Globalization has led to not only a scaling and rescaling of
urban processes, but also how human beings relate to place. “Time-space
compression” makes the world smaller. Massey defines “time-space compression”
as, “movement and communication across space, to the geographical
stretching-out of social relations, and to our experience of all this.” This mobility
not only refers to transnational flows of capital but to people, ideas, and
culture. This movement is socially differentiated between individuals who are agents
of their own mobility to those who move out of necessity like refugees and
undocumented migrant workers to those people who are imprisoned by time-space
compression. Some individuals are contributors
to time-space compression through the production of culture, but are at the
same time restricted in their own movement across borders. This shrinking of
the globe has changed the way we relate to place and community. While human
beings are globally connected through transnational linkages, we, especially in
the United States, respond with a reactionary individualism. Harvey describes
this trend as, “a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism,
and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action,
becomes the template for human socialization”(32). Massey argues that instead of
a reactionary clinging to place, we must begin to cultivate a more global sense
of place.
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