Innovation, agency and technology

In the last chapter we discussed ways in which space is produced through our social and creative interactions, taking the forms of sites of social and economic life. Space is formed along value networks that join people and things as agents of change. We also discussed the contentions of socio-spatial life, including conflicts over claims to place; for example, the rubbish tip that served as an illustration is for some a place of work and economic and social life, while for others it is a place of marginalization, poverty and exclusion. This chapter continues these themes by introducing theoretical notions of socio-spatial innovation. We draw on key themes in the economics and sociology of space, and spatial activities, and consider the role of technology as a driver of spatial change. Our main argument is that ‘technology’ is not comprised solely of the devices and instruments for controlling and monitoring our environments, but is a web of social and material capabilities that afford the means of spatial transformations.

Technologies as drivers of spatial change have renewed significance in terms of some major current trends (see Table 2.1). Specifically, technologies have become embedded in social networks, providing means of communication among the dynamic formation of physical and virtual communities. Technologies have become mobile, leading advances in communications in transit, or dislocated organizations, as well as communications between people and machines. Technologies have led to the virtualization of industrial resources, which may now be downloaded from the ‘cloud’ or data server onto dynamically configured client platforms. Technologies are driving advances in the generation and processing of massive datasets derived from highly complex machine and human interactions. Each of these technology capabilities is interacting with advances in technical capacity. Hence more people and things can interact at a greater number of locations, with vastly increased complexity and acceleration of communication. A key problem in this interaction of capability and capacity is system and semantic overload: people and machines become perplexed by the proliferation of technologies and the myriad socio-technical contexts of deployments and participations.1 In this way, technological advances pose a major challenge of intelligibility to designers and engineers.

Socio-spatial innovations, as socio-technical complexes, are commonly expressed through physical structures such as new buildings, roads or parks, or through conceptual means, such as a social network model, or symbolically such as expressions of friendship. Urban developments have been observed as bearing hybrids of physical and conceptual spaces: certain buildings house hubs of knowledge-based agents (including entrepreneurs and researchers), but those hubs are nodes in a network that extends far beyond the walls of the building and beyond the borders of its region. Major urban developments advance beyond prestige architectural projects to encourage flows of people and products. These flows are driven by transport infrastructures that help to ensure ideas, inventions and innovations are dispersed among global networks.

Socio-spatial innovations are driven by knowledge-based agents, and are distributed unevenly among populations. Levels of access to novel spatial forms are either raised or lowered by education, social standing, wealth, professional affiliation, means of mobility and so on (Marmot, 2004). Conditions of access to space form a web of explicit and implicit indicators of distinction. For Bourdieu (1977) this web of material distinctions reflects the tacit social and ideological constraints embedded within the subject. For example, a junior researcher might have the right qualifications for a project, but did not achieve them at the university from where the senior researchers all graduated.

As socio-spatial innovations are the products of the interaction of knowledge-based agents, so they continue to reinforce barriers to entry to those not part of the network. Enterprises and universities alike continue to advance the technological state of the art, which demands of researchers and engineers their continuous technical retraining. Those participating in the knowledge networks keep abreast of the advances as knowledge flows along the network. Those not in the network must negotiate their way inside, a passage made precarious through the disadvantages of cultural distinctions or through misinformation, inappropriate advice or bad timing as the technology advances.

This chapter expands the themes of the contentions of space and knowledge that stem from unequal distributions of innovations and the cultural distinctions that limit access. This is an important matter as it tells us much about the spatial dimension, or the ‘shape’, of knowledge.

Spatializing knowledge

Space is, in the everyday sense, where our homes, workplaces and public facilities are located. Space is the location of our normal routines: we can occupy space, purchase space, find space and so on. In this everyday sense, we can say that space is fixed or is linear. However, radical work in philosophy and physics has revealed that space is not fixed and linear. Leibniz asserted a fundamental argument that space exists only as a relationship between moving objects. Hence space is relational as distinct to ‘absolute’ (Vailati, 1997: 122–6) and, as such, is subject to continuous change. Space is, in some ways, like a natural form in that it is seeded, grows, flourishes and decays. For example, consider a family dwelling, built upon land that has been selected and purchased, upon which plans have been devised, in which rooms have been added, knocked down, converted, extended and reconfigured according to the changing requirements of its inhabitants over decades or even centuries (Brand, 2010). In this mundane sense, we can think of space as the product of our conceptual, material and social interactions.

On the regional scale, space emerges as an economic network of interactions among its constituent groups (Lösch, 1938), including people and the things they produce and exchange. These interactions exert forces upon the space, shaping its contours and infringing the boundaries of its political regions. These fields of force, based on needs and on trade, push people and things out from the centre and attract them in from the periphery, constituting a constant cycle of economic activity. The standards asserted by one group within the region – such as sovereign currency values – are distorted through renegotiations by another group elsewhere in the region, thus regions are delocalized (Perroux, 1950: 100).

Definitions of ‘space’ remain contentious. The geographer Doreen Massey is for space, while the anthropologist Tim Ingold has argued that he is against space. Massey has outlined three tenets for a comprehensive approach to the study of space: it is the product of socio-economic interrelations, it is qualitatively pluralistic and multiple, and it is under continuous construction (Massey, 2005: 9). Space is not fixed but is continuously modified, thus to spatialize knowledge is to apply temporal dynamism to things we study.

Ingold’s concern is with the persistent separation of space and place in academic research. This dichotomy supposes that space is abstract, empty and void, while place is where we dwell. For example, according to this space/place separation, the ‘space’ of a kitchen occupies a geometry comprising a certain number of cubic feet which are arranged at various levels and positioned on some urban grid. The ‘place’ of kitchen is where one cooks and cleans. Ingold’s contention is with the implication that place is...