Heritage · Legacy
Doreen Massey Legacy
British geographer (1944–2016) at the Open University who reshaped how space, place and power are understood through 'For Space' and 'power geometry'.Written to last.
By Confinity Heritage Editorial · Updated 2026-07-31 · 6-minute readQuiet tools, kept out of the way.
Doreen Massey was a British geographer who spent most of her career at the Open University and changed how scholars think about space, place and power. Rather than treating space as a flat backdrop for events, she argued that it is produced by social relations and is always unfinished. Her ideas about the spatial division of labour, a global sense of place, and power geometry moved out of geography into sociology, cultural studies and politics, and her books are still widely taught.
Doreen Barbara Massey was born on 3 January 1944 in Manchester, England, and grew up in Wythenshawe, then one of the largest council estates in Europe. The social and economic divisions she saw as a child shaped her later research on inequality and marginalisation. She read Geography at St Hugh's College, Oxford, graduating with a first-class degree, and became increasingly drawn to economic geography. She then studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where she took a master's degree in regional science (Wikipedia).
Her first substantial post was at the Centre for Environmental Studies (CES) in London, a research institute working on urban and regional policy. There she developed the idea of the spatial division of labour, set out in full in her 1984 book Spatial Divisions of Labour. She argued that capitalist economies do not spread investment evenly: they concentrate control, skilled work and profit in some regions while leaving others dependent, producing an inequality that is geographical as much as economic. When CES lost its government funding in the 1980s, Massey moved to the Open University, where she held the chair in Geography until her retirement in 2009 (Social Science Space).
Massey's best-known argument is that place is not fixed. In her 1991 essay "A Global Sense of Place", published in Marxism Today, she rejected the idea of places as bounded, defensive and rooted in a single identity. Places, she wrote, are meeting points, defined by the particular mix of social relations and connections that pass through them at a given moment. This progressive, or global, sense of place offered a way to talk about local identity without nostalgia or exclusion.
That thinking culminated in For Space (2005), where she set out three propositions: space is a product of interrelations, it is the sphere of multiplicity and coexisting difference, and it is always under construction and never closed. Her stated aim was "to bring space alive, to dynamize it and to make it relevant" (Social Science Space). Alongside this she developed power geometry, the observation that globalisation positions people very differently: some initiate the flows of money, people and information, while others are only on the receiving end. The concept travelled well beyond the academy and was taken up in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez, where it was named one of the "five motors" guiding national policy (Social Science Space).
Massey was a Marxist and feminist geographer, and her 1994 collection Space, Place and Gender made her one of the founders of feminist geography, showing how ideas about space and mobility are shaped by gender and class. Her influence reached across sociology, cultural studies, planning and political theory. She received the Prix Vautrin Lud, often described as the Nobel Prize of geography, in 1998, and the Royal Geographical Society's Victoria Medal in 1994; she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002 (Wikipedia). She reportedly declined the offer of an OBE (Social Science Space).
She never separated scholarship from politics. In 1995 she co-founded the journal Soundings with Stuart Hall and Michael Rustin, and the three later produced the Kilburn Manifesto, a serial critique of neoliberalism. She advised the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone and remained an active public intellectual after retirement. Massey died of pancreatic cancer on 11 March 2016 in Kilburn, London, at the age of 72 (The British Academy).
Massey's central claim, that space and place are made by relationships rather than fixed on a map, is close to how Confinity thinks about a life. A person is not a single point but the sum of the connections, places and moments that run through them. Keeping her here holds onto a thinker who insisted that geography is really about people and power, and whose ideas still help readers make sense of a connected and unequal world.
Early life
For Space and power geometry
Legacy
Why Confinity keeps Doreen
References
Timeline
- 1944Born in Manchester, England
- 1984Published Spatial Divisions of Labour
- 1995Co-founded the journal Soundings with Stuart Hall and Michael Rustin
- 1998Awarded the Prix Vautrin Lud, the Nobel Prize of geography
- 2005Published For Space
- 2009Retired from the Open University as Professor Emerita
- 2016Died in Kilburn, London