Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference - David Harvey

This book engages with the politics of social and environmentaljustice, and seeks new ways to think about the future ofurbanization in the twenty-first century. It establishesfoundational concepts for understanding how space, time, place andnature - the material frames of daily life - are constituted andrepresented through social practices, not as separate elements butin relation to each other. It describes how geographicaldifferences are produced, and shows how they then becomefundamental to the exploration of political, economic andecological alternatives to contemporary life.

The book is divided into four parts. Part I describes theproblematic nature of action and analysis at different scales oftime and space, and introduces the reader to the modes ofdialectical thinking and discourse which are used throughout theremainder of the work. Part II examines how "nature" and"environment" have been understood and valued in relation toprocesses of social change and seeks, from this basis, to makesense of contemporary environmental issues.

Part III, is a wide-ranging discussion of history, geography andculture, explores the meaning of the social "production" of spaceand time, and clarifies problems related to "otherness" and"difference". The final part of the book deploys the foundationalarguments the author has established to consider contemporaryproblems of social justice that have resulted from recent changesin geographical divisions of labor, in the environment, and in thepace and quality of urbanization.

Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference speaks to a widereadership of students of social, cultural and spatial theory andof the dynamics of contemporary life. It is a convincingdemonstration that it is both possible and necessary to valuedifference and to seek a just social order.