GaWC Research Bulletin 117

Gateways into GaWC

This Research Bulletin has been published in I Douglas, R Huggett and C Perkins (eds) (2007) Companion Encyclopedia of Geography 2nd ed. London: Routledge, pp. 57-69.

Please refer to the published version when quoting the paper.

(Z)

Place as Network

R.G. Smith

"The town is the correlate of the road. The town exists only as a function of circulation and of circuits; it is a singular point on the circuits which create it and which it creates. It is defined by entries and exits; something must enter it and exit from it. It imposes a frequency. It effects a polarization of matter, inert, living or human; it causes the phylum, the flow, to pass through specific places, along horizontal lines. It is a phenomenon of transconsistency, a network, because it is fundamentally in contact with other towns"

Deleuze & Guattari (1986: 195-196)

In 1931 Henry C (Harry) Beck created a map of London’s Underground tube network. Beck’s now iconic subterranean map - still the template for today’s journey-planner and copied around the world - is interesting to a geographer because it creates a London that is geographically different to the London one conventionally encounters above ground. The comical travel writer Bill Bryson (1995: 54) writes;

“Here is an amusing trick you can play on people …. Take them to Bank Station and tell them to make their way to Mansion House. Using Beck’s map … they will gamely take a Central Line train to Liverpool Street, change to a Circle Line train heading east and travel five more stops. When eventually they get to Mansion House they will emerge to find they have arrived at a point 200 feet further down the same street …. Now take them to Great Portland Street and tell them to meet you at Regent’s Park (that’s right, same thing again!), and then to Temple Station with instructions to rendezvous at Aldwych. What fun you can have!”

At the heart of Beck’s design is an abandonment of cartographic conventions - of street-level topography - in favour of a sequential and non-scalar topology. In other words, Beck realised that a passenger could be moved around the network by making him or her follow a given sequence of stations, a sequence that has relative autonomy from the physical geography of the city above ground. Furthermore, Beck played with his map’s scale, with the proximate and the remote, drawing his map as it would appear through a convex mirror: outlying stations appearing near to each other and those in central London appearing further from each other. Beck’s map is important because it is analogous with the global world we live in. Globalization is made through the formation of networks, and those networks often do not correspond directly with ‘real’ geography, the kind of geography you were perhaps taught at school, or possess as ‘common sense’, or take-for-granted: our global world is no longer a configuration of fixed positions, neatly scalar, a Euclidean and Cartesian space, indeed it is now only on obsolete maps that places retain an objective shape. We need to avoid falling into the trap of somehow reading Beck’s map as ‘imaginary’ and in contradiction to the ‘real’ above-ground geography of London if we are to begin to understand places as networks.

Beck’s map is just a starting point in our rethinking of places as networks because a non-Euclidean and non-Cartesian topological take on place as network has numerous consequences for how we understand the world’s geography as a crumpled spatial configuration (see Smith, 2003a). Two decades ago Peter Cook (1986: 436) wrote:

“My walkman is on my head for the whole of my weekly London-Frankfurt commute. I can’t remember where I bought the tape. I wave on the escalator to friends at both ends. I select to eat Italian in Frankfurt and Indian in London, have heavy discussions in one and witty discussions in the other. In the late 20 th-century city I can fuzz out my view from the bus window or choose to look. I choose certain indulgences in the late 20 th-century city. Others choose completely other sets of indulgences. They switch in or out on a different set of criteria. Isn’t it funny that we occasionally overlap …”

Perhaps unwittingly Cook here is making an important point about our global world: namely that, your world is just one of many parallel worlds. Latour (1997: 3) explains how in our global world there is no summation as such, no coherence, no longer is there one map for all;

“I can be one metre away from someone in the next telephone booth, and be nevertheless more closely connected to my mother 6000 miles away; an Alaskan reindeer might be ten metres away from another one and they might be nevertheless cut off by a pipeline of 800 miles that make their mating for ever impossible; my son may sit at a school with a young Arab of his age but in spite of this close proximity in first grade they might drift apart in worlds that become at later grades incommensurable; a gas pipe may lie in the ground close to a cable television glass fiber and nearby a sewage pipe, and each of them will nevertheless continuously ignore the parallel worlds lying around them”

This is our global world – increasingly Hobbesian with no ‘Leviathan’ or other such unifying figure - a world where proximity, propinquity and contiguity count for less and less in terms of what and whom we connect to. People in particular networks (e.g. bankers working and living in a global city, the super rich, a Pakistani living in Leicester) are often more connected to one another, even when half a world away, than to people who are far more spatially proximate to them (i.e. the near can be distant, and vice-versa). In short, with globalisation places have a topology of numerous parallel – sometimes intersecting – networks that do not necessarily correspond to a metric geography of stable and well defined distances.

Having said all that however, almost nothing has been written about places as networks, let alone the distinctive topologies of networked places. Those writers that have mentioned networks in their thinking about places have by-and-large tended to conceptualise places and networks separately: places are treated as in networks, as fixed, rather than as constituted by networks themselves that are constantly in movement. To move towards a topological conceptualisation of places as networks this chapter will develop its argument in the following sequence. First, the ideas of two key theorists of globalisation - Doreen Massey and Saskia Sassen - will be discussed. Both authors are interesting because whilst they argue for a topological take on globalisation, on global networks, they nevertheless - like Manuel Castells - conceptualise places as in networks, and so ultimately see places or nodes (usually privileged ones: key points such as global cities, world cities, international financial centres etc.) as apart from networks. Second, ideas from poststructuralism, actor-network theory (ANT), and non-representational theory (NRT) will be mobilised to outline an alterative way of thinking about relations, connections and globalisation that enables a conceptualisation of places as networks: a way of thinking about Place that rejects the very idea of making any distinction at all between places and networks and so any need for the preposition in. Finally, my rejection of the ontological category ‘place’, to rethink place as network is mobilised to illustrate how networked places are enacted and relational effects.

PLACE IN NETWORK

Doreen Massey is a widely cited writer on Place and globalisation having written on the topic throughout the 1990s (1993, 1994, 1995, 1999). Indeed, Massey has written a lot about Place and so let us just examine one of her specific arguments about the different places of different people in globalisation. In her writings she is keen to note the inequalities between individuals and groups in globalisation and time-space compression (see 1993: 61) [Massey's (1993) ideas developed as a critique of Harvey's (1989) idea of 'time-space compression'] She argues that the numerous asymmetries (what she calls power-geometries) of time-space compression are a product of control by some (those with wealth and power) over movement and communication. Massey is consistent in her argument. For example, in 1999 she writes that;

"the space-time of the banker zapping in and around with an internationalised set of contacts to Silicon Valley and Tokyo, is different from the space-time of the beggar who has connections to the village and the countryside beyond and who goes home to a very different housing area" (page 77).

In broader terms what are counterpoised and presented by Massey as incommiscible are: First, the relational geographies of the transnational professional class who produce and circulate through a seemingly rapidly expanding network of global and world cities; and, second the relational geographies of the excluded and marginalized whom are cut-off from the glamorous side of neo-liberal global networks to participate in quite different networks altogether. In short, Massey is concerned with the inequalities between the different flows and interconnections of globalisation. Different people find themselves in different space-times and so are locked into "international or wider connections in different ways" (1999: 77).

Earlier in 1993 Massey made a similar argument;

"For different social groups and different individuals are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections. The point concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn't, although that is an important element of it; it is also about power in relation to the flows and the movement. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway-differentiated mobility: some are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, other's don't; some are more on the receiving end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it" (page, 61)

Her argument about this 'highly complex social differentiation' is illustrated through examples. She identifies four groups that are more or less mobile, and more or less in control: First, highly mobile transnational elites, 'wired' through hi-tech communications, and able to take advantage of time-space compression; Second, economic migrants who also move a lot but are restricted by some national borders; Third, poor UK pensioners living in high-crime inner cities who are scared to leave their homes, but are consumers of goods and images from around the world; Fourth, poor favela residents in Brazil who contribute to globalisation though football, music and dance, but nevertheless remain imprisoned and impoverished through time-space compression. Massey is keen to point to the differences between groups, and how some groups have power over others; "the mobility and control of some groups can actively weaken other people" (1993: 62). However, whilst Massey is surely right to point to the idea that these groups – whilst existing in parallel worlds – might nevertheless be connected, she never quite reaches the idea that people in different social groups, and perhaps in different places, are within the same asymmetrical networks.

Saskia Sassen is famous for her research on global cities (2000a, 2001) and has started to try to think about the complexity of global cities;

“In order to begin to understand what our large cities are about today and in the near future – in order to see what constitutes their complexity – it matters that we recognize the interconnections between urban forms that present themselves as unconnected” (Sassen, 2003: 117)

Her argument is quite simply that in our consideration of global cities more people need to be included and valued;

"The top end of the corporate economy - the highly paid professionals and the corporate towers that project engineering expertise and precision - is far easier to recognize as necessary for an advanced economic system than are truckers and other industrial service workers, or maids and nannies, even though all of them are a necessary ingredient" (2003: 117)

In short, Sassen recognizes that all these people are in the same network so highlighting the asymmetries within networks rather than just between networks (as with Massey). Clearly both Massey and Sassen have - in their own ways - moved the globalisation debate forward. However, both authors treatment of place in their accounts of globalisation is still problematic: both suggest that places are intersections or nodes.

Sassen in particular has tended to privilege nodes (the global cities, world cities, and international financial centres) rather than links or networks in her accounts of globalisation and its consequences. More recently she has been convinced by the arguments of some urban geographers’ (Beaverstock et al., 1999, 2000, 2003) that with globalisation more attention needs to be paid to the links, the relations, the connections and networks between cities: and in her work attention is now duly paid to the world’s urban networks as a whole, not just to the attributes of certain cities, places or nodes (see Sassen, 2000b, 2002). However, whilst this move to considering networks as well as nodes is the most important recent advance in urban studies, it is still not enough (see Smith, 2005). Dematteis (2001: 113) summarises this now standard approach in global urban studies which is in fact a limit to current thought:

“In a world dominated and controlled by networks of interaction and global flows, many of the assumptions upon which the territorial conception of cities was founded are increasingly fading away. … the key break with the past, lies with the fact that while previously the city was thought of as a primary, taken-for-granted entity – stable in time – it can now only be envisioned as one possible, deliberate construction: a local geographical order born out of the turbulence of global flows and with which it must interact in order to continue to exist”

In other words, the argument is that globalisation throws previous settled conceptualisations of place into doubt. Previous accounts that thought of place as bounded and consequently to some extent or another outside of the myriad of connections and networks that constitute globalisation are redundant. However, that is not to say that the world is now somehow place-less but rather that with globalisation place can no longer be thought of as bounded, self-contained, coherent, settled, a territorial package. Places – so the argument goes – should now be conceptualised as intersections or nodes interacting with networks: perhaps the most famous proponent of this style of thought is Manuel Castells (1996) with his idea of the network society (for a critique see Smith, 2003b). However, it is my contention that we now need to go even further than what Dematteis suggests is de rigueur: to move on to consider places as networks, not as fixed permanencies (somehow outside of networks) that are increasingly linked together through networks. Indeed, we need to abolish the distinction between interior and exterior, place and network, altogether if we are to fully appreciate the networked and topological organization of place.

PLACE AS NETWORK

“A concept … should express an event rather than an essence”

Deleuze (1995: 25)

“A dictionary would begin as of the moment when it no longer provided the meanings of words but their tasks”

Bataille (1995: 51)

Place is traditionally viewed, with space and environment, as central to the project of human geography. It should be no surprise then that a great deal has been written on Place, with some writers being particularly noted for their contributions to blazing new paths (e.g. for a recent overview see Cresswell 2004). There are many key thinkers on Place (Heidegger, Relph, Tuan etc.), but none of these thinkers provide an account of place as network, or even provide us with a starting point for thinking about places as networks. However, an exception is Thrift (1999) who stands out as an author on Place because he has started to forge a dynamic non-signifying sense of place through his development of a NRT. In developing his NRT take on Place Thrift’s concern has been to emphasise processes, events, performances and practices in the making of places as networks, rather than to focus on the interpretation and representation of place which has been the predominant concern of cultural geography. For Thrift places are alive, they are made of relations that are constantly being performed, places are networks.

Consequently, my starting point for thinking about places as networks will be NRT and the philosophies of poststructuralism and ANT from which NRT was in part born – precisely because these intellectual movements are concerned with relations, connections, practices, performances, networks. However, these approaches also offer much more to a rethinking of place as network. Most writing on Place is, has in one way or another, been concerned with the essence of Place, but poststructuralism, ANT and NRT are different because they offer a way of thinking about Place as event rather than essence. In other words, these philosophies are ones that guide you towards eschewing pure, bloodless, lifeless Platonic accounts of places (definitions, formulas, essences) to pay attention to the spacing and timing of places as events, practices, performances, relations, connections and networks. In other words, understanding places as networks is to be Deleuzian rather than Platonic. Indeed, places as networks can be conceptualised as Bodies-without-Organs where, if one were to invoke Shakespeare’s Prospero from The Tempest (1968), or literally quote Marx & Engels from Manifesto of the Communist Party (1965: 37) [where in the German the word ‘solid’ reads as the ‘privileged and established’], “all that is solid melts into air”. This idea is taken up in Smith (in press) where the privileged and established power of world and global cities is presented as distributed, decentred, and relational. Indeed, nothing is solid – with poststructuralism there is no distinction between process and thing – there are only transitory hardenings, changeable (not inevitable) political attempts to regulate flows.

How we conceptualise key ideas in human geography really does matter and that is why some geographers (e.g. see Allen, 2003, 2004; Amin, 2004; Amin & Thrift, 2002; Doel, 1999; Doel & Hubbard, 2002; Smith, 2003a, 2003b; Thrift, 2003; Whatmore, 2002) have been developing what might be called a new spatial grammar through an engagement with ideas from poststructuralism, ANT and NRT to rethink space, time, scale, identity, environment, and power. This chapter is a contribution to that endeavour, to propose a radical new direction for conceptualising Place. In other words, this chapter is aligned with current efforts in critical social theory to undo established habits of thought (conceptual maps) that no longer – if they ever did – match current global realities. My argument is for a relational rather than a representational understanding of place (see Table 1).

One of the key achievements of poststructuralist theory – which has shaped both ANT and NRT - has been an undoing of many of the dualisms that have shaped critical social theory. Poststructuralism is a purely materialist approach – naked without even a fig-leaf of ideology or any of the other mumbo-jumbo that has cluttered modern social science (e.g. class consciousness or other such essentialisms). Elsewhere (Smith, 2003a, 2003b) an argument for a shift from a topographical to a topological perspective was advanced, as the binary of global and local was undone to argue for actant-networks and against an ontology based on geographical scale. That argument is extended here by undoing the separation of place and/in network. A poststructuralist-driven relational perspective is always aware that places are not somehow made a priori, rather any place is always travelling without moving (toing and froing, stuttering and stammering, or voyaging in place as Deleuze would say) as it is co-constructed with numerous other humans and non-humans. Place, like space and time (see Smith, 2003b), is not passive and neutral but is constantly becoming made, unmade, and remade. In other words, dualisms are irrelevant for thinking effectively about geographies of globalisation. It is not the case that place is somehow outside of actant-networks and then becomes incorporated into forever combining and recombining networks, but is rather actively co-constructed through connections and relations. From this perspective both global and local, abstract network (space) and concrete place, are redundant categories because places are actively co-constructed through actant-networks which are always distanciated and ‘concrete, grounded, and real’ because they are a product of connections, relations, practices and performances.

Previously (Smith, 2003a, 2003b) a topological spatial formation emerged from an outlining of the co-relation of space and time as multiple (coherently or incoherently related) and constructed through networks with elsewhere, as always undergoing a series of transformations, translations and transductions in the process of becoming made, unmade and remade, as always incomplete and in movement. Thus, through an anti-essentialist and relational poststructuralist perspective place can now be conceptualised as a formless amorphous coacervate made up of all kinds of relations and movements: a hybrid and porous unbounded space of flows, always becoming and replete with loose ends and possibilities. Place can now be imagined as folding, refolding, and unfolding through a hinge logic, as a rhizome: place as network is a plane of immanence. The rhizome means that places are not points or nodes in a network, where our task would be to ‘join up the dots’ so to speak, but to realise that it makes no sense to even distinguish between nodes and links, as all is lines of flight across the manifold. Places as networks are never given, ready-made, or preformed, they are always becoming and performed.

Let me be frank, the argument is not that place-local has been displaced or replaced by network-space-global, but rather that everything is folded together: globalisation is topological in organisation and place is an effect of relations.

PLACE AS RELATIONAL EFFECT

Reporting on a visit to Istanbul Baudrillard (2001) contends that there is something about that city which is special, a quality that is certainly not being erased by globalisation. Baudrillard (2001: 40) writes that,

"The star system is one of the effects of globalisation. And it applies not just to film stars and politicians, but to cities too. Looking beyond the concentration of economic and demographic forces that characterises all cities that can be said to be 'global', we must ask wherein lies the singularity of some modern metropolises, what it is that makes them world cities and that, even boundless as they are, makes them resistant to globalisation. It's to do with fame, not simply political and economic power"

According to Baudrillard something about Istanbul's culture (not the museums or official heritage sites that are a part of globalization) resists its disappearance into the planetary conurbation, the mental diaspora of networks, the virtual world city as Virilio (1997) puts it.

For Baudrillard, cities are not becoming homogenised and absorbed into the networks (or flows, if you like) of globalisation. Baudrillard is not one of those who fetishizes the (surely dystopian) ideal of a truly global or world city, one who tries to sell the exaggerated narrative that the city to end all cities is the city network, a planetary horizontal conurbation of multiple networks, which produces - to invoke Relph - a common city of "non-places and soulless urban spaces" (Baudrillard, 2001: 40). Rather, Baudrillard points towards a different analysis all-together, a different definition of a global city, when he draws our attention to the 'elective affinities' between cities. He writes that, "A truly fascinating city shares its fabric, its sky, its characteristic features, its memories with many others. It has with them elective affinities - and it's that which makes it a global city, not the fact of having been, the centre of the world". And it is that idea that there is something about Istanbul and other cities that makes them resistant to erasure on the spinning surface of globalisation that is, I think, significant.

Baudrillard’s 'elective affinities' between cities makes me think of Wittgenstein, of his Philosophical Investigations (2000), and his discussion of games. In remarks 66, 67 and others he discusses the category of ‘games’ (including board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, chess, tennis, ring-a-ring-a-roses, etc.) through the idea of ‘family resemblances’ arguing that all ‘games’ are related and belong to “… a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail” (2000: 32 e). Furthermore, Wittgenstein moves further along in his thinking about categories to ask;

“Why do we call something a “number”? Well, perhaps because it has a-direct-relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.

But if someone wished to say: “There is something common to all these constructions-namely the disjunction of all their common properties” - I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: “Something runs through the whole thread-namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres” (2000: 32 e)

With Wittgenstein ‘family resemblances’ can be thought of as fibrous and overlapping connections. And so we can perhaps link together Baudrillard’s ‘elective affinities’ with Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblances’ to realise that there is some kind of effect that is generated through connections, it is a particular arrangement of connections that makes a place special, familiar, famous. It is relations, the performance of relations, that produces the effect of this or that place: it has nothing whatsoever to do with embedment, historical or otherwise.

Wherein lies the singularity of some modern metropolises? In a discussion of Serres’ interest in cities Hénaff (1997: 61-62) writes:

"What is at stake for our epoch is that the planet is being urbanized globally. Will we think about the entire world as a swelling city that invades space by homeothesis - in other words, will we see the world as the outgrowth of the oecumene only? Or will we think the city as part of the world, that is, think of the built environment inhabited by humans in its relation to the totality of the landscape, including the spaces of the other species, the mineral elements, the continents and climates, not to mention its relation to older traditions, various ways of life - whether urban or not - and the arts and sensitivities that make for the extraordinary cultural diversity of the world"

For Serres - and ironically reminiscent of an argument Castells made many years ago - "the question of the city goes far beyond the urban question" (Hénaff, 1997: 63), the city should be considered as a part of both the human and non-human world. For Serres the city is a 'world object', an artefact with the capacity to intervene globally (other examples include banking, nuclear weapons, and satellites (see Hénaff, 1997)). Serres highlights a broader sense of the significance of the city, of place, in the modern world through a myriad of connections: networks not only constitute cities, but also touch the world, shape the world. Following this approach Istanbul can be considered as both connected and actant. Istanbul both resists and enables globalisation, as a networked place it has a power to affect and modify the relations between people and materials, humans and non-humans.

CONCLUSION

Any Place is made through connections, made up of, made by, nothing more than actant-networks of varying lengths and durability (this is our purely materialist ontology). Every place is both present and absent, an absent presence (see Hetherington (2002) on the importance of considering the effects of absence, not just the absence of presence, but the figural presence of absence). In other words, every place is never fully ‘there’ – it is there to some extent, but it is also not there insofar as its being is determined by its relation to the whole network of which it is a part, a network that does not appear to us (cf. a metaphysics of presence). It is for this reason that we should be concerned with the network as a whole, with places as networks, and not with individual places as such, with places in networks. Finally, the characteristics of any place are the effect of the relations that run through them: a city is famous because the relations that constitute that place have produced that particular spatial formation and effect.

It is time to challenge your long-held assumptions about Place. Places are networks, not simply open or perforated intersections. And if you accept that argument then the study of Place can never be the same again.

CODA

The new paradigm for Place that has been outlined is not just a different way of seeing Place, but a way of situating yourself too. And so there is a politics involved in accepting places as networks. Approaching places as networks means that: (1) places are not ‘framed’ as local and weak; (2) that any place is not ‘explained away’ as being shaped by, or a ‘victim’ of, some exterior force such as capitalism or the neo-liberal or neo-conservative, unbounded, ‘free trade’ discourse of globalisation pushed by such institutions as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Western governments, and the World Trade Organization (see Smith (in press) for my poststructuralist critique of such extrinsic approaches to urban studies); and (3), any place is no longer disempowered through being located within a ‘big picture’ or ‘wider context’. A topological take on places as networks means that it makes no sense to think of - and portray - place as ‘detailed’ and context as somehow ‘general’ and so more important. And, of course, vice-versa: it makes no sense either to think of the general or the large as more complex than the particular or small.

The current hegemonic rhetoric that presents and promotes one form of globalisation as inexorably encroaching and inevitably driving toward open, barrier-less, friction-less, unfettered mobility (but paradoxically not the free movement of all people) and interaction needs to be challenged. In that discourse the global is commonly portrayed as an inevitable, unstoppable, virtual or abstract process that is intangible and untouchable. In contrast, places are seen as fixed, inherently local, and ultimately weak, unable to stand-up to the storm outside. Indeed, so ingrained is the hyper-globalisers scalar argument that now many people seem to think that the global and the local have different and separate kinds of politics (that you can distinguish between a space of global politics and a space of local politics). However, if places are networks then it is harder to pretend that globalisation simply overwhelms places. Rather, those considering places as networks need to be attentive to the politics of connectivity (see Amin, 2004) that such a perspective brings.

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