ABSTRACT
It is trite to say that ours is a spatial world through which we pass in time. Nonetheless, the apparent naturalness of our everyday time-space geographies often relegates our understanding of space to a mosaic that simply contains social activities. Within this formulation, our activities fill space, and time is a sequential, if not linear, constraint upon those activities. This chapter begins with the suggestion that questions posed by geographers and other social scientists interested in socio-economic units are still, to a large degree, circumscribed by narrow structural definitions of space and time. For example, geographers who ask, “Why do people do that there?” are not much more than cartographers who map social patterns. Even questions that seemingly probe the social and cultural contexts of space-"What do people have to do to keep doing that there?"— for the most part assume a Cartesian view of space. The overarching premise of this chapter is that we need to reconstitute our questions to penetrate the power of space and time or, put another way, we need to pose our questions in a way that de-stabilizes the ‘fundamental nature’ of space and time. This premise is based upon the belief that space and time are complex social products and the social is a complex spatial and temporal product. For example, a question such as “What is intrinsic about the way space and time are constituted there that enables people to keep doing that and how, in turn, does that actively constitute space?” opens up the possibility of different productions of space and time. A central tenet of the chapter, then, is the nonsense of an assumed ‘fundamental nature’ for either space or time.
