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Spatial Fix

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DOI: 10.1002/9781118568446.eurs0309

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Spatial Fix
ANDREW HEROD
University of Georgia, USA
A 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 inner
workings 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 consti-
tutive 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 to
do 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
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies. Edited by Anthony Orum.
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118568446.eurs0309
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 land-
scapes of both production and consumption.
Such activities invariably involved the state,
for without state intervention much of the
infrastructure necessary for production,
consumption, and thus the realization of
surplus value cannot be put in place. Hence,
he argued (Harvey 1982, 233), capital must
collectively and individually invest in “facto-
ries, dams, offices, shops, warehouses, roads,
railways, docks, power stations, water supply
and sewage disposal systems, schools, hospi-
tals, parks, cinemas, restaurants – the list is
endless.” It is the laying out of the economic
landscape in particular ways that Harvey
termed the creation of capital’s “spatial fix.”
Through such a spatial fix, he averred, capi-
talists seek to resolve the tensions within the
capitalist mode of production.
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
 2 SPATIAL FI X
time if there is not a more productive use
for it. In this regard, Harvey suggested that
there is an important connection between the
realm of surplus value production in what
he called the “primary circuit of capital” and
the construction of the built environment
(the “secondary circuit of capital”). There
is, though, a tension between and within
these two types of fix. In particular, Harvey
noted that capitalists must negotiate the
geographical knife edge between their need
to have their capital sufficiently fixed in place
so that accumulation can occur and their
desire to have it be sufficiently mobile so
that they can take advantage of investment
opportunities that arise elsewhere. In this
context, capital’s fixing in place produces a
landscape that is helpful for accumulation
at one moment in time but that becomes
increasingly constrictive as the demands of
accumulation change – the urban landscapes
which facilitated the expansion of capitalism
in the nineteenth century, for instance, have
often subsequently had to be demolished and
reworked to facilitate accumulation in the
late twentieth century.
Although Harvey developed the concept
of the spatial fix to describe how capitalists
produce and use space in various ways as
part of the accumulation process and to try to
solve crises of overaccumulation, the concept
was adopted and adapted in the 1990s by
various self-described “labor geographers”
to describe how workers also seek to ensure
that the economic landscape is made in ways
that can facilitate their social and biological
reproduction, both on a daily but also a
generational basis – ensuring the landscape
is made as one of employment rather than
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unemployment, for instance. Like capital,
workers too must decide between being fixed
in place and migrating elsewhere. In an inter-
esting theoretical extension in this regard,
Samers (1998) coined the term “spatial vent”
to describe the forced and/or encouraged
repatriation by the state of migrant workers
during economic crises, when having large
numbers of immigrant workers might cause
resentment and nativist sentiments – and
thus political instability – on the part of local
workers.
SEE ALSO: Neo-Marxian Analysis; New
Economic Geography; Uneven Economic
Development
REFERENCES
Harvey, David. 1982. The Limits to Capital. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Samers, Michael. 1998. “Maghrebin Immigration,
France, and the Political Economy of the ‘Spa-
tial Vent’.” In An Unruly World? Globalization,
Governance and Geography, edited by Andrew
Herod, Gearóid Ó Tuathail, and Susan Roberts,
196–218. London: Routledge.
FURTHER READING
Harvey, David. 1978. “The Urban Process under
Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis.”
International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research, 2(1): 101–131.
Harvey, David. 1981. “The Spatial Fix: Hegel, von
Thunen and Marx.” Antipode, 13(3): 1–12.
Harvey, David. 2001. “Globalization and the ‘Spa-
tial Fix’.” Geographische Revue, 3(2): 23–30.
Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Herod, Andrew. 2003. “Workers, Space, and
Labor Geography.” International Labor and
Working-Class History, 64(Fall): 112–138.