cities are key.
It is also key to Sassens particular argument that
the various lines of coordination and control cannot
just be assumed (from the size of the cities, say, or
from the location there of banks and corporations
and international regulatory institutions); they
must be produced and continually maintained.
Thus: A key dynamic running through these various activities and organizing my analysis of the
place of global cities in the world economy is their
capability for producing global control (p. 6);
there is a new basic industry in the production of
management and control operations, of the highly
specialised services needed to run the world economy, of new financial instruments (p. 14). (One
might add political and ideological rhetorics, cultural constructions and symbolisms.) She writes of
the practice of global control (p. 325; emphasis in
original). This emphasis on production is significant in two ways. First, as Sassen herself demonstrates, it grounds the process of globalisation, and
it grounds it in place: a focus on production does
not have as its unit of analysis the powerful actors,
be they multinational corporations or government,
but the site of production in this case, major cities
(p. 325). What these cities bring together is more
than just the peak organisations of globalisation; it
is also a huge complexity of affiliated and subsidiary institutions. Place, one might say, very clearly
matters.
If we now bring to these arguments of Sassen
and others about the nature of global cities such as
London the reflections on the relationship between
identity and responsibility posited by Gatens and
Lloyd, a new line of argument emerges about the
Geografiska Annaler 86 B (2004) 1

potential nature of local, or place-based, politics.

In understanding the formation of that part of its
identity which is as a financially elite global city
(and this is the aspect of its identity most stressed
by the citys planners and policy-makers, not to
mention the City itself), we understand also the
demands of responsibility for those relations with
other parts of the world through which this identity
is formed.
Moreover, the second significance of Sassens
emphasis on the production (rather than just the assumption) of global control in various forms is that
it also points to its lack of inevitability. It can be intervened in. There is a possibility of politics. This
is an argument made by John Allen (2003) in his
work on power. And in specifying further the possibilities for intervention, the various potential political avenues open to taking responsibility for this
identity as a global city, it would also be necessary,
as Allen argues, to disaggregate and characterise
much more clearly the ways in which the accumulated resources of London are in fact mobilised into
distinct modes of power.
This, then, would be a local politics that took seriously the relational construction of space and
place. It would understand that relational construction as highly differentiated from place to place
through the vastly unequal disposition of resources. This is particularly true with regard to the specific phenomenon of capitalist globalisation. The
mobilisation of resources into power relations between places is also highly differentiated, and a local politics of place must take account of that.
Gibson-Graham writes of her antagonists the
globalists that their interest in globalisation is to
understand it, expose it, and, hopefully, transform
it, but they are not attracted to the local as a site of
realistic challenge and possibility (p. 28). Her own
strategy is to argue for a specifically local politics
and indeed to criticize others, such as Dirlik, when
it seems that the local may be valued less in itself
than as a potential base for wider actions. I am trying to argue something different again: that one implication of the very inequality inherent within capitalist globalisation is that the local relation to the
global will also vary, and in consequence so will the
coordinates of any potential local politics of challenging that globalisation. Moreover, challenging
globalisation might precisely in consequence
mean challenging, rather than defending, certain
local places.
Indeed, it seems to me that to argue for the defence of place in an undifferentiated manner is in
13

DOREEN MASSEY

fact to maintain that association of the local with

the good and the vulnerable to which both Escobar
and Gibson-Graham quite rightly object. It contributes to a persistent romanticisation of the local.
Gibson-Graham writes of the difficulties of overcoming an imagination in which the global is inevitably imbued with more power and agency than
the local. In most discourses of globalisation this
criticism is absolutely spot-on. It is even more so if
the local place is London, Tokyo or New York.
What I am concerned with here is a persistent exoneration of the local. It takes the form not only of
a blaming of all local discontents on external global
forces, and a concomitant understanding of local
place in entirely positive terms, but also of understanding globalisation itself as always produced
somewhere else.
Bruce Robbins, in his book Feeling Global
(1999, p. 154), muses ironically upon some USAbased political struggles around globalisation:
One distinctive feature is that capitalism is attacked only or primarily when it can be identified with the global. Capitalism is treated as
if it came from somewhere else, as if Americans derived no benefit from it as if
American society and American nationalism
were among its pitiable victims . By refusing to acknowledge that these warm insides
are heated and provisioned by that cold outside, these avowedly anticapitalist critics allow the consequences of capitalism to disappear from the national sense of responsibility.
Perhaps this difficulty of looking at ourselves, at our
own, and our own localitys, complicity and compliance, is another element in Gibson-Grahams
characterisation of the rejection of local politics as
visceral. Certainly one could make about London,
and some of Londons professedly progressive politics, the same argument that Robbins makes about
some of the anticapitalism of the USA.
Theoretically, conceptually, this political stance
accords with a notion of capitalist globalisation as
somehow up there. The evocation of a placeless
capitalism can lead all too easily to an erasing from
the imagination of the places in which capitalism
(and thus globalisation) is very definitely embedded;3 those places such as the City of London
in which capitalism has accumulated the resources
essential to the mobilisation of its power. This indeed is an erasure of place which is politically disabling.
14

Indeed, there is a similar puzzle in Dirliks wider

argument that the survival of place-based cultures
will be ensured only when the globalisation of the
local compensates for the localisation of the global.
He means this, I think, in both social and conceptual terms (see Escobar, 2001, p. 163; Gibson-Graham, 2002, p. 34). But as Gibson-Graham points
out in relation to development, this is a curious
comment, given that development is now widely
recognized as a local project of particular Western economies and regions that very successfully
became globalized (2002, p. 55). An exactly parallel point may be made about the long history of
capitalism and its current forms in globalisation, or
about formulations such as global culture overpowers local cultures (Escobar, 2001, p. 144, in a
commentary on Castells and Dirlik). For writers in
the USA and Western Europe in particular this is to
be blind to the local roots of the global, to understand in classic fashion the dominant local as
being global/universal.
This imagination of capitalism/globalisation being somehow up there has interesting parallels
also with that notion of power, or the resources of
power, as being everywhere. As John Allen points
out, this is an imagination which makes political
challenge particularly difficult (2003, p. 196). It is
important that we analyse and recognise both the
specific forms of power at issue in any particular
case and the specific locations of its enabling resources.
In the ongoing struggle to disrupt the binaries of
local and global, Gibson-Graham writes of the
practices of resubjectivation, a set of embodied interventions that attempt to confront and reshape the
ways in which we live and enact the power of the
global (p. 30). This re-imagination of local positioning is, she argues, absolutely crucial because it
addresses the deep affective substrate of our subjection to globalization (p. 30). Such a re-imagination is indeed vital to any sense of empowerment,
but, in certain locations within the unequal powergeometries of capitalist globalisation, resubjectivation must include also a recognition of the responsibilities which attach to those relations and
aspects of our identity including those of our
places through which we, and our places, have
been constructed.
Perhaps the most crucial aspect of the dimension
we call space is that it is the dimension of multiplicity, of the more-than-one (Massey, 1999). One
vital element that this insight gives us is the insistence, even within globalisation, on a plurality of
Geografiska Annaler 86 B (2004) 1

GEOGRAPHIES OF RESPONSIBILITY

positionalities. Included within that, and crucial to

the dynamics of the production of inequality, is the
recognition that not all places are victims and that
not all of them, in their present form, are worth defending.
Indeed, it is precisely taking responsibility for
challenging them that should be a political priority.
Relational politics beyond a global city
London as a global city is certainly by no means
a victim of globalisation. It also, at the time of writing (2003), has a mayor committed to shifting the
nature and perception of this place. Ken Livingstones declared aim, in numerous statements, is to
turn London into a different kind of global city.
This then is a spacetime conjunction (a progressive force at the political head of a powerful node
within the relations of globalisation) which could
be seized for inventing a rather different politics of
place.
There are, of course, many radical groups working in London but I am concentrating here on the
politics of the local state specifically. This is because this is a local state with serious potential to
rearticulate the meaning of this place, to recharge
its self-conception, its understood identity, with a
different kind of politics. Kens statements give evidence of this intention, and the previous period of
London government under his leadership gives evidence that the potential is realisable. The GLC
(Greater London Council) of the early 1980s was
one of the key foci of opposition to the government
of Margaret Thatcher. It was, in other words, a key
opponent of the national government which did
more than any other to mould the national economy, the major institutions of the international economy, and the national consciousness, into forms
which favoured neoliberalism. In return for its opposition, Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC.
When Ken was re-elected, with Thatcher long gone
but with Tony Blairs government having picked up
the baton of neoliberalism, his opening words on
accepting the result were: As I was saying when I
was so rudely interrupted fourteen years ago.
There is a real question, then, already hanging in
the air, of how the politics of opposition to neoliberalism will be continued.
It must also be recognised that in this term of office much has indeed been done from a doughty
if unsuccessful battle against the governments tortuous privatisation of Londons Underground, to
the organisation of a congestion charge on vehicles
Geografiska Annaler 86 B (2004) 1

in the city centre, to a whole range of measures

against racism and celebratory of the capitals hybridity. This last measure continues a longer characteristic of the capital and of a range of social
movements within it. The place is most certainly
riven with racism (the murder of Stephen Lawrence
being an iconic moment) but one strong aspect of
its self-identity is none-the-less constructed around
a positive valuing of its internal mixity. To me, this
renders even more stark the persistent apparent oblivion of London and Londoners to the external relations, the daily global raiding parties of various
sorts, the activity of finance houses and multinational corporations, on which the very existence of
the place, including its mixity, depends.
The London Plan gives evidence that this oblivion is largely characteristic also of Londons new
governing council. The Plan, and its range of supporting documents, understands Londons identity
primarily as being a global city. Moreover, this in
turn is presented primarily as a function of Londons position within global financial markets and
related sectors. This is presented as fact, and also as
an achievement. The Plan presents no critical analysis of the power relations which have had to be
sustained for this position to be built and maintained. It does not follow these relations out across
the world. Only in one (important) respect is this
question of the nature of this relational construction
of this aspect of Londons identity held up to scrutiny and investigated further the question of the
demands on natural resources, and the capitals environmental footprint. Quite to the contrary the
Plan has as its central economic aim the building up
of London as a specifically financial global city. In
its consideration of this role, and of this strategy,
the Plan fails to recognise both Londons huge resources and their historical and current mobilisation into power relations with other places, and the
subordination of other places and the global inequalities on which this metropolis depends and
upon which so much of its wealth and status have
been built. It does not question, for instance, the human resources on which it draws to enable its reproduction which range from nurses from Africa,
badly needed on that continent, and graduates from
the rest of the UK (thus draining those regions of
one element in their potential regeneration). Such
relations are riven with political ambiguities and
raise difficult issues which any exemplary global
city should want to address openly and directly.
Furthermore, when the London Plan does explicitly address relations with elsewhere, the analysis
15

DOREEN MASSEY

is pervaded by anxiety about competition with other places, in particular Frankfurt as an alternative financial centre. This form of self-positioning represents a significant imaginative failure which closes
down the possibility of inventing an alternative politics in relation to globalisation.4
Had that closure not been imposed, all kinds of
alternative politics and policies towards neoliberal
globalisation might have been proposed. They
could have raised to consciousness, opened up to
debate, even disturbed a little, Londons current position as promoter and seat of coordination of that
formation.5
For instance, and posing the least political challenge to the hegemonic order, there could have
been a far broader and more imaginative sectoral
definition of Londons claim to global city status.
The existing narrowness of the current definition is
probably the strategic aspect of the Plan which has
been most subject to criticism, and from a whole
range of political directions (Spatial Development
Strategy, 2002). A wider sectoral definition, following some of Londons other global connections
(other than finance, that is), would also have had
very different implications, both socially and spatially, within the metropolis itself, broadening the
growth potential and the economic benefits away
from the Square Mile and its ever-spreading area of
influence and from the relative elite of the financial
sectors. There is little doubt that the current narrow
focus is an element in the continuous reproduction
of poverty and inequality within the urban area.
Such a broadening of the meaning of global
city would, moreover, be but one element in a necessary re-imagining of the whole of the metropolitan economy. London is far more mixed than the
Plan allows; indeed in their mammoth study Working Capital, (2002), Buck, et al. having demonstrated this point empirically, go on to argue that
complexity and diversity are precisely crucial
strengths of Londons economy, strengths which
could be placed in jeopardy by an over-concentration on finance.6
It might also be possible, however, to mount a
more explicit questioning of, and challenge to, the
current terms of neoliberal globalisation. Alternative globalisations could be supported. The GLC of
the 1980s, for instance, gave aid in a variety of
forms to the building of trade union internationalism. Or there could be a programme of support for
fair trade associations both for their day-to-day operation and for the debates which they aim to stimulate. Other suggestions have been made of build16

ing in various ways, both economically and culturally, on the global links embedded in Londons ethnic complexity. Twenty years ago huge controversy
was aroused by Ken Livingstones statements
about Irish politics. The capital city should not
have a foreign policy, shouted most of the newspapers. Yet London has a huge population of Irish
descent. Irish politics are alive in the streets of the
city, in certain areas in particular. To pretend that
the boundaries which enclose the right to vote also
enclose political influence and interests is indeed to
pretend. External interests are already present,
through multinational capital, through social and
cultural networks, through political organisations
which do not stop at the boundaries of the city
(Low, 1997). To make such issues at least open to
debate would be to contribute further to local governments being genuinely political rather than (apparently) merely a matter of administration (see
Ash Amins paper, this issue). London ranks as the
second city in the world (after Brussels) for the
presence of international non-governmental organizations (Glasius, et al. 2003); surely the issues
with which they engage could legitimately be a part
of political debate in the city. Or again, perhaps a
fuller recognition of the co-constitution of relations
of power could be embodied in collaborative, rather than competitive, relations with other places.
(Phil Hubbard, 2001, has written about this possibility more generally.) In particular, there might be
collaboration, around issues of globalisation, with
other Left-led cities.
It would be disingenuous to claim that a bundle
of strategies such as these would on their own do
much to alter the dynamics of the current form of
globalisation. They would certainly make some
difference in their own right. But one of their more
important effects would be to stimulate a public debate on Londons place within current globalisation, to provoke awareness of the capitals conditions of existence. And conditions of existence are
what Gatens and Lloyd are referring to when they
rethink the concept of responsibility through a recognition of the relationality of identity. To adapt
their phraseology to refer to geography rather than
history: We are responsible to areas beyond the
bounds of place not because of what we have done,
but because of what we are. A re-imagining of Londons identity in these terms, a re-recognition,
would be very similar to what Gibson-Graham
calls for as a first step of resubjectivation, but in
this case it would be empowering in a wholly different sense. Sassen has argued, indeed, that global
Geografiska Annaler 86 B (2004) 1

GEOGRAPHIES OF RESPONSIBILITY

cities are rich sites for the development of transnational identities (Sassen, 1991, p. 218). Such cities
help people experience themselves as part of global non-state networks as they live their daily
lives; and cities and the networks that bind them
function as an anchor and an enabler of cross-border struggles (p. 217). Sassens concern in this
work was to examine struggles within global cities,
but her arguments hold out potential also for a political recognition of the international interdependence of those cities. Places, though, are not themselves in any simple sense agents, and this is one
of the troubling threads that runs through some of
the literature referred to in the previous section. All
of my arguments work against place as some kind
of hearth of an unproblematic collectivity. Indeed,
counter-globalisers within London, and the kinds
of strategies advocated here, precisely open antagonisms which cut through this place. Londoners
are located in radically contrasting and unequal positions in relation to todays globalisation. The political argument should be about how those small
and highly differentiated bits of all of us which position us as Londoners give rise to responsibility
towards the wider relations on which we depend.
And that London voice is a powerful one. In the
past it has been a subversive voice, and it could be
so again.
My argument in this paper, though, has not been
only about London. It is a general one. Certainly
place can be a political project, as Gibson-Graham
put it, but a real recognition of the relationality of
space points to a politics of connectivity and a politics whose relation to globalisation will vary dramatically from place to place. Challenge to the current construction and role of a place may sometimes
be a more appropriate strategy than defence. And it
may be necessary to try to develop a politics which
looks beyond the gates to the strangers without.
Doreen Massey
Department of Geography
Faculty of Social Sciences
Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
England
Notes
1. He is citing Massey, 1994.
2. Although Gibson-Graham is arguing for a local as opposed
Geografiska Annaler 86 B (2004) 1

3.

4.
5.
6.

to an extensive politics (see the critique of Dirlik, mentioned

above). This is not the position being argued in this paper.
Just to clarify this, Dirliks use of place here is a quite confined one but, as I have argued above, this can lead to its
own difficulties. Moreover, places such as the City, the
very hearths of an international capitalism and places cultivated to exude that status and to maintain a monopoly position over it, are indeed also places in that very narrow
sense (see here the work of Michael Pryke; Linda McDowell; Nigel Thrift).
There are also questions to be raised about Londons relations to the rest of the UK. These are not discussed in this
paper, but see Amin, et al., 2003.
Only a few indications will be given here.
It is also more than a question of diversity since Londons
economy is also a site of clashing trajectories between different elements of capital. The London Industrial Strategy
of the 1980s GLC presented a view of the London economy
which was radically different from that in the current Plan.

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