The Nature of Space by Milton Santos (review)

Abstract

Several years after the publication of Por uma geografia nova (1978), in which Milton Santos carried out a rigorous critique of geography, defended the premises of a nascent critical geography and announced the continuation of an ambitious project of theoretical reflection on human space, the publication of A natureza do espaço (The Nature of Space) in 1996 crowned his extensive research, offering the most comprehensive and systematic elaboration of his theory of geographic space. Now translated into English, this work provides a fundamental framework for the global diffusion of this situated thought with a universal vocation. The important technical, social, political, and economic transformations of the last three decades of the twentieth century, the excessive fragmentation of science, and his dissatisfaction with a geography that was either too empirical or too adjectival, led Milton Santos to deepen his analysis of space as a matrix of social life and to formulate new methodological questions. In some sense, this book is a journey upstream of what could be expected from a theoretical text in geography, as the author starts from the real and not from an epistemological discussion. The important issue, he points out, is not to debate geography, but rather the being of space, its constitution, its ontology. Thus, he dedicates the first part of the book to those topics. Inherited structures, current processes, and tendencies are recognized based on categories extracted from the real that, at the same time, allow for elaborating and analyzing a discipline’s object. In that way, in dialogue with philosophers of technique, such as Simondon (1989) and Ellul (1977), Santos affirms that the being of contemporary space is technical and therefore technique is a constitutive category (Granger, 1993) that allows for empirizing time and space as historical phenomenon.