Class, Gender, and Space: Scale and the Production of Difference and Inequality

Abstract

Although ‘geography matters’ may seem like a heartfelt but specialist plea from human geographers, too often ignored by other social scientists and scholars interested in the connections between citizenship, equality and social justice, Ben Rogaly demonstrates here that spatial distributions and locations clearly do matter. Space is no longer regarded as a container or an absolute independent dimension but rather theorised in contemporary human geography as constructed out of the intersections of social relations. As the geographer Doreen Massey (1992: 65) once argued, ‘the spatial is social relations stretched out’ and its reverse, social relations quashed together as ‘places’ are distinguished by historical patterns of social relations intersecting over time and solidifying to construct difference between localities, at whatever scale they might be defined. And so, where people live affects their rights and obligations, their access to the goods of a society, including de facto and de jure citizenship, as well as the costs of, for example, want, scarcity, pollution and anti-social neighbours.