ABSTRACT
The development of the modern academic division of labour from the late 19th century has created walls between disciplines that pay little attention to the rich interconnectedness of the social world. One of the contributors to the Gregory and Urry collection was Doreen Massey, who died a month before John in 2016. She argued in 2005 that space is the dimension of multiplicity in the sense of ‘contemporaneous plurality’ and ‘coexisting heterogeneity’, in which there is much interdependence between different places. Global warming is without doubt the biggest challenge human society faces. Abstract theorising about space and society was closely related with concrete empirical research on the theme of unequal urban and regional development, and the Lancaster Regionalism group was one of many teams of researchers looking at localities in the 1970s and 1980s.
