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 power’s 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: Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz and the seductive logic of public space
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 in tension
Part 3 Power-Topologies
8 Topological twists: Power’s shifting geographies
9 The circulation of financial elites: Invented spaces, power and dissimulation
10 Power’s quiet reach: Manipulating publics, policing borders, and undermining the NHS
Afterword: Shifting spatialities, shifting conversations
Biography
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).
Currently, John Allen is the most important theorist of power and space. The present collection gives a superb overview of his seminal contribution. A real strength of his work is his ability to combine classical social theory and the continental tradition of Foucault and Deleuze, moving seamlessly between them to explore power’s choreography of space.
-Mark Haugaard, Emeritus Professor of Politics and Sociology, University of Galway. Founding editor of Journal of Political Power
John Allen is one of our most insightful writers on power and space. His persuasive account of power’s diverse modes and their topological spatialities has transformed thinking in geography and beyond. This collection provides a compelling picture both of the development of those ideas and of the shifting contours of power in its many guises (and disguises).
-Joe Painter, Professor of Geography, Durham University.
