ABSTRACT
While there are important questions to be raised about the validity of broad-sweep, long-range theorizations such as these, which despite their conceptual superiority to such theories as ‘Industrial Society’ and ‘Post-Industrial Society’ nevertheless share their time-scale, and may well run the risk of appearing somewhat archaic shortly after coming to fruition (Giddens, 1979a), it is clear that some rather dramatic changes in the pace and direction of economic and social change have occurred over the past two decades. Many of these are picked up by theorists of the ‘Disorganized Capitalism’ school. In this chapter I want to focus mainly upon those which have a socio-spatial dimension. I wish to do this as the prelude to a discussion of the nature of the spatial development process under capitalism, emphasizing certain organiza tional features of that process which are often swamped by economic analysis of the same process. This I do in the second section of the chapter. Then I want to go on to consider the relationship between spatial development and certain imperatives of the restructuring of economic relationships, focusing particularly upon the nature and role of technology in the development process - this is the third section of the chapter. Then, in the last two sections I want to examine some recent evidence of socio-spatial processes drawn from an overview of restructuring in Britain during the past twenty years or so, focusing on the paradigmatic relationship of space and technology in economic change, and pointing up some of the key features of the spatial development planning process.
