Time-Space Compression

Time-Space Compression is a term defined by David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity as “processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves” (240).

The term is often linked to the change of space-time conceptions associated with the rise of the Modern Era. In Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey (about the introduction of railways to nineteenth-century England), he explains that “the railroad opened up new spaces that were not as easily accessible…it did so by destroying space, namely the space between points” (37). The way the space between places was conceived was radically altered. Thus, “[w]hat was experienced as being annihilated was the traditional space-time continuum which characterized the old transport technology” (37).

But this flexible concept is also used in consideration of the wider social effects of such changes. Harvey himself writes that there has been an “intense phase of time-space compression” in the past two decades “that has had a disorienting and disruptive impact upon political-economic practices, the balance of class power, as well as upon cultural and social life” (284).

Similarly, Edward Soja’s analysis in Postmodern Geographies of space as conceived through intellectual history (especially in relation to capitalism and Marxism) is founded on time-space compression. He says that through the nineteenth-century restructuring of space and time, “the spatial organization of society was being restructured to meet the urgent demands of capitalism” (34), and so “[l]ike capitalism, the modern critique of capitalism seemed to be propelled through an annihilation of space by time” (33).