I am choosing to write a book review of Doreen Massey’s For Space[i] as her scholarship has recently been introduced to me through references and citations in other literature I’ve been reading (eg. Kim Dovey’s Becoming Places) and I feel that her work is an important aspect of place research to which I need to become intimately familiar.
Studying Massey’s theoretical perspectives put forth in this book will help me couch my interests (currently the intersecting areas of: place-identity, attribution of meaning, phenomenology, gentrification, temporal perceptions, built form and public space) within the context of capitalist neoliberal globalization. Through reading For Space, I hope to begin to understand urban power structures in a scalar relation to urban space and identity in such a way that could eventually allow me to thread the effects of capitalism on cultural subgroups of people from a national scale to that of the sidewalk space of the local bodega.
i Massey, D. (2013). Space, place and gender. John Wiley & Sons
