INTRODUCTION

Doreen Massey had a lifelong fascination with the social and environmental lives of places, lived space, the dimension of multiplicity and radical simultaneity, and the political possibilities of thinking space-time relationally and dynamically. This brought her into close collaboration with British Cultural Studies and its theories of the conjuncture. Drawing particularly on economic geography, the New Left, Althusserian Marxism, British Cultural Studies, the feminism of Luce Irigaray (among others) and later post-Heideggerian anti-essentialist theories, her work was important in inflecting these perspectives with a deep and abiding commitment to the “mattering” of space.

In this chapter, I focus on Doreen’s contributions to these crucial progressive movements in contemporary British Cultural Studies. In conjunction with her colleagues at the Open University, her writings on critical feminist geographies of place, space, environment, gender and geography have come to define the practices and goals of a conjunctural analysis for the Left, and have challenged taken-for-granted explanations of regional decline, peripheralization and inequality, the privileging of high-tech fantasies, the reworking of development logics around neoliberal economics and the domination of financialization logics and interests in framing London (and wider British) futures.

PLACE, SPACE AND POLITICS

From her position at the heart of economic geography, and throughout her academic, professional and wider social life, Doreen Massey was a key contributor and interlocutor in British Marxism, the New Left, feminism, British Cultural Studies and a series of major institutions they influenced. Like others influenced by critical readings of Marxism and postwar continental philosophy, Doreen was committed to challenging the hegemony of a temporal understanding of radical politics in favour of what she variously referred to as a relational understanding of place, dynamic concepts of space-time, non-binary concept of nature, and non-functionalist epistemologies of causality (Massey 1973, 1978, 2000b). If time was the dimension of sequences of actions and experience, space was the dimension of radical simultaneity and multiplicity. As she argued repeatedly with Ernesto Laclau, understanding change purely in temporal terms elided the complex interweaving of space and time that drove the actual content of concrete events (Massey 1995c; Mouffe 2013).