ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter we discussed the nation as the pre-eminent scale of political power and organisation in the modern era, demonstrating that nations are not pre-ordained naturally occurring entities, but are socially constructed and frequently contested. The same applies to other ‘places’ in which we encounter politics at levels beneath the nation-state: regions, cities, towns, neighbourhoods, streets and so on. ‘Place’ is a central concept in human geography, yet it can be slippery to define and describe. A ‘place’ is not necessarily a bounded territory that ends where another place begins. As relational theorists such as Doreen Massey (1994, 2005) have shown, places are unique entanglements of wider social, economic and political relations – or what Massey calls ‘power-geometries’ (Massey 2005: 64). This means that we cannot examine the politics of a place in isolation. Places are intimately connected to other places, and thus influenced by political actions and decisions occurring elsewhere, and by inequalities of power within translocal networks. A ‘sweatshop’ clothing factory in Bangladesh, for example, is tied to corporate headquarters and commercial shopping malls in Europe and North America, but with little power over the nature of the relationship. Equally, the precise ways in which different relations are combined in a place are dynamic and open to contestation – for example, in local opposition to a coffee chain opening in a small town.
