Remaking the socio-spatial fix: Actors,time and crisis in two iron ore towns

Abstract

The ‘spatial fix’ has been central to economic geography for nearly 50 years, examining capitalist development through both stability and change. Harvey’s original conceptions of the fix prioritised capital’s capacity to fix space to accumulate and forestall crisis. We continue this by considering the ‘socio-spatial fix’, allowing closer investigation of who makes the landscapes of capitalism, and how actor choices and actor inter- and intra-relationships forestall crises of accumulation. We show how crisis, time and actors are central to making and re-making socio-spatial fixes and in turn to understanding both the socio-spatial dialectic and the spatial fix. Empirically, we compare two remote but globally networked mining towns, Kiruna, Sweden and Newman, Australia. Mining towns are rewarding case-studies because capital’s relative immobility and the dominance of a single industry make strikingly clear how both production and social reproduction are remade. We enrich general theorisations in three ways, by explaining: first, how crisis-threatening events require renegotiation of socio-spatial arrangements; second, how time and timing are critical in remaking fixes; third, how actor agency and heterogeneity are central because the actors who make fixes change over time and are in complex relationships with each other.

Introduction

Examining capitalist accumulation’s inevitable trajectory towards crisis has long been fundamental to critical scholarship (Harvey, 1982). To capture both the relative stability, where crisis is forestalled, and crisis, human geographers invoke the ‘fix’. As a construct, the fix has the capacity to unpack, in a time- and space-sensitive manner, the complexity of actions and relations which constitute and sustain capitalism. The fix dates back nearly half a century (Harvey, 1975), and has become a central tenet of critical economic geography (Bok, 2019). In this paper, we interrogate and operationalise one branch of fix scholarship, the ‘socio-spatial fix’. In doing so, we improve understandings of the fix more generally by empirically investigating and foregrounding the contradictory and complex social relations that underpin fixes, combining two foundational concepts, Harvey’s spatial fix (1975, 1982) and Soja’s socio-spatial dialectic (1980).

The spatial fix considers how capital arranges (or fixes) space; organising production, circulation and realisation to be able to secure accumulation (Harvey, 2006), simultaneously securing the reproduction of labour to sustain the system (Harvey, 1982). Additionally, the fix is only a temporary solution against overaccumulation, where capital receives impermanent relief from crisis (Harvey, 2001). Fixed space, however, is not made by capital alone as other actors have agentic potential (Herod, 1997). This invites questions of how, and by whom, capitalist social formations are created and re-created. Defined by Harvey (1982), a capitalist social formation, is ‘a particular society as it is constituted at a particular historical moment’ (p. 26). We join the spatial fix with the socio-spatial dialectic (Soja, 1980), to deploy the ‘socio-spatial fix’ (following Ağar and Böhm, 2018). Such an approach reveals that capitalism is sustained through conflict and compromise between different actors, themselves internally divided (Warren, 2019).

In this paper we compare two iron ore mining towns, Kiruna in northern Sweden and Newman in north-western Australia. Our comparison foregrounds the materiality of fixes, that is, how the geography of capitalism is transformed to forestall crisis, drawing on Schoenberger’s (2004) insight that: ‘The dynamics that [the spatial fix] describes are contradictory and they produce conflict that is worked out by real people in their real lives. These contradictions and conflict will never go away so long as the system exists’ (p. 433). Studying mining towns is valuable in longitudinal analysis because resource fixity constrains capital’s mobility (Bridge, 2008), revealing contradictions in place. Kiruna and Newman are fruitful sites, having sustained a single dominant institutional project (Pred, 1984), iron ore mining, over an extended period. The towns’ crises, actors and temporalities have been constituted differently, caused by, and causing, different socio-spatial fixes over time. Comparison allows examination of how both social and accumulation crises are forestalled while (partially) meeting the needs of various actors, and the spatial consequences of their choices.

Our paper operationalises and theorises the fix in three inter-related ways. Firstly, we consider the role of crisis in unmaking and making socio-spatial fixes. Secondly, we foreground time and timing in the remaking of fixes. Precisely when transitions in socio-spatial fixes occur, and over what period, is fundamental to the composition of subsequent fixes. Thirdly, we consider the role of actor agency and heterogeneity in making fixes. The actors who make the fix engage in complex and at times contradictory relationships with each other. However, the internal composition of these actors changes over time, meaning that denominations such as union or worker reflect different attitudes and interests at different times in the same place.

To locate and build the argument, we first chart our theoretical starting points. We then outline our methodology and trace successive socio-spatial fixes in Kiruna and Newman. Our analysis section turns to the key similarities and differences between the cases as we examine the trajectories of the towns, and the forces which led to the unmaking and remaking of their socio-spatial fixes. Finally, we explain the significance of our findings, highlighting the role of crisis, actors and timing to theorise the socio-spatial fix.

Theoretical underpinnings

Our starting point has much in common with critical geography, recognising that the landscapes of capitalism are not made solely by capital, but rather through contestation and cooperation between different actors over time (Harvey, 1982; Herod, 1997; Massey, 1984). Nearly 50 years ago, Harvey (1975) described how capitalism as a political and economic system is inherently geographical, requiring the spatial arrangement of workers, the means of production, infrastructure, the capacity to transport where required, and markets to sell products. Through arranging space and time, capital secures accumulation and reproduction.

Underpinning the fix, Harvey argues, is the totality that is generated through the combination of production relations and social formations, which are integrated in particular places at particular times (Harvey, 1982, 2006). While the terms of each are explained elsewhere, it is useful to consider how production relations sustain social relations and how they value labour power. Harvey (1982) explains that

The value of labour power can be understood only in relation to the concrete modalities of the reproduction of the working class under the specific historical conditions imposed by capitalism [which can be grounded by] considering the historical processes whereby the standard of living, the value of labour power and the share of variable capital in the total social product are actually regulated. (p. 49)

This paper, in comparing the two towns, charts the concrete modalities of production in place, as generated by specific historical conditions of capitalism. This is described as a historical and moral process which form a totality. Harvey argues this totality is constantly in danger of developing into a crisis, which manifests in locally specific ways that are ‘built into distinctive regional, organizational and sectoral configurations’ (Harvey, 1982: 431).

This spatio-temporality of accumulation, and the arrangements conducive to stability between crises, led to the development of the fix (Bok, 2019). Introduced as the spatial fix, fixes are the means by which capitalism can be stabilised, ‘in either the short or long run’ (Harvey, 1982: 27). Later, Harvey (2001) made explicit that the fix has a dual meaning, as a way of holding steady spatial relations to ensure accumulation, but also as an addict understands it, as a way of satisfying a desire, but only a temporary satisfaction. Analysis of the fix, and of capitalism more broadly, is a venture that necessarily charts stability, through fixes, and instability, through crises (Harvey, 1982). This duality opens analytical space to understand both the formulation and the remaking of fixes as a reaction to previous crises and reflecting power relations in place.

The spatial fix explains capitalism as a set of social relations, which can be inwardly or outwardly transformed to forestall, but never overcome, crises of overaccumulation (Harvey, 1982, 2001). The temporary ‘fixing’ of socio-economic relations generates and exploits uneven economic development (Smith and Harvey, 2008). There is, with any dynamic phenomenon, a need to understand the processes by which change occurs.

Class relations, according to Harvey, are a historical creation. The relation between capital and labour results from specific historical processes. To understand this, Harvey notes that ‘[t]here is, therefore, a great deal that goes on in society that is not directly related to the circulation of capital’ (Harvey, 1982: 20). This insight sits complementarily with the shared understanding that emerged within critical geography that capital does not make the landscapes of capitalism entirely on its own terms, but through contestation. Herod (1997) suggested that labour could shape economic space both in relation to, and independently from, capital, advocating a ‘labour geography’, describing ‘labour’s spatial fix’ where ‘workers’ activities in terms of their desire to create particular spatial fixes appropriate to their own condition and needs at particular times in particular locations’ (Herod, 1997: 17). He later summarised the argument that workers are not ‘dupes [. . .] but. . . real and complex people with real and complex sets of interests that they pursued as they sought to secure their futures and, in the process, shaped the economic landscape’ (Herod, 2022: 6). In this conceptualisation, Herod (1997) accounts for divisions within labour and contradictory relations between (segments of) labour (Warren, 2019) and (segments of) capital. Further, workers in the same location have different levels of power, formed not only from production relations, but also from culture and ideology (Peck, 1996). Subsequent developments in labour geography have shown how workers have different capacities to shape ‘labour’s spatial fixes’ as labour agency is constrained (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2023).

These approaches still leave the question of how workers in one place interact with capital, of which answers can be found in what Jonas (1996) calls a ‘local labour control regime’. Baglioni et al. (2022: 12) defines these regimes as ‘the combination of social relations and institutions that bind capital and labour in a form of antagonistic relative stability in particular times and places’. This formulation highlights the relationship between production and reproduction in place in sustaining accumulation (Baglioni, 2018), along with articulations between global economic space and the local. This helps chart the role of stability in the interplay between the economic and the social, and between labour and capital (Baglioni et al., 2022).

In attempting to connect labour geography to ideas of social reproduction and relations beyond the workplace, Ağar and Böhm (2018) propose a ‘socio-spatial fix’. Engaging with socio-spatial analysis is useful for three reasons. First, the socio-spatial fix describes how fixes are produced and reproduced by ‘collective, interdependent and practical human action’ (Ağar and Böhm, 2018: 1232) which occur in relation to social and economic forces (Dutta, 2020). Second, it enables labour agency – ‘the intention and practice of taking action for one’s own self-interests and the interests of others’ (Rogaly, 2009: 1975) to be conceptualised in broader social relations. Third, it foregrounds that worker agency can be based around different alliances, and at times worker action can be to the detriment of other workers at various scales and timeframes (Barratt et al., 2020).

While outlining the benefits of a socio-spatial fix, Ağar and Böhm (2018) stop short of defining it. We therefore return to Soja’s (1980: 208) socio-spatial dialectic, drawing on the insight that neither the social nor the spatial are pre-eminent, but sit in a ‘mix of opposition, unity and contradiction’ which dialectically forms the relations of production, ‘which are simultaneously social and spatial’. Soja invokes the role of ‘contextual space’ and ‘created space’ to understand how society and production are organised. Organised space is the product of society, it is social, but also the product of capitalist spatial relations, and it is spatial, and their co-production generates the socio-spatial dialectic. Soja’s work allows us to consider social relations as being constructed in relation to economic space, but also as a component of that economic space.

Temporary stability in each socio-spatial fix is achievable if two requirements are met: as in the spatial fix, it must resolve crises of accumulation (Harvey, 1982) but it must also meet the needs of socio-economic formations (Ağar and Böhm, 2018). Crises in either domain can lead to ‘unfixing’ of a temporary stability. Drawing on these ‘fix’ and ‘dialectic’ insights, we therefore define the socio-spatial fix as a period of relative stability in both the landscape of capitalism and in the processes of daily life which (temporarily) allow accumulation, which is then remade to overcome crises of accumulation. Socio-spatial fixes are created not by capital alone, nor by labour and capital together, but by groups of people competing and cooperating in place over the creation and distribution of the products of accumulation while forestalling crisis. Again, Schoenberger’s (2004) emphasis on the importance of ‘life’ within capitalism is critical as she describes ‘how people live [spatial fixes] and struggle against them, the resources and strategies they bring to this struggle, the constraints that hamper them, their successes and failures and renewed efforts—this is history in the making’ (p. 433). Our analysis therefore allows for place-based empirical investigation of the materiality of the fix and the social relations that both challenge and sustain it.

We continue the work of Ağar and Böhm (2018) in arguing for the socio-spatial fix to incorporate micro-social processes into understandings of capitalist development. That is, within the spatial fix, social relations play out separately from but in relation to production in a particular place, but also are a critical component of production processes within that place. Our unit of analysis is, therefore, drawing from Soja (1980), la vie quotidienne, as a measure of relative stability in daily life. The relationship between production and reproduction shapes how labour engages with capital in particular places and how capital’s influence extends beyond the workplace (Kelly, 2009; Peck, 1996). There is a fundamental connection between the agency of local actors in place, be it Indigenous Peoples (Radcliffe and Laurie, 2006) or labour (Wu et al., 2022), and the resultant form of capitalism.

The socio-spatial fix can engage the complexities of capitalism as a socio-economic phenomenon to deepen understandings of capitalist accumulation and life within it. By mining the concept of the fix, we explain how forestalling crisis is a socio-spatial phenomenon, and in doing so enrich understandings of capitalism more broadly. In our empirical section, we interrogate the actors and processes by which fixes are made in greater detail to capture these processes more precisely, focusing on crisis, timing and actors.

Methodology

Case studies are best deployed when the context is inextricably linked with the phenomenon (Flyvbjerg, 2006), a feature shared with socio-spatial fixes. Our comparative case study of two mining towns, where iron ore extraction is the enduring single dominant institutional project, allows time to be leveraged to understand the dynamics, rather than snapshots, of the phenomenon in question. This also pays heed to ‘the importance of continually revisiting the [spatial fix] to see how it is working out in different historical periods and historical circumstances’ (Schoenberger, 2004: 432) All case study research has limited generalisability, but we offer a study that is designed to be more analytical than empirical.

The examination of these mining towns is particularly useful because the richness of these two orebodies means that capital abandoning these places is not economically viable, and therefore socio-spatial fixes will likely be unmade and remade in place. This differs from more footloose capital, which can pull a metaphorical ‘rip cord’ and seek more amenable socio-spatial circumstances across space. This creates locales where socio-spatial fixes can be examined in detail, as they change in relation to both internal and external stimuli.

The towns are selected because of their similarities, but, as with much comparative analysis, insights are drawn from how differences arise over time (Thomas, 2011). We select these towns as they share a mutual trajectory over time, which is of theoretical interest because despite connection through a global industry, and similar production processes, there are different social formations, economic forces and social relations of production. The towns’ shared characteristics are that they are iron ore mining towns, peripheral within their national economies (Barratt and Klarin, 2021; Sandström and Persson, 2021) but fundamental to global production (Barratt and Ellem, 2019; Jensen and Sandström, 2020). They have common historical features, being settled on Indigenous lands, with periods as closed ‘company towns’, and with the emergence of strong unions which then lost power (Ellem et al., 2020). Local class and social relations in each place are, however, distinct.

Historical engagement with place perennially raises two questions: what empirical data are to be captured, and over what period? The copious empirical material recording each town’s history means that selections must be made. The authors have several years of fieldwork in these towns, drawing on site visits and meetings, which involved interviews with non-residential workers and locals, workers, trade unionists and community members (Barratt, 2017; Ellem, 2017; Jensen and Sandström, 2021) Here we rely on secondary sources, both of our own work and others in the field.

To examine the relevant histories and perspectives of each town, we follow Barratt and Klarin (2021), focussing on turning points between socio-spatial fixes, because such moments highlight the forces which lead to socio-spatial fixes being unmade, and the factors which shape their re-composition. Nonetheless, given that it is the very landscapes (and resources within them) that sustain capitalist development within place, starting points are also important. In both cases, we begin by briefly considering socio-spatial fixes which predated extraction.

Kiruna

Kiruna is an Arctic mining town which was built in the early 20th century, approximately 1200 km north of Stockholm. Capitalism expanded into a contextual space which had seen enduring use by the indigenous Sami people and the Finnish speaking minority, lantalaiset. Mining in the region dates to the 17th century and the iron ore body in Kiruna was reported in 1736 (Ahnlund and Brunnström, 1992), 231 years before Newman was built. Attempts at establishing a mining socio-spatial fix failed until the late 19th century due to difficulties with the climate, securing finance, attracting labour and prohibitive transport and infrastructure costs (Ahlström, 1966).

We explain Kiruna’s history in three phases, each depicting a different socio-spatial fix. The establishment of the first fix came in the late 19th century and lasted until World War Two. The second fix then lasted until the recession in late 1970s and the third into present time.

Fix 1: Building a ideal town and an Arctic mine

The first fix in Kiruna saw a production mega-system established, built on Sami lands, to facilitate the extraction. Capital needed to construct mine infrastructure and secure a workforce. For labour, different workers circulated in and out of place, but also creating a space where decent lives could be constructed.

In the late 19th century, the Swedish state became increasingly protectionist of ore extraction. Steelmaking technology had advanced, and demand, particularly from England and Germany, was growing. Resultantly, it became possible that excess capital could be absorbed through mining, triggering the expansion of capitalism into northern Sweden. A railway was completed from the port at Luleå to Malmberget in 1888, and 1899 the state funded the railway’s expansion from Malmberget via Kiruna to Narvik in Norway, a port which does not freeze in winter. The privately owned mining company, Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag (LKAB), was established in 1890 and placed by the state in charge of the mines, with the ore body in Kiruna as centrepiece.

To support iron ore extraction, mining and export, the north of Sweden was transformed, including the creation of hydropower plants and a fortress (Hansson, 2015). From the contextual space of Sami herding land, mining infrastructure and a town to house workers were constructed. Securing labour in place, and sustaining its reproduction, was critical due to the remoteness of the mine, and the means by which this occurred laid the preconditions for the first socio-spatial fix.

The state also influenced the material conditions of reproduction, desiring that Kiruna not become a shanty town, as in nearby Malmberget, but an ideal town for the miner and ‘his’ family (Brunnström, 1981). This ideal, with an exclusively male workforce (Hägg, 1993), meant the needs of women and children had to be accommodated, leaving capital exposed to place-based demands around both work and community.

The company’s first patron, Hjalmar Lundbohm, worked with the state to make the Kiruna’s first socio-spatial fix. Literally capital personified, he benchmarked Kiruna against contemporary company towns, such as Pullman City (Persson, 2015). Lundbohm was the social engineer, arranging education, a hospital, a police force, a church, cultural and sport events, establishing social relations which complemented production in place, making evident that social formation and production relation co-develop. Experience of place differed based on a person’s position in this society, reflecting divisions within labour, as well as between labour and other groups. For example, LKAB offered modern housing, to employees and their families by 1900, but not to contractors. The Sami were alienated and excluded from the mine, reflecting Lundbohm’s view that ‘a Sami should be a Sami’ (Persson, 2015). From this time, the Sami were increasingly displaced, curtailing the opportunity to continue reindeer herding.

This socio-spatial fix was based on a flexible entrepreneurial work regime, which while predating the term, resembles a local labour control regime. Company-labour relations were based on short-term contracts, and reproduction was embedded in the town. Emphasising fluidity in which individuals make the fix, turnover was high, with half the workforce quitting in the first year, but quickly replaced by different workers seeking to earn income, with the average period of engagement being only 2.7 years (Barck, 1999). That is, there was always labour, but composed of different people.

Lundbohm encouraged workers to unionise, but tough work conditions led to greater-than-anticipated militancy against the work regime, culminating in a strike in 1909 (Pääjärvi, 2000). Tensions existed within organised labour: dual unions, the syndicalists and the miners’ official union, vied for worker loyalty, revealing divisions within and between actors in place. Division did not impede success: by 1920, union density was 90% and when the unions struck in concert, they won a 20% wage increase (Eriksson, 1991).

When Lundbohm retired in 1921, Kiruna had 8834 registered inhabitants, over 14,000 in the municipality, and the mine employed about 1400 persons. Institutions entrenched capital’s power over socio-spatial relations because the company still owned the town and the law dictated that a man’s income (women were excluded from voting until 1918) decided the value of his vote in Sweden; that is, voting rights were proportional to income not to population, giving Lundbohm wildly outsized power. The next couple of decades saw boom-and-bust cycles, strikes and internal union struggles but a continuation of the first socio-spatial fix.

Fix 2: A sustained boom fuelling demand and empowering and enriching social life

Kiruna’s second identified socio-spatial fix was renegotiated due to exogenic (rather than endemic) crises, due to changing geographies of European steelmaking, with a 30-year post-war economic boom, itself drawn from the absorption of excess capital elsewhere. Daily life in the town was characterised by labour and the community gaining political and industrial power over work and place. This suggests that in Kiruna socio-spatial fixes are remade slowly. A local crisis between capital and labour towards the end of this period, with national ramifications, came to symbolise the peak of this fix.

In this period the mine transformed from an open pit to an underground mine while conflict underpinned capital-labour relations, but not to the extent it threatened production. Crisis was forestalled and a relative socio-spatial stability was maintained. Unions were powerful, embedded in place, with their actions extending into town politics. This saw a created space where workers asserted some counter-control, wresting the ability to dictate the terms of daily life away from capital and the state. At work, the power of the unions is reflected in 1947 negotiations between unions and the company resulting in a wage increase of 12.5%, among the very best in Sweden at the time (Pääjärvi, 2000).

In 1948, the state denoted Kiruna as a town (later revoked in 1957), which saw more of LKAB’s taxation payments retained locally, which was critical in staving off local crisis. Given LKAB’s size, this radically altered Kiruna’s material conditions, making it one of the richest towns in Sweden, exemplified by the construction of many iconic buildings. Less value was expropriated from the region, an arrangement which suited all actors in place, leading to these actors to secure resources to create a better quality of life within the community.

Economic prosperity drew migrants from within Sweden and even abroad to live and work in Kiruna, again highlighting that the composition of labour is dynamic. In 1950 the town had 12,106 inhabitants and the mine employed about 2300. By 1965 there were 21,492 inhabitants and the mine employed more than 3600. The number of apartments (including detached houses) almost doubled between 1945 and 1965, reflecting a fix based on accumulation in the mine, and an agglomeration of resources in place to create the new fix. This led to crises in other markets in place, for instance overcrowding was an issue as was low quality housing stock (Persson, 2000).

Kiruna used the wealth and dynamism of the town at this time to attempt forestall future crises through diversification of industry, seeking to set up non-mining sources of wealth and employment. For instance, the municipality offered loans to small businesses with better terms than banks (Nilsson, 2000) to mitigate the reliance on mining, but crisis was only forestalled for so long. With the state deciding to become full owner of LKAB in 1957, mining capital fought back, at the workplace.

On the mine, time-and-motion studies and dehumanising work conditions culminated in a wildcat strike in 1969. The strike was a local crisis created by a state-owned LKAB (and a passive miners’ union) seeking increased productivity while neglecting human dignity (Lidman, 1969). This period was also one of general criticism of the union’s strong ties to the Social Democratic Party. The strike forced capital to accommodate labour’s demands, having gravely underestimated how the workers’ movement and power was drawn from workplace and community. Because work conditions could not be separated from life in the community, labour issues were also social issues. The community flexed its muscles against capital which had to accommodate these demands.

Through the mobilisation of solidarity in Kiruna and across Sweden, the movement became a national one, disrupting labour relations in Kiruna and creating a crisis for capital in Sweden more generally (Ellem et al., 2020). Challenges to the socio-spatial fix in Kiruna had national ramifications. Equally, actors outside the town would play a role in reshaping it. The strike was a sign of how the second socio-spatial fix, permeated by labour and community power, had grown in strength, but it was soon to be challenged.

Fix 3: Neoliberalising production while unfixing population

The third socio-spatial fix in Kiruna reflected a new more global iron ore market, which in turn weakened the power of the place (see Harvey, 1975). This changed daily life, where the workforce was reduced and life became dominated by work. A greater share of the created value was able to be retained by capital, with less being claimed by workers or invested into the town.

The year 1977, coinciding with unprecedented investments in steel production in Luleå which enlarged the technological mega-system, saw a peak employment level close to 4600, but also an external crisis of overproduction. Recession, and consequent reduced steel output across Europe, threatened the town’s viability. Mining’s centrality to the socio-spatial fix meant that diminishing production led to diminished town resources. The steel recession was compounded by increased global iron production, with expansion into Australia (see below), Africa and Brazil (Wilson, 2013). Global market pressures reshaped Kiruna, transforming union power, company strategy and local social relations.

By 1979 production had fallen to 1920 levels, with LKAB reporting its first loss in over 30 years, which underscores the scale of crisis. In 1984, 2400 people lost their jobs, though the state supported the company and the workers that were laid off through alternative, state-subsidised employment. Indeed, state policy determined that the mining fix must survive as, despite the attempts to diversify the town’s economy, mining was still the dominant institutional project. Capital, however, used the crisis to decouple production form employment, making strategic and technological choices to become a high-tech iron ore company. The success of this capital intensification is reflected in mining’s reduced share of employment which fell from 30% and 40% of all jobs in the early 1970s, to about 15% entering the 1990s (Nilsson, 2000). In doing so, the company also sought to ‘add value’, refining more of its ore before export (Alalehto, 1992). This would secure the company’s place as a provider of high-quality iron ore pellets with a price premium.

While the mine survived yet another crisis, the place-based social relations changed. There was a slow population decline as the company’s capital intensification weakened the place-based demands of workers and the community. The mine’s physical presence became ever-larger, continuously shrinking the space for the Sami to maintain their reindeer herding, and literally undermining the local community’s built infrastructure.

Socio-spatial relations have been, again, increasingly determined by capital. The socio-spatial fix was materially remade when, from 2004, the Mining Inspectorate of Sweden notified the town that its city centre was to be relocated to accommodate the further expansion of the mine to the ground underneath. This meant the relocation of approximately 5000 residents as well as the destruction of many iconic buildings built during the second socio-spatial fix. To save the mine, and sustain accumulation, the community endured unprecedented spatial transformation (Jensen and Sandström, 2020).

At work, the company also transformed the labour process to increase its flexibility and productivity by extending use of contractors (Ellem et al., 2020). The use of contractors challenged union power and increased productivity by workers to compete for scarce jobs. Work schedules were re-made to accommodate long-distance commuters, which remade the socio-spatial terms of the place and undermined local place-based claims. Contractors bought local property to use as worker accommodation, driving up housing prices for locals. Areas exclusively for accommodating long-distance commuters were established, with housing and the terms of reproduction again becoming problematic.

In sum, local reproduction has become less difficult for the company and the legitimacy of place-based demands has been reduced. The meaning of place has changed for a larger part of the workforce. Miners persist in the local community but in different relationships and with different interests. A counterweight provided through a strong social identity as a mining company town – as in the days of Lundbohm – and meant the company cannot fully cut free from its role and responsibilities in the community. Capital still must go through the mountain, but its prerogative is greater than in previous fixes.

Newman

The land upon which Newman is developed has a geology dating billions of years, and the traditional owners, the Nyiyaparli people, and current custodians, the Martu people, have sustained their socio-economy since The Dreaming, when, according to Indigenous world views, ‘country’ ¹ was created. The town is located approximately 1100 km north-east of Perth, the capital of Western Australia, and was constructed from the 1960s to facilitate the extraction of iron ore.

Iron ore was discovered in the Pilbara in the 19th century, but as in Kiruna, discovery was insufficient to sustain capitalist accumulation. The region’s remoteness, lack of infrastructure and high transport costs were prohibitive, as was an export embargo. Extra-regional changes in the mid-20th century created the preconditions for the development of Newman’s mining socio-spatial fix. The embargo on ore exports was lifted in 1961, which, coupled with technological advances and pent-up demand from Japanese steel manufacturers, allowed the ore to be extracted for a profit and the first socio-spatial fix to be established. This endured until the 1980s which saw the second fix made, before the third fix from the year 2000.

Fix 1: Constructing a desert mine and a company-governed suburbia

Newman’s first socio-spatial fix was a closed, suburban, company town, with mine and railway built to sustain large-scale ore extraction out of a contextual space of a desert. The terms for Newman’s construction were the result of negotiations between capital and the state, reflecting discussions over the development of Kiruna many decades beforehand. The Western Australian government, with the power to grant mining leases to capital, was driven by a desire to develop the north of the state. It negotiated a contract with the Mt Newman Mining joint venture, which was enshrined in legislation in 1964, that granted access to the resources in exchange for taxation, the construction of infrastructure and administering a ‘company town’, Newman (Horsley, 2013).

In this region, economically underdeveloped and remote as Kiruna was 80 years previous, its own technological mega-system was constructed, with mines, towns and a private railway to the coast over 400 km away. Torres Strait Islander labour was fundamental to the construction of the railway (Konishi and Lui-Chivizhe, 2014), while the Pilbara’s Indigenous People were excluded from iron ore mining and the associated economic value (Peck, 2013), again showing differing place-based claims of different social groups.

The remoteness of the orebody from existing settlements meant the company needed to find and accommodate a labour force to extract the ore and realise surplus value. As in Kiruna, the processes, actors and assumptions in the making of a concrete socio-spatial fix could hardly be clearer. The town was built ‘from scratch’ to accommodate and service mining work. Social reproduction occurred in either of the two main forms of housing, ‘single men’s quarters’ and residential family homes (Eckhart, 1996). The mining workforce was exclusively masculine and, in exchange for cheap company housing, mining companies benefited from the unpaid work of women who raised children, did housework and ensured their husbands were ready to work (Rhodes, 2005).

Capital-labour relations were underpinned by market dynamics and labour regulation. Labour law privileged unionisation which, when coupled with high demand for ore, gave organised labour significant power. Deploying organising know-how from migrants from Britain (Frenkel, 1978), local militant unions were fundamental to constructing the socio-spatial fix. Capital was vulnerable to place-based claims, pressed through frequent strike action, leading to sharp wage rises and counter-control (Ellem, 2004). As in Kiruna, workers and their families shared work and social spaces, so, here too, labour issues were social issues. The town was: ‘[O]ccupationally homogenous, male-dominated [and] isolated . . . [where] work group or department is bound to play a larger role in workers’ current life experience’ (Frenkel, 1978: 398). Work issues impacted workers’ social lives, and social lives were inhabited by work colleagues. This meant that ‘unions were inseparable from the local social formation, and a place consciousness developed in which unionism was central’ (Ellem and McGrath-Champ, 2012: 362).

The form of social and productive relations was contested because, while social reproduction supported mining labour and capitalist accumulation, the way of life in place supported unionisation. Capital resisted union power, particularly in the workplace, meaning that Newman was particularly strike prone. While economic conditions were favourable, this arrangement and its concessions to labour were sustainable but when faced with less favourable market conditions in the 1980s, capital sought to remake the socio-spatial fix.

Fix 2: Decreased production and shrinking social life

The global iron ore industry was remade in the 1980s and 1990s, with globalisation connecting Newman and Kiruna’s production, along with other new producers (Wilson, 2013). Increased supply and an extended recession in Japan (the Pilbara ore’s then primary export destination), a crisis of overaccumulation in itself, descended through the commodity chain to Newman. Lower demand for ore and lower prices threatened both accumulation and reproduction. Capital, labour, community and the state responded to see the town and extraction sustained, crisis averted and the construction of a new socio-spatial fix.

Mining capital withdrew from town administration, ceding responsibility to the state (Thompson, 1981). This change was negotiated solely by the state and capital, with no public or union involvement. The re-created fix was imposed on the community from ‘above’, which included a home ownership scheme, changing the terms of reproduction in place. Families became eligible to buy their company-supplied homes on favourable terms from the company if they stayed in place for an extended period. This committed workers and their families to place, but also to mortgage repayments, making striking more costly (Neil and Brealey, 1982). Meanwhile, the state embarked on a strategy of reducing the institutional legitimacy and power of unions, with some of the new norms established in disputes elsewhere in the Pilbara (Copeman, 1987). In concert with employers, including Pilbara mining capital, increasingly neoliberal labour laws were passed by successive state and federal governments, weakening the institutional power of Pilbara unions (Ellem et al., 2020).

Newman’s population shrank in this period, from 5600 in 1991 to approximately 3500 in 2001, by which time over a third of dwellings were unoccupied, meaning that production and reproduction were both occurring well below capacity, providing a ‘safety valve’ of surplus productive and reproductive capacities. Despite these changes, a strong sense of social cohesion was maintained by this stable workforce embedded in place for many years, if not decades. This tension saw this cohort of labour, well paid and in secure work, assisting capital and the state in staving off crisis in difficult economic times. However, this period of relative stability, and calm, would give way to the third socio-spatial fix, seeing radical economic and social changes in the 2000s.

Fix 3: Neoliberalising production and town

Newman’s third socio-spatial fix saw little change in production, but the socio-spatial relations which underpinned production were fundamentally remade. Power shifted forcefully away from unions, with transience and insecurity becoming the hallmarks of a rearranged productive and reproductive regime. This predated sharp growth in Chinese demand for ore creating boom conditions, which resulted in large scale investment in mining infrastructure, with relatively little investment in the town and its community.

The catalyst for the making of the new socio-spatial fix as an industrial dispute, based around capital offering individual contracts to workers (Ellem, 2004). Unions were effectively excluded from rulemaking, a major departure from previous socio-spatial fixes, replaced with a new neoliberal spatial praxis of ‘individual reward for individual performance’ (Ellem, 2004: 33). The community became fractured in response to the change, with workers compelled to take sides, between the prior socio-spatial fix or the emergent one. Over time, unions became marginalised as new recruits signed individual contracts. While labour persisted in place, the individuals who constitute the labour force changed, as did their interests and relationships with the town and capital.

Through this fix, living in the town became motel-like, and less reflective of the transplanted suburbia of previous socio-spatial fixes. Insecure work and Fly-In Fly-Out (FIFO) work patterns, a form of long-distance commuting, became the norm, as capital no longer faced opposition from a resident workforce or unions seeking to maintain work rules around job security (Ellem, 2004). FIFO sees workers work for an intense period (one typical roster is 14 days) before a period of rest, often in another place (the same roster is in parenthesis above has 7 days of rest). Workers can ‘live’ in one place, commonly Perth but also Australia’s eastern cities, or even overseas, and fly to the site of production to work (Mayes, 2020). Newman’s workforce became a not always harmonious combination of local and non-residential workers.

FIFO radically changed Newman’s socio-spatial fix, to the advantage of capital and those few workers who can earn high wages, but to the detriment those who lived in the town. Who the workers are, and how they interact with place, are markedly different from prior fixes. The town is not the centre of social reproduction for these workers, as residential housing is supplanted by FIFO ‘camps’, a material change in housing stock and a social relations. FIFO workers are spatially and temporally fragmented from the place, their families and each other, creating a new form of daily life for all involved (Mayes, 2020). Job insecurity coupled with FIFO reinforced the remade socio-spatial fix. Workers who resist can be removed and replaced with workers who view the remade socio-spatial fix as acceptable, or even desirable. They are less likely to want, or be able, to put down roots in the town, creating a short-term orientation and instrumental relationships with capital, colleagues and community. New workers have not merely undone ‘organised labour’s spatial fix’ but have actively made and entrenched the new socio-spatial fix.

Analysis and discussion of the fixes

Newman and Kiruna are small towns in economic peripheries, which facilitate the extraction of large amounts of ore. Extraction remains the raison d’être for each town; these are truly dominant institutional projects. Production has been sustained, delving ever deeper into the earth (Barratt and Ellem, 2019). Extended temporal analysis reveals that accumulation, and therefore the wealth generated by each town, is contingent on the capacity of socio-spatial arrangements to forestall crisis. There are similarities in production processes in each place, but socio-spatial analysis reveals variation in the social relations, providing three contributions through the deployment of the socio-spatial fix. First, we chart the development of capitalism further into time, providing concrete examples of how life has changed and what it is like under neoliberalised capitalist- and place-relations. Second, we show the material, historical and moral processes by which the social terms of spatial fixes play out in particular places. Third, we show how place-based demands have decreased by decoupling social processes from place, charting a new stability based on changing who comprises different actors. To draw the argument together, we examine the significance of crisis, actor choices and timing.

Crisis

The era immediately before Kiruna’s construction was one of crisis-prone unfettered capitalism. The first socio-spatial fix enabled the growth of the town, internal labour contestation and state acquisition of the mine (and changing town governance) leading to the development of the second fix, which saw greater wealth captured by community. However, economic crisis, in part due to globalising iron ore markets, led to the town shrinking. To sustain production, this third socio-spatial fix saw crisis forestalled by the re-marketisation of labour relations and the literal shift of reproductive spaces to sustain extraction.

Newman’s construction was, in contrast, smoother and planned, with state and capital negotiating the first fix’s parameters. However, economic conditions in the late-1970s, and militant unions embedded in place, threatened the viability of the fix and, albeit in a different form to Kiruna, saw the state vacate town administration. The defeat of unions in place, enabled by the state, and response to a crisis of local competition and market conditions, saw the fix remade. The reaction to crisis in the early 2000s created a greater tendency to mono-economy, and an even more mining-centric fix confirmed with the dominance of FIFO (figuratively) undermining and dispersing the community.

Understanding these paths of development emphasises that there is a spatiality and temporality to crises within place and across space. In turn, this foregrounds the importance of endemically and exogenically created crises. The relationships of these towns, geographically and politically peripheral, but economically central to, first regional, then global production processes make this apparent. While some of the crises in both towns were locally generated, over threats to production through housing inadequacy or worker militancy, the towns also absorbed capital from across space, for instance Newman’s downturn in response to Japan’s lost decade, again underscoring the relations between place and wider capitalist geography. Their socio-spatial fixes retain the capacity to absorb excesses of capital not only in place, but also in global ore markets and consumer-facing product markets (e.g. construction) across space.

Actor choices

Socio-spatial fixes are made by actors who are internally heterogenous and whose composition changes over time. Kiruna’s history, built environment and socio-economic development reflect compromises and competing ideologies between the state, capital, labour and those living in the town. The socio-spatial fix reveals that these categories are not discrete, with significant overlap. For instance, the state’s position as mine (and railway) operator allowed the first fix, which was also shaped by Lundbohm, seeing his role as the paternal constructor of a community for the workers and for certain residents.

Even actors whose position is usually considered unified have been fragmented, exemplified in Kiruna where two trade unions with different ideologies represented ‘organised labour’. Further, the union-state nexus saw unions’ relationships with the Social Democratic government remaining contentious. The fragmentation of actors, including workers, through long-distance commuting arrangements, shows that workers may pursue individual and collective objectives, in individual as well as collective ways, creating internally contradictory and complex social relations in place between and within actors.

Newman’s third socio-spatial fix fundamentally altered relationships between actors in place. While class relations were relatively clear-cut in the first socio-spatial fix, due to militant unionism, these relations were unpicked over time, and, as in Kiruna, community and labour had less capacity to secure value in place. This meant that during the resources boom of the late 2000s and early 2010s, capital extracted large profits while avoiding the local community- and place-based claims of the boom a generation beforehand. Crises of accumulation are now forestalled by capital’s prerogative to scale its workforce unchallenged. This is underscored and reinforced by a remaking of community and the making of a workforce which accepts that this is how the industry and the town are sustained, and lets individual workers earn high wages.

Drawing the cases together, labour geography reminds us that what benefits one worker may be a loss for another, and the exclusion altogether of another. Socio-spatial analysis reveals that unionised workforces have been replaced by workers who accept this new status quo, who consider neoliberalised arrangements to be (more than) acceptable. The removal of strong, institutionally embedded trade unions has meant that socio-spatial fixes are increasingly governed, at the behest of capital, by market regulation of work and life.

Engaging the socio-spatial fix at the town scale makes clear, therefore, that social actors have varying influence, interests and composition. While the rise and fall of unionism in both places shaped capital-labour relations, actors can only shape the place if they have access to the place itself and power resources. Decades of Indigenous exclusion have disempowered Indigenous voices in the creation of socio-spatial fixes, while the male-dominated nature of the workforce, coupled with the dominance of mining as an institutional project, have meant that the nature of the fix has reflected the priority of privileged groups. Even for those once louder voices, priorities changed over time.

Time/timing

Both town’s trajectories have led to neoliberalised and marketised socio-spatial relations. However, close analysis of social and productive relations as a totality reveals changes in the rates of change. Kiruna’s path has been slow, characterised by long periods of stability, while Newman saw rapid shifts between fixes. This difference reflects each town’s history and socio-spatial relations. The Swedish state and its tradition of socially regulating work meant social relations in place were more insulated from boom-and-bust cycles. In contrast, Newman has been more exposed to crises of accumulation in other, connected spaces, and has therefore remained relatively unstable, and from the mid-1970s increasingly subject to capital’s regulation of place.

In both places, we saw the capacity of capital to create a geographical extension of capitalist class relations. Subsequently, the riches accrued in that place based on extraction led actors to entrench social relations in place, which is sustained until either endemic or exogenous crises upset this stability, while attempts at forestalling crisis in Kiruna proved ineffective. The response to crisis was a remaking of social relations by actors, often led by capital, with current fixes based around prioritisation of extraction, seeing social relations increasingly subordinated to accumulation. What is different, however, about the cases is ‘when’ and ‘over what period’ these changes occurred. Kiruna saw these transformations across more than 100 years, while in Newman it took fewer than forty. The concept of the socio-spatial fix allows for these comparisons in the relationship between the social and the spatial over time, attentive to change in place and across space.

Socio-spatial fixes are sensitive to both time and timing (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011), not only in terms of the timescales over which they unfold, but precisely when they occur. Resource peripheries are fundamentally shaped by external forces, meaning how and by whom capitalism within them is sustained is also externally framed. This is the case in both towns, whose development is subject not only to state policies and local actor choices, but also to the vagaries of global resource markets, and periodic local and global boom-and-bust.

Explaining time and timing brings the argument together: actors, time and crisis are in a mutually co-constructive relationship. Change has occurred more slowly, and fixes have been more stable in Kiruna, while in Newman there are more radical shifts in socio-spatial arrangements. In drawing together these three elements, we explain how these towns, established in a period of colonisation of Indigenous Peoples, are exposed to first regional and then global iron ore markets, and are subject to changing government priorities over time. In these places, we see a neoliberalisation of life, and capital which swings from paternalist and embedded to increasingly financialised and withdrawn. Using the socio-spatial fix creates a framework by which we can understand the nature, pace and domains of development of both daily life and production within each town. These three elements can themselves be thought of as a totality, as actors, time and crises in place all shape the making of socio-spatial fixes, their dismantling and their reformation, reflecting relative power relations of the individuals and collectives that compose these actors, and their dominant priorities, at any particular time. These choices, in sequence, then form the basis of life in place.

Conclusion

Deep, temporally extended comparative examination of the socio-spatial fixes assists in better explaining capitalist development. The challenge facing geographers is to engage fixes as rich, dynamic and multifaceted phenomena. This necessarily invites complexity, even in places where the dominant institutional projects are as clear-cut as mining towns. This complexity underpins social formations, and the experiences of those who live them, and is therefore worthy of attention. While we trace the trajectory of two fixes where the resources fix capital in place, socio-spatial fixes can be explored in industries where capital remains in place despite having greater mobility, or where capital does move.

Comparing two towns reveals how the making, unmaking and remaking of successive socio-spatial fixes allows capitalism to endure, but on different terms. These towns are remade in relation to contextual space and the crises which are revealed through extended temporal analysis.

These histories, when analysed through the lens of the socio-spatial fix, also reveal the divisions within actors, and the contradictory and complex relationships between actors. Socio-spatial fixes develop in reaction to crisis, allowing capital (through profits), labour (through wages) and community (through increased amenity) to create and, albeit unevenly, apportion value.

By highlighting the explanatory capacity of crisis, actors and timing within the socio-spatial fix, we show how socio-spatial fix can be operationalised in further empirical and theoretical work. This approach would include studies of sites which are less mono-economic, which are less peripheral, those that engage in manufacturing or tertiary economic activity, and those located in the Global South.

In the decades since Harvey and Soja explained the spatial fix and the socio-spatial dialectic, the nature of capitalism and economic space themselves has been transformed, as has the scholarship about those changes. Nonetheless, these foundational works remain powerful, providing the basis for the deployment of the concept of the socio-spatial fix to elevate the explanation of capitalism so it can be better understood as a social as well as economic phenomenon. Therefore, its tendencies and trajectories, and the uneven consequences thereof can be more fully charted, described and anticipated.