Looking Well to See Well: Lessons from Oxford Street, Accra

Extract

Two decades ago the late doreen massey, a feminist geographer, made a clear, rich, and generative argument about what she referred to as a progressive, or global, sense of place, one that emphasized process, that admitted of multiplicity and heterogeneity while recognizing the power geometries that produced hierarchical difference, and that rejected an insular and bounded sense of place in favor of a relational analysis. In Space, Place, and Gender, Massey based her analysis on a brief example, no more than a few paragraphs long, in which she read her own “pretty ordinary” street, Kilburn High Road, in northwest London (152-54). Her critical vocabulary offered a way of thinking about place that was not self-enclosing but outward-looking: what gives each place its fingerprint, she asserted, is the constellation of global flows, the social relations that overlap in one space—patterns that are always changing.