Let's get real: spatio-temporal identity and geographic entities

Doreen Massey’s paper in this journal (Massey 1999a) called for a new ‘conversation’ between human and physical geographers about the nature of space-time and time-space. We believe that her initiative is an important one as methodologies in both physical and human geography have become highly entrenched with respect to concepts of space and time. We would like to extend the arguments in our 1995 article (Raper and Livingstone 1995) that were discussed by Massey (1999a), in order to make a contribution to the much needed conversation. Our starting point is Massey’s assertion that ‘the representation of space-time is itself an emergent product of the conceptualization of the space-time entities themselves’ (269). It seems to us that this phrase marks out a number of key theoretical debates: 1 the role of representation 2 the question of how entities are conceptualized 3 the framing role of space and time 4 how representation and conceptualization are mutually constituted. In this Exchange, we would like to set out the important issues for the ‘conversation’ as we see them. As one of us has recently completed a monograph discussing these issues at length (Raper 2000), only the outlines of these arguments will be attempted here.