Doreen Massey points out how much changes if we avoid the notion of places as neatly nested and bounded locations. No longer can a place be the site of "an authenticity, as singular, fixed and unproblematic in its identity."
[If we think of place] as formed out of social interrelations at all scales, then one view of a place is as a particular articulation of those relations, a particular moment in those networks of social relations and understandings. . . . It includes relations which stretch beyond -- the global as part of what constitutes the local, the outside as part of the inside. . . . The identities of place are always unfixed, contested and multiple. And the particularity of any place is, in these terms, constructed not by placing boundaries around it and defining its identity through counterposition to the other which lies beyond, but precisely (in part) through the specificity of the mix of links and interconnections to that "beyond". Places viewed in this way are open and porous. . . . All attempts to institute horizons, to establish boundaries, to secure the identity of places, can in this sense therefore be seen to be attempts to stabilize the meaning of particular envelopes of space-time. . . . such attempts . . . are constantly the site of social contest, battles over the power to label space-time, to impose the meaning to be attributed to a space, for however long or short a span of time. (Massey 1994, 5)
Such shared and contested places can become violent. Scarcities of resources and surpluses of memory seem to be the usual causes. Sometimes such conflicts can be handled by secession, but there is less and less unoccupied room in which the contestants can separate, and historical ties run deep.
Along with conflicts among particular identities -- and as one of their causes -- there are conflicts between particular identities and something else that claims to represent the Totality. Conflicts were difficult enough before, but they can seem more acute now that the universal has turned predatory.
An acidic fluidity has been variously identified: the market, the flow of capital, the communications revolution, democracy, the flow of signifiers, the mediazed world of simulacra. Is this the new universal place?
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001