Power and Space sets out the inherently spatial nature of power today and seeks to change the conversation around how power exercises us in the contemporary moment.
Power and Space sets out the inherently spatial nature of power today and seeks to change the conversation around how power exercises us in the contemporary moment.
The essays brought together in this book are a response to the fact that conventional descriptions of power and its ordered geographies no longer chime with our lived experience. Spatiality matters to the workings of power nowadays and this book sheds light on what it is that we face when power is exercised though more subtle, spatially nuanced arrangements. It is divided into three parts, each representing a different kind of engagement with powers relationship to space, from the spatial shifts in the way power is exercised through to its assemblage-like entanglements, and, in turn, its progressive topological character. Throughout the book a wide range of social, political, and economic examples are drawn upon to illustrate a more provisional sense of power, ranging for instance from the seductive logic of privatized public spaces to the attempt by a data analytics company to manipulate political behaviour, through to the offshore spaces invented by rising financial elites to challenge the established banking order.
Illustrating the new-found abilities of the powerful to make their presence felt, this book provides an accessible account of the practical workings of power in the present-day. It will be invaluable to students and academics in human geography and urban studies as well as politics, sociology and cultural studies.
1 Introduction: making space for power
Part 1 Spatial power plays
2 Ambient power: Berlins Potsdamer Platz and the seductive logic of public
spaces
3 Pragmatism and power, or the power to make a difference in a radically
contingent world
4 Powerful city networks: more than connections, less than domination and
control
Part 2 Assemblages of power
5 Beyond the territorial fix: regional assemblages, politics and power
(with Allan Cochrane)
6 Assemblages of state power: topological shifts in the organization of
government and politics
(with Allan Cochrane)
7 Powerful assemblages: held together in tension
Part 3 Power-Topologies
8 Topological twists: powers shifting geographies
9 The circulation of financial elites: invented spaces, power and
dissimulation
10 Powers quiet reach: manipulating publics, policing borders and
undermining the NHS
Afterword: shifting spatialities, shifting conversations
John Allen is Professor Emeritus at The Open University. His publications include Lost Geographies of Power (2003) and Topologies of Power: Beyond Territory and Networks (2016).
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