ABSTRACT
This chapter critically examines current sociological and geographical conceptualisations of space and time in relation to the processes which have formed an inner city area of Leeds, England. This area, known as Chapeltown, contains the majority of the city’s black residents. The chapter analyses some of the ways in which diverse human agents historically created and continue to use this territory. Simultaneously, it investigates the impact on social relationships of disparate senses of time among the various historical and present occupiers of this space. The overall argument is that, while the effect of global economic forces and the time-space shifts identified as characterising the condition of postmodernity are clearly evident in this locale, and signs of fragmentation and ghettoisation abound, the diversity of the population, and the rootedness of many residents in modern and traditional time-space, provides a social coherence, and a resource for resistance, for many of the people who live in the area.
