ABSTRACT
Social scientists have long been aware of the significance of developments in transport and communication for the reorientation of temporal and spatial relationships between places (Janelle, 1968; Falk and Abler, 1980). The concepts ‘time-space convergence’ and ‘time-space compression’ were developed by geographers to describe the cumulative effects of historical improvements in the speed of movement of goods, services and information. The former concept refers to the increased velocity of circulation of goods, people and information, and the consequent reduction in relative distances between places. The latter concept describes the sense of shock and disorientation such experiences produce (Harvey, 1989, 1990). As Harvey describes it, time-space compression refers to:
processes that so revolutionise the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves. I use the word ‘compression’ because a strong case can be made that the history of capitalism has been characterised by speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us.
