Progress in Human Geography 33(4) (2009) pp.

487–506


Phase space: geography, relational
thinking, and beyond
Martin Jones*
Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, and Wales Institute of Social and
Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD), Aberystwyth University,
Aberystwyth SY23 3DB, UK

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning of work on ‘thinking space relationally’.
According to its advocates, relational thinking challenges human geography by insisting on an
open-ended, mobile, networked, and actor-centred geographic becoming. The paper discusses the
importance of this ‘relational turn’ by positioning it within the lineage of philosophical approaches
to space in geography. Following this, it highlights some silences and limits, namely factors that
constrain, structure, and connect space. The paper then offers a moderate relationalism by
discussing the notion of ‘phase space’. This acknowledges relationality but insists on the confined,
sometimes inertial, and always context-specific nature of geography. Some challenges for this
approach are discussed.

Key words: human geography, phase space, political geometry, relational space.

[W]e want to fight against the idea that
politics has to be territorially bounded. Rather,
we are interested in spaces of relation in
which all kinds of unlike things can knock up
against each other in all kinds of ways … Two
particular threads of change are important
to this reimagination … One is the issue of
the very conceptualization of regions and ‘the
regional question’ in an era of increasingly
geographically extended spatial flows and an
intellectual context where space is frequently
being imagined as a product of networks and
relations, in contrast to an older topography
in which territoriality was dominant. (Amin
et al., 2003: 6, emphasis original)
These new spatialities have become decisive
for the constitution of place. The varied pro-
cesses of spatial stretching, inter-dependence
and flow, combine in situ trajectories of socio-
spatial evolution and change, to propose
place – the city, region or rural area – as a site
of intersection between network topologies
and territorial legacies. The result is no simple
displacement of the local by the global, of place
by space, of history by simultaneity and flow,
of small by big scale, or of the proximate by the
remote. Instead, it is a subtle folding together
of the distant and the proximate, the virtual
and the material, presence and absence, flow
and stasis, into a single ontological plane upon
which location – a place on the map – has come
to be relationally and topologically defined.
Grasping the implications of such a definition
of place is not easy, given the grip of carto-
graphic legacy measuring location on the
basis of geographical distance and territorial
jurisdiction. (Amin, 2007: 103)
Scales are not fixed, separate levels of the
social world but, like regions/places, are
structured and institutionalized in complex
ways in de/reterritorializing practices and
discourses that may be partly concrete,

*Email: msj@aber.ac.uk

© The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions: DOI: 10.1177/0309132508101599

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488 Progress in Human Geography 33(4)
powerful and bounded, but also partly un-
bounded, vague or invisible. Scales are also
historically contingent; they are produced,
exist and may be destroyed or transformed in
social and political practices and struggles. The
institutionalization/deinstitutionalization of
region, place and scale are in fact inseparable
elements in the perpetual process of regional
transformation. (Paasi, 2004: 542)
Trying to think clearly about space is not easy.
(Dainton, 2001: x).
I Introduction
The first two quotations are indicative of
a ‘thinking space relationally’ approach to
human geography and the social sciences
more broadly. This ‘defies easy summariz-
ing’ (Amin, 2007: 103) and for its advocates,
geography – both within abstract reasoning
and concrete political/policy practice – has to
be seen as unbounded and formed through
imbroglios of flows and networks. This body
of work is hugely important because it ex-
plicitly challenges, for instance, claims for a
political economy of scale (compare Brenner,
2001; Brenner et al., 2003; Marston, 2000;
Marston et al., 2005) by insisting on the open-
ended, actor-centred, and mobile politics
of spatiality. For Amin, the relational space
economy ‘has far less to do with territorial
properties (such as localized linkage, local
identity and identification, scalar politics,
and governance) than with the effects of spa-
tial and temporal exposure and connectivity
(such as continual and open-ended change,
juxtaposition of difference, overlap of net-
works of different global connections)’
(2002: 391; see also 2004a; 2004b). Likewise,
for Doel, as ‘space is continuously being
made, unmade, and remade by the inces-
sant shuffling of heterogeneous relations,
its potential can never be contained and its
exuberance can never be quelled. What be-
comes of space always and necessarily eludes
the grasp of every will to order’ (2007: 809,
emphasis removed).
‘Thinking space relationally’ (Geografiska
Annaler, 2004) is becoming the mantra of the
early twenty-first century in human geog-
raphy and its importance is being discussed
in various subfields (see Bathelt and
Glückler, 2003; Boggs and Rantist, 2003;
Ettlinger, 2003; Jones and MacLeod, 2004;
Murdoch, 2006; Sunley, 2008; Yeung, 2005;
Allen and Cochrane, 2007). As we can see
from the third quotation, though, ‘thinking
space relationally’ has limits – for Paasi, the
capacity to deal with multifarious acts of
fixing space and to highlight factors that
constrain, structure, and connect space.
Work on the geography of regions has been
exploring this in recent years (see Hudson,
2007; MacLeod and Jones, 2007; Morgan,
2007), although not always from a philo-
sophical stance, and I will discuss these
interventions below.
The paper applauds ‘thinking space rela-
tionally’ but airs caution over the implication
of its theorizations for human geography. It
takes issue not with relational space per se,
but with how ‘relational’ is itself theorized.
Echoing those debates from the 1980s on the
sociospatial dialectic (see Soja, 1980; Smith,
1990), does relationally constructed space
matter, or should it simply be reduced to pro-
cess? I also question the normative political
and policy assumptions made by relational-
ists. My critique is thus not just concerned
with the philosophy of spacetime. Building
from the Paasi quotation, among other things,
I discuss actually existing political/policy
contexts, the geometry, topography and
topology of the state, differential social
power relations, notions of territory and how
this can be enlivened. Section II deals with
this by positioning relational space within the
lineage of philosophical ap-proaches to space
in geography. A series of problems are posed,
which the remainder of the paper endeavours
to tackle.
Section III offers a way forward by en-
gaging in a number of parallel debates: the
searching for common ground between
the social sciences and physical sciences (see
Kauffman, 1993; Wallerstein, 1996; Byrne,
1998; Wilson, 1999; Urry, 2004), discussions
over space and time in geography (Massey,
1999; 2001, 2005; Matthews and Herbert,
2004) and mathematics as ontology after
 Martin Jones: Phase space: geography, relational thinking, and beyond 489
(Badiou, 2005). I am aware of the limits
of borrowing ideas from outside the social
sciences and that the ‘history of geography
is littered with the wreckage of attempts to
“make it into a science”’ (Hart, 1982: 6) and
that given ‘the gulf separating the views of
physical scientists and geographers con-
cerned with social philosophy on the question
of space, it is not easy to see how they can
be reconciled’ (Unwin, 1992: 203; see also
Lefebvre, 1991: 13). However, I agree with
Thrift that research and development with-
out making choices is needed to expand the
geographical imagination, forge new ground
with other disciplines, and in doing so ‘ex-
pand the envelope of the political’ and if ‘we
don’t do it, others surely will’ (2004a: 75) –
geographical economics and the new region-
alism being recent examples of this. The trick,
following Massumi, is not to make the social
sciences scientific. ‘The point is to borrow
from science in order to make a difference
[and] in ways they [social scientists] are un-
accustomed to’ (2002: 21).
I advocate a ‘phase space’ approach to
address some of the silences in ‘thinking space
relationally’. Described by complexity ad-
vocates Prigogine and Stengers (1984: 247)
as the ‘theory of ensembles’, phase space
acknowledges the relational making of space
but insists on the confined, connected, in-
ertial, and always context-specific nature
of existence and emergence. When applied
to geography, phase space, among other
things, expresses sociospatial relations from
a topological stance but insists on the com-
patibilities between, rather the mutual exclu-
sivities of, flow-like (networks, etc) and more
fixed (scales, territories, regions, etc) takes on
space. Section IV discusses some challenges:
as Dainton highlights in the fourth quotation,
engaging with this terrain is ‘not easy’ and
the paper is the start of a dialogue.
II Positioning ‘thinking space
relationally’
The narrative that I present in this section is
the step-by-step shift in the conceptualization
of space from ‘absolute’ to ‘relative’, then
‘relational’ conditions. This is a huge task
to undertake in the limited space available.
Elsewhere I have demonstrated this in greater
depth by using ‘the region’ as space-time
barometer (Jones, 2005) and I would also
direct the reader to some different takes on
this history (see Smith, 1990; Unwin, 1992;
Harvey, 1996; 2006; Sheppard, 2006).
1 Background: space and geography
The absolute (or substantival) versus rela-
tive debate around geographical space
is well known – it forms the backdrop to
geography and its evolution over the last
century (compare Blaut, 1961; Harvey, 1969;
Abler et al., 1971; Holly, 1978; Sack, 1980;
Smith, 1984; 2004; Agnew, 2005). Both
approaches are variously concerned with
topography. Absolute space is a condition
in which space exists independently of any
object(s) or relations: space is a discrete and
autonomous container. Approaches such as
Kant’s transcendental idealism see space as
‘a kind of framework for things and events:
something like a system of pigeon holes, or
a filing system for observations’ (Popper,
1963: 179, cited in Harvey, 1969: 207). The
job of geography here is to fill containers
or pigeon holes with information, through
techniques such as cartography and by pre-
scribing categories for data collection and
analysis. Callon and Law call this the ‘romantic’
approach, which assumes things in space
have analytical fixity and complete affinity
to their spatial reference point such that ‘dis-
tance and scale can be determined without
ambiguity: we know who is big and what is
small, and who is close to whom’ (2004: 3).
The concerns of a certain kind of pre-1950s
regional geography with delimiting natural,
climatic and later human regions best illus-
trates this. However, the preoccupation with
environmental determinism and agency-free
landscapes highlights the weaknesses of
this approach.
Pitched against this is relative space, which
rests on two assumptions. First, space can be
490 Progress in Human Geography 33(4)
defined only in relation to the object(s) and/
or processes being considered in space and
time. Second, there is no defined or fixed
relationship for locating things under con-
sideration: a non-Euclidean perspective is
adopted, where distance/relationships are
relative and change over time and across
space. Space, and also time, have ‘positional
quality’ as Jammer (1954) puts it. In turn, the
traditional three dimensions of space, plus
a separate one for time, are merged into a
single unified ‘spacetime’, as Einstein puts it,
with four dimensions. A point in space thus
becomes an event or moment in spacetime.
In geography, it was in this vein that Nystuen
advocated a new ‘geographical point of view’
based on five key concepts: ‘direction or
orientation, distance, and connection or relative
position’ (Nystuen, 1963: 384, emphasis
original). The followers of regional science
pushed this a stage further by making direct
links with Einstein’s general relativity theory.
Isard argued that regional science ‘must adopt
a four-dimensional space-time continuum
and speak of world lines (world helices, etc)
of behaving units and institutions [and] probe
deeply the gravitational interaction among
social masses, as well as the impact of accel-
erating masses upon other masses’ (1972: 151).
Gregory has aptly noted this period as being
one of undertaking ‘social physics in a spatial
context’ (1978: 73).
As with absolute space, relative approaches
to space have limits, which partially explain
why human geography is adopting a ‘thinking
space relationally’ approach. First, drawing
on Grünbaum’s (1963: 421) ‘intrinsic metrical
amorphousness of space’ thesis, Harvey
predicted that the ‘empirical problem’ that
relativistic geography would ultimately face
was to select a geometry to deal with the
‘complexities of fields and forces’, ie, what
is the source and structure of spacetime and
what are the bounded or ‘boundary condi-
tions’ that permit certain activities and rela-
tions to take place (Harvey, 1969: 196, 209)?
For critics (eg the early advocates of relational
space), relative space should be conceived
of in terms of the behaviour of objects and
events that constitute and reconstitute the
multifarious fields of existence. In philosophy,
Whitehead’s writings tackled this conun-
drum by using process thought to capture
the roles of ‘events as active conditions in the
ingression of sense-objects into nature’
(1920: 158). He continued:
It is in the progress of this investigation that
scientific objects emerge. They embody those
aspects of the character of the situations of
the physical objects which are most perman-
ent and are expressible without reference
to a multiple relation including a percipient
event. Their relations to each other are also
characterised by a certain simplicity and
uniformity. (Whitehead, 1920: 158; compare
with Marston et al., 2005)
This approach has, in turn, been criticized
for the uneasy line which it frequently walks
between materiality and subjectivism, and,
more precisely, concerning the relationship
between the concept and the status of a
Whiteheadian actual entity. If the existence
and direction of ‘events’ is not assured,
neither are the structures that Whitehead
attributes to them (Grünbaum, 1963).
According to these critics, Whitehead com-
mits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness
inasmuch as he infers a dubious multiplicity
in the place of clear-cut entities (compare
Grünbaum, 1953; 1962; Russell, 1927). The
counter critique is that by ignoring events,
microcosmic practices, and the categories
flowing from this, there is an equal danger
of presenting the life-world as an apparent
totality (compare Deleuze, 1993; Schatzki,
2002; DeLanda, 2006).
Translating this into geography, debates
have revolved around how to uncover, explain,
and represent the interrelationships between
spaces and objects (compare Paterson, 1974;
Sack, 1980; Soja, 1980; Gatrell, 1983; Smith,
1990; 2004). Important exchanges have taken
place on the relativism-realism question (see
Strohmayer and Hannah, 1992) with critical
realists insisting on the non-essentialist,
 Martin Jones: Phase space: geography, relational thinking, and beyond 491
necessary and contingent relations between
objects and subjects within space (see Sayer,
1993; 1997). The problem of writing and
representing behaviour of relative things in
space was also discussed initially by Sayer
(1989) and at length by Thrift (1996; 2005;
2008), with these tasks noted as being bound
up with the perpetual difficulties of deliver-
ing analytic and narrative forms of analysis.
In this sense, the links between space, time
and representation take centre stage.
2 Relational perspectives
Relational thinking is a paradigmatic depar-
ture from the concerns of absolute and rela-
tive space, because it dissolves the boundaries
between objects and space, and rejects forms
of spatial totality. Space does not exist as an
entity in and of itself, over and above material
objects and their spatiotemporal relations
and extensions. In short, objects are space,
space is objects, and moreover objects can be
understood only in relation to other objects –
with all this being a perpetual becoming of
heterogeneous networks and events that
connect internal spatiotemporal relations
(compare Mol and Law, 1994; Dainton, 2001;
Massey, 2005). As Sklar puts it, describing
what we might now call a ‘flat ontology’ (see
below):
Insofar as talk about spatiality is meaningful,
the relationist alleges, it is talk about the spa-
tial relations born to one another by the point
material objects of the idealization. To view
it as talk about ‘the structure of space itself’
is to wallow in metaphysical confusion. In-
sofar as temporal talk is intelligible, it is talk
about the temporal relations instantaneous
events bear to one another. And insofar as
spatiotemporal talk is meaningful, it is talk
about the spatiotemporal relations born to
one another by the ideal unextended and
instantaneous concrete events that occupy
the spacetime world on the substantival view.
Properly speaking, the relata occupy the
appropriate spacetimes only in the sense that
they bear spatiotemporal relations to one
another. Any other sense of ‘occupation’ is
absurd, for there is no spacetime itself to
be occupied. Relations like being coincident
spatially or being simultaneous temporally or
having given invariant spatiotemporal interval
between them are relations material points,
events, or unextended events can have only to
one another. They cannot have these relations
to points of space, instants of time, or event
locations in spacetime, for there are no such
things over and above the material ‘occupants’
of them. And certainly any talk of relations
born to each other by points of spacetime
itself is pure nonsense, for there are no such
‘points’. (Sklar, 1977: 168)
Relational thinking in spacetime philosophies
originated with the work of Leibniz in non-
Euclidean geometry and calculus, which criti-
qued (absolute) substantivalist theories for
not analysing fluid dynamics, ie, motion within
and between objects (see Ishiguro, 1972),
and for playing down the ‘inner principles’ of
existence (see Couturat, 1972). In Shaw’s
discussions of Leibniz’s Monadology (the text
broadly covering the metaphysics of things)
it is suggested that: ‘One Monad is said to
act upon another and thus to be more perfect
when its state explains the state of the other.
They are only said to act upon each other.
In reality, each Monad unfolds its series of
changes from its own inner principle, and in
conformity with the development of every
other Monad’ (Shaw, 1954: 34, emphasis
original). Elements of this thinking have been
picked up and extended by Whitehead (see
above) and in turn critiqued in the work of
Russell (1926; 1927; 1937).
3 Relationalism and geography
Before I discuss ‘thinking space relationally’
as a distinctive turn in geography, I would like
to acknowledge that its antecedents can be
located in Harvey’s work on spaces of his-
torical materialism, the limited malleability of
space thereafter, and later discussions on per-
manence and dialectics (see Harvey, 2006).
And, outside geography, Dainton (2001) has
clearly documented the various twists and
turns in how relational thinking has morphed,
and we should always be wary of treating this
492 Progress in Human Geography 33(4)
body of thought as a homogenous concern.
As Earman notes, ‘there are almost as many
versions of relationism as there are rela-
tionists’ (1989: 12) and ‘[t]o defeat one tribe
of relationists … is not to vanquish the whole
nation’ (Maudlin, 1993: 187).
In the 1990s with social constructionism
and poststructuralism (compare Harari,
1979; Doel, 1999), and the displacement of
topographical with topological thinking and
its notions of pleats and folds (see Deleuze
and Guattari, 1983; 1988; Deleuze, 1993;
Serres and Latour, 1995), relational thinking
has become embedded in the social sciences
and human geography through science and
technology writings (Latour, 1988; 1993; Law
and Mol, 2001), human/non-human – nature
hybridities (Thrift, 1994; Whatmore, 2002),
accounts based in actor-network theory
(Thrift, 1996; 2004; Hetherington and Law,
2000; Latour, 2005), world-city networks
and topologies (Smith, 2003a; 2003b), cities
more generally (Amin and Thrift, 2002), re-
search on mobile objects (Laurier and Philo,
2003), Bergson-inspired approaches to the
nature of time (compare Deleuze, 1988;
Prigogine, 1997; Massey, 2005), discussions
on political subjectivities and identity
(Mouffe, 1993; 1995), new theories of local
and regional development (Storper, 1997;
Amin, 2004a; 2004b), and critiques of scale
(Marston et al., 2005; Jones et al., 2007) …
the list goes on. In short, the spatial project
for relational thinkers is to replace topography
and structure-agency dichotomies with a
topological theory of space, place and politics
as encountered, performed, and fluid. For
Latour (1988), this is ‘infra-physics’, which
replaces systems of coordinates (Einstein,
etc) with ‘activities’ for ‘framing’ space.
For Callon and Law, and following Deleuze
(1993), this signifies a ‘baroque’ position in
the social sciences, which insists: ‘there is no
distinction between the individual and his or
her environment; that many, perhaps most,
relations remain implicit; that entities are
made out of a myriad of heterogeneous
entities; that these in turn are made out of an
infinity of other entities, and so on’ (Callon
and Law, 2004: 7).
‘Thinking space relationally’ is an em-
powering perspective. It suggests that space
and its orders are always open such that ‘the
local is an achievement in which a place is
localized by other places and accepts ‘local-
ization’ itself. But this means that no place
is closed off’ (Callon and Law, 2004: 6).
Advocates suggest that the conditions of
economic circulation, hypermobility, time-
space compression, and cultural insignia
warrant a completely new conceptual-
ization of space. For Thrift, ‘[s]pace is no
longer seen as a nested hierarchy moving
from ‘global’ to ‘local’. This absurd scale-
dependent notion is replaced by the notion
that what counts is connectivity’ (2004: 59,
emphasis added). This squares with writings
in philosophy, where relationists ‘only rec-
ognize the material bodies and the spatial
relations between material [and] are com-
mitted to the non-existence of unoccupied
places and regions’ (Dainton, 2001: 143,
emphasis original).
4 Relational thinking and the region:
non-territorial traps
Applying this to ‘the region’ – one of the core
concepts in human geography that relational
approaches have sought forcefully to redefine
and more broadly an ongoing battleground
for redefining the discipline (Jonas, 2006) –
Massey and colleagues propose that ‘an ade-
quate understanding of the region and its
futures can only come through a conception
of places as open, discontinuous, relational
and internally diverse’ (Allen et al., 1998: 143;
see also Massey, 1994: 152–55) and ‘thinking
‘a region’ in terms of social relations stretched
out reveals, not an ‘area’, but a complex and
unbounded lattice of articulations’ (Allen
et al., 1998: 65). Drawing on London – ’only
because it came to mind first, not because it
is any more relationally constituted than any
other place’ (Amin, 2004a: 34) – Amin adds
that cities and regions should be seen as
places ‘without prescribed and proscribed
 Martin Jones: Phase space: geography, relational thinking, and beyond 493
boundaries’ (p. 34, emphasis original) and
conceptualized as
nodes that gather flow and juxtapose diversity,
as places of overlapping – but not necessarily
connected – relational networks, as perforated
entities with connections that stretch far back
in time and space, and resulting from all of this,
as spatial formations of continuously changing
composition, character, and reach. (Amin,
2004a: 34)
Bringing both perspectives together, Amin
et al. (2003) propose a ‘relational grammar of
politics’ to challenge the contemporary state-
driven territorial management practices of
devolution and constitutional change (in
the UK). This advocates: dispersing some
of the political/policy forms and functions of
capital/global cities into provincial regions
by using mobile and travelling political
performances; creating alliances between
places/regions to foster ‘external connecti-
vity’; and nurturing a ‘cosmopolitan region-
alism’ that replaces regional identities, and
their deemed-to-be parochial senses of be-
longing (a ‘politics of territorial confine-
ment’), with a ‘politics of local and translocal
engagement’. The latter is a distinctly non-
territorial project because performing/
performed politics takes place in and across
territory, as opposed to being a politics
of territory, and this harnesses an important
practice of democracy in a relational world
(Amin and Thrift, 2002; Massey, 2005).
As noted by Jones and MacLeod (2004;
MacLeod and Jones, 2006; 2007), given that
all territories are mutually constitutive and
reflective of dynamic social, economic and
political action (Paasi, 1996; 2003a; 2003b)
the relational programme has considerable
appeal. Moreover, given the prominence of
global spaces and networks of flows, it is rea-
sonable to claim that economic and cultural
geographies will increasingly be imagined
and performed in and through an intricate
geometry of transborder (though never
placeless) networks (compare Agnew, 2002;
Amin, 2002; 2004a; 2004b). A relational
approach to space and place, then, would
seem a promising theoretical avenue to
explore the contemporary mobile world and
its circuits of commodities, people and ideas.
Nonetheless, the advocates of ‘thinking
space relationally’ seriously overstate their
case. Despite the multiple potentials of space
flagged in relational thinking, factors can
constrain and structure space. All things con-
sidered potential does not necessarily become
an actual. This needs to be considered more
carefully by relational advocates, as do issues
of connection.
First, while Massey (1994; 2007), Allen et al.
(1998) and Amin (2004a) present a convincing
case of the London/South East as a region of
relational topologies vis-à-vis various maps
of transregional and transnational economic
flows and interchange, this is only part of
this region’s ‘story’, and of a unique (English)
region at that, given its long-established
international networks. Other regions and
places for that matter might lend their weight
to different theoretical perspectives and also
perform more conventional territory-based
political, economic, and cultural strategies –
a point conceded in later work by Allen and
Cochrane (2007). The obvious danger of
translating uniqueness into one-region-tells-
all scenarios is certainly an issue for relational
thinkers critically to consider.
Second, Cochrane and Arredondo point
out that relational thinking implies openness
that often belies the lived-experience of many.
Contextual forces within advanced capitalism
(such as class, race, gender and location) are
considered important for framing and allow-
ing certain possibilities and opportunities to
exist (Cochrane and Arredondo, 2005; see
also Cochrane, 2003). To ignore this runs
the risk of lapsing into spatial voluntarism. In
economic geography, Yeung makes similar
arguments, drawing our attention to the im-
portance of power relations and actor-specific
practices in the making of relational economic
spaces (2005; see also Allen, 2004).
Concerns with the spatial relations of
permanence (material and discursive) follow
494 Progress in Human Geography 33(4)
from this, concerns with which relational
thinkers seem uncomfortable. Work on re-
gions and identity, for instance, has pointed
out that many everyday realpolitik acts of
regionalization and/or regionalism – as, for
instance, in state forces classifying a region
as a ‘problem’ or local activists campaigning
for devolved government and cultural rights –
often distinguish a pre-existing or aspirant
spatial scale or territorially articulated space
of dependence through which to conduct
their actually existing politics of engagement.
In other words, when performing their prac-
tical politics, agents imagine and identify
a discrete, bounded space characterized by a
shared understanding of the opportunities or
problems that are motivating the very nature
of political action (Jones and MacLeod,
2004; MacLeod and Jones, 2007; see also
Tomaney, 2007). However, for Amin we
should not assume
that there is a defined geographical territory
out there over which local actors can have
effective control over and can manage as a
social and political space. In a relationally
constituted modern world in which it has
become normal to conduct business –
economic, cultural, political – through every-
day transterritorial organization and flow,
local advocacy … must be increasingly about
exercising nodal power and aligning networks
at large in one’s own interest, rather than
about exercising territorial power … There is no
definable regional territory to rule over. (Amin,
2004a: 36, emphasis added)
This statement does not pay sufficient atten-
tion to how regions are being constructed,
anchored and mobilized in and through terri-
torially defined political, socio-economic and
cultural strategies. On this, much of the pol-
itical challenge to devolution prevailing across
Europe and elsewhere is being practised and
performed through an avowedly territorial
narrative and scalar ontology (Paasi, 1996;
2002a; 2002b; Keating, 1998; 2001; Keating
et al., 2003; Jones, 2004): albeit often en-
acted through topologically heterogeneous
transregional and cross-border networks
of ‘fluidity’ and circulation. An example of
this is the approach to regions taken by the
European Commission. Regions are per-
ceived to be ‘the basis for Europe’s cultural
wealth and a point of identification for the
citizens. [Regions] are a source of economic
growth and social welfare’ (Hüber, 2008: 1).
The European regional map of various terri-
torial and territorialized units, which is used
to deliver DG Regional Policy, is being con-
tinually produced and reproduced through
stretched-out and heterogeneous social and
political territorial relations involving actors in
individual demarcated territorial spaces and
also their networked and relational represen-
tatives in places such as Brussels, Strasbourg
and Luxembourg (see Keating, 1998).
Contrary to the beliefs of relational ap-
proaches to space, then, mobility and fluidity
should not be seen as standing in opposition
to territories and we should, therefore, not be
forced to adopt a ‘networks versus territories’
scenario. On the one hand, networks should
not be seen as non-spatial and without ‘geo-
graphical anchors’ – a much forgotten point
made by Haggett and Chorley (1969) – and
on the other hand, territories and scales
should not be viewed as closed and static
(Dicken et al., 2001; Leitner et al., 2002;
2008; Bulkeley, 2005; Hudson, 2007; Leitner
and Miller, 2007; MacLeod and Jones, 2007;
Jessop et al., 2008).
This behoves us to make analytical dis-
tinctions between ‘territory’ (appropriated
enacted space), ‘territoriality’ (the sum of
relations between subjects therein), and ‘ter-
ritorialization’ (the process through which
these relations are established) – see Raffestein
(1986, cited in Philo and Söderström, 2004).
Relational thinkers appear to create a crude
caricature, whereby all non-relational think-
ing is conveniently displaced into notions
of static space and deemed to omit ‘much of
the topology of economic circulation and
network folding’ that is characteristic of
contemporary capitalism (Amin, 2002: 395).
This non-territorial trap (cf. Agnew, 1994)
plays down the fact that territories are ‘not
 Martin Jones: Phase space: geography, relational thinking, and beyond 495
frozen frameworks where social life occurs.
Rather, they are made, given meanings, and
destroyed in social and individual action’
(Paasi, 2003b: 110). Furthermore, territorial-
ization involving social and political action is
being constantly articulated to form conic
geometries or what Peterson (1988) calls
‘topologia’. The question here becomes how
far territorialized forms of political power
can be folded or bent without losing identity.
Relational thinking rarely questions whether
‘topology’ – a concept from mathematics
that described the geometry of relations
whose qualitative structure is robust to
various kinds of transformation or ‘folding’ –
has certain properties that ensure that its
relational constituents and coordinates re-
turn to their spatial form, thus limiting the
open-endedness inferred by geographers (on
this, see Barr, 1964; Harvey, 1969; Stewart,
1975; Peterson, 1988). The rare exception to
this is work of Whatmore – who posits rela-
tionally that territory and its governance
are in practice ‘plastic achievements’ and
research needs to ‘focus attention on the
tangle of socio-material agents and frictional
alignments in which it is suspended and to
recognize that they harbour other possibil-
ities’ (Whatmore, 2002: 87). Work on such
other possibilities has been undertaken in
recent years by Jessop et al. (2008) and Leitner
et al. (2008), with polymorphic sociospatial
relations advocated as an alternative to
the often one dimensional ‘thinking space
relationally’ (see section IV).
III ‘Phase space’ and the political
geometries of emergence
Geographers cannot seriously hope to under-
stand their own notions about space, let
alone comprehend spatial behaviour or give it
formal representation, in academic isolation.
(Harvey, 1969: 228)
1 The critique of relational thinking
Before I discuss ‘phase space’ – not as an
alternative to relational space per se, but as
an approach that asks different questions and
in doing so addresses some limits to relational
thinking – there is a need to consider some
deeper central philosophical problems with
‘thinking space relationally’. Writings on
the philosophies of space offer a critique of
relational thinking in five areas (see Dainton,
2001: 140–44).
1) What are the relations in question? A dis-
tinction needs to be made here between
relations and relational properties.
2) How exactly should we think of them, ie,
what are the relational properties for ex-
istence in spacetime?
3) What is it, exactly, that they relate? The
answer to this, of course, is material objects,
but which objects are relationists talking
about, and what forces govern their ex-
istence through internal and external
spatial relations/extensions? 1 Not en-
gaging in this results in ‘the connection
problem’ (Dainton, 2001: 143): that where
it becomes impossible to distinguish be-
tween necessary and contingent spatial re-
lations, such that all objects are necessarily
spatially related – the everything is con-
nected thesis – and as Harvey reminds us
the ‘reduction of everything to fluxes and
flows, and the consequent emphasis upon
the transitoriness of all forms and pos-
itions has its limits’ and says nothing
about nothing (Harvey, 1996: 7). The
thinking behind this statement and the
search for an alternative can be further
spelled out as:
In addition to providing an explanation of the
constraints on spatially related things, such an
account must provide some explanation of the
distinctive ways that such things are connected.
(Dainton, 2001: 138, emphasis original)
4) Can and how do we distinguish between
different states of motion, ie, acceleration
and fixity, and are all relational things
equally mobile?
These four questions get to the concern
that ‘it must be by virtue of some structural
496 Progress in Human Geography 33(4)
features of the world that material objects,
were they present, would enter into certain
patterns of relations and not others’ (Malament,
1976: 315, emphasis added). Pushing this
further, for Dainton (2001: 197) relationism
needs to ‘embrace a richer collection of
spatiotemporal relations’ and also consider
‘inertial paths’, ie, conceptualize forces that
restrict, constrain, contain, and connect
the mobility of relational things. Writing on
Leibniz, Hacking notes that: ‘[s]ubstances
are bundles of attributes, but not all attributes
are substances. Only active principles of
unity will do’ (Hacking, 1972: 151). Harvey’s
critique of Leibniz’s ‘windowless’ world and
Whitehead’s (1978) process philosophy is
also highly relevant here: it is suggested that
there should not be ‘barrier[s] to construing
things and entities as “permanences” or
even relatively autonomous entities provided
we recognize how those things and entities
are constituted, sustained and ultimately
dissolved in flows and how all entities are
relationally defined with respect to others’
(Harvey, 1996: 73). Last, Bhaskar’s skilful
writings on critical realism also apply:
In working towards a relational conception of
collectivities we need to understand any given
collectivity both in terms of its relationships
with other collectivities (and in particular those
in terms of which it is oppositionally defined or
defines itself) and in terms of its international
relationships. (Bhaskar, 1989: 8)
5) Two readings of relational space exist, the
realist approach and the ideal approach,
and these are frequently conflated by
those working outside philosophy, which
can lead to problems of translation. For
realist relationists, true statements about
space are made true by facts about material
bodies and the way they are related, which
can involve detailed and diverse empirical
observations and abstractions from reality.
By contrast, for idealist relationists, true
statements about space are made true by
facts about human minds and/or patterns
of sensory experience. This captures how
we believe things could and should be,
often based on more normative, abstract,
and selective experiences. Based on se-
lective, and at times without, empirical
connections, ‘thinking space relationally
approach’ often falls into the latter cat-
egory: it lacks a widely applicable and
observable material basis.
2 Collections of states of affairs
One way to take things forward might be to
consider a conceptual middle road between
space as territorial anchorage and fixity and
conceptions of space as topological, fluid
and relationally mobile. This dialogue of
structure and flow (cf. Hudson, 2004) or pro-
cess and permanence (cf. Whitehead, 1978;
Harvey, 1996) – situated somewhere along
a spectrum between substantivalism and
relationism – has been explored by scholars
working outside human geography:
We are pulled in two directions. On the one
hand, we feel uncomfortable with the idea
of space and time existing in the absence of
any concrete objects or event – a discomfort
that is particularly strong when we try to
imagine [things] going on in a completely
empty universe. On the other hand, treating
them just as abstract ways of talking of objects
does not do justice to everything we want to
say about space and time. Is there any way of
resolving this tension? One compromise [is] to
treat space as nothing other than the fields of
force around and between objects, but on the
other hand they are something other than
those objects, and can exhibit a certain shape
that explains the behaviour of objects moving
in apparently empty space. Similarly, we do
not have to treat time as wholly reducible
to changes. Collections of states of affairs,
some of them perhaps unchanging states of
affairs, would provide alternative building-
blocks of time. Combining these two, we have
a picture of space and time as an ordered series
of states of affairs concerning the properties of
and relations between, concrete objects and their
fields of force. The extent to which we think of
space and time [and the practices and politics
therein] as independent of their contents
will affect our view of their boundedness (or
unboundedness). (Le Poidevin, 2003: 238,
emphasis mine; see also Earman, 1989: 208)
 Martin Jones: Phase space: geography, relational thinking, and beyond 497
The importance of this statement for human
geographers lies in considerations of ‘un-
changed’ and ‘ordered series of affairs’, ‘fields
of force’ and ‘boundedness’ – the things that
structure, frame, and connect space. In
response to those arguing that space is
produced and has separate causal effects,
Soja (1980) grappled with similar concerns
by coining the ‘sociospatial dialectic’. These
concerns are still pertinent. Today, I would
argue that they are bound up with bringing
time more clearly into relational thinking.
With the exception of Massey’s (2005) recent
writings on the elusiveness of place, it is dif-
ficult to trace any temporal depth, or what
Smith (1990: 160) calls ‘deep space’, in rela-
tional approaches to space. Current accounts
on ‘thinking space relationally’ in many ways
resemble Abbott’s (1952) ‘flatland’ – a flat
and timeless plane, which is contrasted with
a multiple dimensional ‘spaceland’ where
time gives space ‘extra height’ – because
their open-ended networks, events, en-
counters, and fluids appear to operate in a
spatiotemporal vacuum, when it is impos-
sible to picture empty space and empty
time (compare Manning, 1960; Field, 1980;
Earman, 1989; Dainton, 2001). Amin et al.
(2003) for instance have no time for locally
rooted territorial identities that are often
embedded in the consciousness of inhabit-
ants, and instead support ‘cosmopolitan
regionalism’ with its open-ended and time-
less politics of connection and encounter
as preferred political and cultural strategy.
Cosmopolitan things, though, can knock up
against each other in all kinds of interesting
and networked ways, be sticky, gel, and
get anchored or ‘moored’ (Urry, 2003: 49)
through power, political strategy, and acts
of social resistance. Relational entities are
thus not always hypermobile. An embedded
perspective, which after Field (1980: 154–55)
we might want to call the ‘space-time point’
dynamic, is fundamental to the juxtaposition
and order of things in/as space (cf. Crang,
2005; Massey, 2005).
3 Phase space as ensemble ontology
The remainder of the paper argues for an
ensemble ontology that recognizes the co-
existence of structure and flow and also
acknowledges the evolutionary and devel-
opmental nature of spatiality. Putting ‘en-
semble’ at the centre of the paper invites
reference to the geophilosophy of Deleuze
and Guattari (1988). According to Marston
et al. (2007), this would:
propose a spatial ontology that recognizes
a virtually infinite population of mobile and
mutable ‘sites’ and that is ontologically flat by
virtue of its affirmation of immanence – or self-
organization – as the fundamental process of
material actualization. Against the deployment
of form or categories that operate by carving
the world into a delimited set of manageable
object-types, we look to the unfolding state of
affairs within which situations or sites are
constituted as singularities – that is, as a col-
lectivity of bodies or things, orders and events,
and doings and sayings that hang together so
to lend distinct consistency to assemblages of
dynamic relations. (Marston et al., 2007: 7,
emphasis orginal)
This flat ontology is an empty ontology. How
do we explain materiality and emergence?
A multiplicity of metaphors can be read from
the quote above. How do we secure consensus
on these metaphors (‘doings’ and ‘sayings’) to
operationalize them and avoid a priori anti-
essentialism? Emergence entails contingent
necessity, hence causality based on prior
mechanisms (see Sunley, 2008; Sheppard,
2008). These are unexplained and this anti-
perspectivalist approach – that which rejects
the God’s eye view but this does not exclude
the plurality of perspectives or theoretical
strategies – runs the risk of advocating pure
contingency and falls into the ‘the connection
problem’ noted above. How are ‘object-types’
locked in resonance with each other to ensure
an ‘unfolding state of affairs’? To answer all
this demands a commitment to causal analysis
and, in so doing, the undertaking of historical
geographical periodization. Sociospatial
relations are consequently neither automatic
498 Progress in Human Geography 33(4)
nor naturally necessary features of capitalism.
They are deeply processual and practical
outcomes of strategic initiatives undertaken
by a wide range of forces produced neither
through structural determinism nor through
a spontaneous voluntarism, but through a
mutually transformative evolution of in-
herited spatial structures and emergent spatial
strategies within an actively differentiated,
continually evolving grid of institutions,
territories and regulatory activities (Brenner
et al., 2003; Jessop et al., 2008). In short,
constructed and always emergent space
matters in shaping future trajectories.
Contra relationalism, this position can be
conceptualized through notions of ‘phase
space’, a body of work initially associated
with the ‘state space’ thinking of Poincaré
in mathematics, geometry and dynamical
systems (compare Poincaré, 1952; Dantzig,
1954; Gould, 2001; Zahar, 2001), and recent-
ly revived in complexity theory (Prigogine
and Stengers, 1984; Prigogine, 1997; Byrne,
1998; Massumi, 2002; cf. Thrift, 1999;
Manson, 2001), popular science (Cohen and
Stewart, 1994; Stewart and Cohen, 1997),
geometric quantization and one-body per-
spectives in physics (Toro et al., 1986; Kim
and Zachary, 1987; Folland, 1989), science
fiction (Baxter, 2002; Pratchett et al., 2002),
and periodically flagged as an interesting
proposition in earth system science and
physical geography (compare Melton, 1958;
Phillips, 1999; Washington, 2000; Richards
et al., 2004; Inkpen, 2005), and more recent
approaches to non-linear dynamic modelling
in human geography (Plummer and Sheppard,
2003; 2006). By switching disciplines, I am
following Elden’s lead that ‘conceptions of
geometry and conceptions of territory bear
close examination and relation’ (2005: 11) as
well as Massey’s (1999; 2001) steer to forge
links with the physical sciences over space-
time, and Sheppard’s (2002) call for a critical
human geography of spatial dynamics and
‘positionality’. The phase space argument
commences by outlining Poincaré’s philoso-
phy and work, then considering its application.
Poincaré founded the discipline of combin-
atorial topology and has a long list of scientific
achievements to his name (see Dantzig, 1954;
Galison, 2003). Poincaré studied ‘the theory
of groups, the probability of calculus, classical
mathematics, optics, electromagnetism, and
astronomy; he attacked the three-body prob-
lem and addressed the question of planet-
ary stability, thereby creating chaos theory.
In this context, he established a result which
proved essential to the second law of thermo-
dynamics. Together with Lorentz and simul-
taneously with Einstein, he discovered Special
Relativity’ (Zahar, 2001: 1). The political
achievements of Einstein – the first to publish
accounts of relativity in systematic manner –
has certainly reduced Poincaré’s importance,
but in many ways Poincaré can be credited
as the originator of cosmopolitan science,
initiating conversations across divides.
Two aspects of Poincaré’s work are par-
ticularly relevant to human geography. First,
drawing on the work of Fuchs, Poincaré
offers a qualitative system dynamics that has
possibility without having to demonstrate ex-
istence (compare Pontryagin, 1952; Dantzig,
1954; Hausmann and Vogel, 1993). This
non-Euclidean geometry disturbs the Kantian
viewpoint that the true structure of space
can be known a priori but does not fully
embrace the relational world where inner
logic and inner connections take precedence
over structuring external structures. Second,
extending this, Poincaré advocates a philo-
sophy of ontological and epistemological
‘conventionalism’ – that which rejects all
forms of synthetic a priori geometric intuition
and follows instead a heuristic based on the
study of groups. Galison has summarized this
position as one interested in the ‘variable and
the fixed’, which emerge together and ‘can
only be understood together’ (2003: 79).
Poincaré thus defines aggregates in/of space
in temporal terms and traces these as coher-
ences and temporal orders travelling in curved
spacetime, which he called the disk model.
With this background in mind, Poincaré’s
‘phase space’ is an abstract concept that
 Martin Jones: Phase space: geography, relational thinking, and beyond 499
describes the dynamics and geometry of sys-
tems with non-constant parameters being
performed within four dimensional space-
time. Phase space captures all the possible
spaces in which a spatiotemporal system
might exist in theoretical terms. The litera-
ture often specifies system-state properties
by identifying n-objects/coordinates in an
n-dimensional phase space (see Byrne, 1998).
Phase space encompasses current spacetime
(instances of the actual, or what Poincaré
calls ‘restricted’) and imaginative or mental
spacetimes of the future (spaces of the
emergence or in Poincaré words ‘extended’ –
see Poincaré, 1952). Phase space, then, ‘con-
tains not just what happens but what might
happen under different circumstances. It’s
the space of the possible’ (Cohen and Stewart,
1994: 200, emphasis added).
The space of the possible, though, is
limited by what is already occupying and
occupied in spacetime in the present. The
‘geography of phase space is flexible, but not
totally arbitrary: the main possibilities are
“already there”, constrained by contextual
realities’ (Stewart and Cohen, 1997: 277,
emphasis added). In turn, and in contrast to
relational thinking, which insufficiently prob-
lematizes boundedness, inertia, power, and
time – and internalizes spatiality into our
cultural constructions to such an extent that
it perhaps loses senses of space as something
external or given (compare Smith, 1990;
2004; Dodgshon, 1998) – relations are seen
as spatial and temporal. This is because we
are not dealing with ‘single indicators’ as
Byrne (1998) puts it, or collapsing everything
into each other through networks and fluids
such that flux and change is nowhere in
particular; we want to describe the ‘state of
systems’ (systems of complexes, rather than
complex systems) that can be traced in and
through time.
4 Phase space and the region
Applying this thinking to human geography
is a considerable challenge. Using the region
as an example, given its focus above, these
spaces are multifaceted but constrained phe-
nomena layered through points of contact
between different systems. Regions are his-
torical geographical accomplishments, de-
fined and delimited by shifting relationships.
They exist as non-essentialist (as opposed to
essentialist or anti-essentialist – see Sayer,
1997) entities that can be identified through
abstraction and analysed in accordance with
‘the contingent upshot of historical events’
(Hacking, 1999: 14). On this, and following
Byrne (1998: 25–26), the interesting question
is whether the region is located in, or con-
stitutes, phase space. The answer is both: as
‘phase spatiality’ regions are framed by the
balance between different geopolitical, socio-
economic, and cultural institutionalizing
forces. These forces (or components) can be
activated in strategies, practices, and dis-
courses, some of which are bounded and
others unbounded. On certain occasions,
systems of regions are spatially contiguous,
and at other times they are spatially non-
contiguous, and these change over time (cf.
Painter, 2008). As Smith puts it, ‘[regions as]
geographical scales are the products of
economic, political and social activity and
relationships; as such they are as changeable
as those relationships themselves’ (1995: 60).
This initial discussion chimes loudly with
Paasi’s writings and statements made in
physical geography:
While the perspectives of authors may vary
from the questions of economy (know-
ledge economy, economic restructuring) to
the questions of administration/governance,
from culture and identity to the roles of new
institutions in regional development … the
region should not be regarded merely as a
passive medium in which social action takes
place. Neither should it be understood as an
entity that operates autonomously above
human beings. Regions are always part of this
action and hence they are social constructs
that are created in political, economic, cultural
and administrative practices and discourses.
Further, in these practices and discourses
regions may become crucial instruments of
power that manifest themselves in shaping the
500 Progress in Human Geography 33(4)
spaces of governance, economy and culture.
(Paasi, 2001: 16, emphasis added)
[R]egions are continually being redefined, at
various scales, either because the character of
places changes, or because the value placed on
different variables or properties as measures
of the nature and character of a place change.
This in turn implies that in n-dimensional space,
(small) places with a common properties in a
larger and less homogeneous area can at some
stages be spatially contiguous as a common
entity (a contiguous patch, or a region) in
conventional space co-ordinates, and at others
may be spatially disjunct (in terms of locational
co-ordinates). But, when they are disjunct in
conventional spatial co-ordinates, they may
nevertheless form a contiguous region in phase
space. (Richards et al., 2004: 341, emphasis
removed)
In contrast to relational approaches, phase
space, to quote Thrift ironically, locates the
search for an approach able to ‘keep a hold on
history and geography’ (1992: 24, emphasis
original). Successive rounds of ‘region build-
ing’ (Paasi, 1996) are superimposed over
already existing relationships and activities in
phase space and transform the systems that
they inherit because fields of force (expressed
through politics, power, positionality, con-
sciousness, inertia and embeddedness, etc)
matter. In turn, regional spatiality presents
itself as a succession of different ‘phase por-
traits’ (Stewart, 1996) or ‘phase space layers’
(paralleling conceptualizations of ‘rounds of
accumulation’ by Massey, 1984, and layered
human occupancy by Johnston, 1991) formed
through the passage of events, legacies, and
practices.
IV Conclusions
With the exception of passing references to
‘phase relations’ and ‘phase shifts’ in the
time-geography research of Parkes and Thrift
(1980: 14–15), ‘state space’ mentioned in the
links between Deleuze’s geophilosophy and
complexity theory (Bonta and Protevi, 2004:
19–21), and cameo appearances in Urry’s
(2003) Global complexity, ‘phase space’ is
a philosophical perspective that is curiously
absent from human geographic thinking and
I would argue one that is worthy of further
discussion and debate. For Richards and col-
leagues, ‘the idea that places can be redefined
by changing the co-ordinate frame in which
they are mapped and viewed adds a rich
dimension to interpretation of the nature
of the Geography of places and regions’
(Richards et al., 2004: 344, emphasis added).
Several issues remain to be discussed.
There is the issue of if/how to schematic-
ally or diagrammatically ‘represent’ phase
space. I would see phase space as the ‘focus
of past processes whose traces are not always
evident in the landscape’ (Lefebvre, 1977: 341,
emphasis added). Do we need an approach
that can capture and depict space over time –
rather like Gregory’s (1989: 77) playing-card
approach to explaining Massey’s spatial
division of labour thesis through rounds of
investment? Embarking on this project, how-
ever, involves dealing with much ‘cartograph-
ic anxiety’, as Painter (2008) has pointed out,
and perhaps undertaking a bit of fieldwork in
the process. In complex dynamical model-
ling, phase space is more often than not a
diagrammatical representation. Does phase
space though have to be a mode of physically
modelling behaviour (cf. Richards et al., 2004:
342–44)? Or is it, instead, what O’Sullivan
(2004) calls a useful ‘geographical narrative’?
In this paper, I have argued for the latter.
The politics of phase space needs to be
seriously considered. Several preliminary
statements can be made. Phase space opens
up a field of political geometry whereby re-
searchers can track multifarious spatial
synchronizations and, when these are in
sync – what Golubitsky and Stewart (2000)
term the ‘symmetry perspective’ when re-
ferring to the behaviour of complex systems –
they can be institutionalized as contiguous
and symmetrical or territorial shapes
(cf. Painter, 2008). Pushing this point further,
although I am sympathetic but cautious of
notions that ‘[c]onceptualizing space as
open, multiple and relational, unfinished and
always becoming, is a prerequisite for history
 Martin Jones: Phase space: geography, relational thinking, and beyond 501
to be open and thus a prerequisite, too, for
the possibility of politics’ (Massey, 2005: 59),
phase space does not necessarily involve ad-
vocating a territorially orientated grammar
of politics, although this can be a possibility.
Instead, it involves conceding that there may
be certain circumstances in which, as an object
of analysis, practical and bounded spaces
that have been institutionalized through
particular struggles and become identified
as discrete territories in the spheres of eco-
nomics, politics and culture, matter (see
Jones and MacLeod, 2004; Hudson, 2007;
MacLeod and Jones, 2007). Phase space
though is sensitive to cross-border complex-
ities and tensions, strategies and tactics, in
its recognition of the unfolding, dynamic,
and overlapping nature of space (on which,
see Healey, 2007). Rather than compete for
mobile economic dividends in an increasing
neoliberal context, by focusing on territories,
spaces and flows, a phase space perspective
provides a basis for articulating collaboration
and coherence.
On a related point, by momentarily freez-
ing spacetime, phase space also asks ques-
tions on what type of economic development
is actually taking place, exploring at the
same time which constellations of forces are
energizing this. Martin and Sunley (2007)
have been exploring similar issues in recent
work on the interfaces between complexity
thinking and evolutionary economic geog-
raphy. Phase space is the active product of
reciprocal relationships between economic
behaviour, the politics of representation and
identity, state power geometries, and the
sedimentation of these practices in space-
time. In turn, coalition building and its politics
are active and ongoing processes – rich in
political strategy, territorial awareness and
cultural expression – which may allow activ-
ists and policy-makers to actually uncover
behaviour in relation to the very formation of
those interdependent conventions and con-
stellations that are always being talked about
within ‘leading-edge’ economies (Scott and
Storper, 2003).
Last, phase space could provide a way
of tracing the polymorphic organization of
sociospatial relations expressed in the work
of Jessop et al. (2008) and Leitner et al. (2008).
The latter propose a multidimensional frame-
work for studying contentious politics with
scale, place, positionality, networking, and
mobility shaping each other and in turn in-
fluencing the trajectory of politics. Likewise,
Jessop et al. suggest that territories (T),
places (P), scales (S), and networks (N) must
be viewed as mutually constitutive and
relationally intertwined dimensions of socio-
spatial relations. They offer a TPSN frame-
work as the starting point for this, whereby
different dimensions of sociospatial analysis
can be located in self-referential terms and
in terms of their interactions (Jessop et al.,
2008: Figures 2 and 3), leading to a 16-cell
patterning of those relations. Phase space
can be used to take this work further as it
is sensitive to the historical geographies of
capitalist development and the ways in which
territory, place, scale, and networks (plus
mobility and positionality), provide structur-
ing principles in and through which different
types of spatiotemporal fixes and politics
occur. As noted above, constructed and al-
ways emergent space matters in influencing
future trajectories due to path-dependent
and path-shaping logics. The geography of
different moments and their combinations
within these spatial constellations merit
more systematic phase space ‘mapping’
analysis, tracing continuities and discon-
tinuities, and particularly emphasis placed
on how this is unevenly developed and with
what consequences.
Acknowledgements
I have been writing this paper for some
time. Earlier versions have been given at
the Annual Conferences of the Association
of American Geographers (2003, 2005,
2007), Institute of British Geographers
(2005, 2007), the Alternative Economic
Spaces: New Political Stories Conference
(Hull, 2005), Regional Studies Association
502 Progress in Human Geography 33(4)
Conference (Aalborg, 2005), European
Urban and Regional Studies Conference
(Barcelona, 2002), and departmental sem-
inars at Kings College (2005) and Durham
University (2008). I would like to thank those
posing questions at these events, which have
encouraged me to clarify the argument.
Thanks also to Roger Lee, Deborah Dixon,
Gordon MacLeod, Bob Jessop, Neil Brenner,
Ian Stewart, Mark Bonta, Kate Edwards,
Graham Gardner, and especially Eric
Sheppard and Anssi Paasi for challenging
questions and insightful comments. The
paper could not have been completed with-
out research leave think-ing space funded
by The Leverhulme Trust, as part of a Philip
Leverhulme Prize for Geography (2005).
The usual disclaimers apply.
Note
1. Harrison (2006; 2008) has posed similar questions in
geography and important thinking has commenced
on notions of ‘the relation of proximity’.
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