Spatial Fix

Description

ANDREW HEROD:

"The central focus of economic geographers is to understand how economic activities are distributed across the landscape. Historically, such geographers tended to view the eco-nomic landscape as a reflection of the innerworkings of whatever economic system is dominant in a particular place – feudalism, capitalism, centrally planned economies, and so forth. With the rise of Marxist-inspired geographical theorizing in the early 1970s,however, several prominent geographers sought to explore the connections between the inner workings of the capitalist mode of production and the making of capitalism’s economic geography, seeing the landscape as a reflection of social relations but also constitutive of them. One of the most prominent theorists in this regard was David Harvey who, among other things, coined the phrase “the spatial fix.” For Harvey, the concept of the “spatial fix” is a geographical corollary to what Marx called the “technological fix,” a term he used to describe his belief that capitalists trust that crises of accumulation can be solved through the replacement in the production process of labor with capital in the form of machinery (or, as he put it, replacing living labor with dead labor). Through the concept of the spatial fix Harvey wanted todo two things. First, he sought to link the political-economic workings of capitalism to the production of the unevenly developed economic geographies that are emblematic of capitalism. Second, Harvey wanted to show that uneven development under capitalism is actively produced rather than the result simply of the impossibility of having even development. This was the result, he argued, of capitalists understanding that they had to create particular spatial configurations of their own investments and of the landscapes of capitalism more generally so that they might generate, secure, and realize surplus value. This involved actively shaping landscapes of both production and consumption.

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Harvey employed the term “spatial fix” in two different, though interconnected, ways. On the one hand, he used it to refer to the physical fixing in place of capital so that surplus value can be secured in the production process. On the other, he used it to refer to how capitalists can temporarily solve problems of overaccumulation through developing new geographical configurations of their investments – say by exporting sur-plus capital overseas or by using the physical landscape as a repository for surplus capital that can be invested speculatively in the built environment for relatively long periods of time.

(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332426834_Spatial_Fix)