Whose values? From the discrete to the continuous in how place and space matter in valuation studies

Abstract

This collection provides some invaluable insight on the interface between the academic discipline of Geography and studies of values and valuation. This article suggests that the tension between the normative and the analytical dimensions of these terms in man pieces is best rooted in the subdiscipline of economic sociology associated with scholars such as Boltanski and Thevenot, Mackenzie, Muniesa and Stark. It goes on to highlight how the geographical tradition might be best served by developing less an argument about why ‘space matters’ and more the sense in which affordances and propensities invoke the temporal and the spatial simultaneously, a framing that echoes Latour’s characterisation of ‘timespace’. This argument is illustrated with reference to the notion of urban fabric as an exemplar of what Latour characterises as the ‘fifth dimension’.

Values and valuation

This special issue about geographies of value and valuation has generated a ‘valuable’ collection of papers in a field of growing concern in contemporary times. This focus on ‘geographies’ provokes a double reflection, one on the interface between the academic discipline of Geography with the subject, the other with a question about the difference that space and place make to other disciplines’ attention to the interplay of values and valuation. Consequently, it is not surprising that there is something ambiguous in these texts that is worth clarifying. All discuss values but this word means slightly different things at different times in different pieces. This is not unusual. For some, ‘values’ is primarily the noun that follows the verb ‘valuation’. It translates into arguments with numbers. For others, ‘values’ signals the normative domains of our lives. For others again, the word ‘values’ signals both. This is important. Not because any of these interpretations of the word is wrong. But more straightforwardly for what it says about how we think about the production of knowledge (Keith, 2019).

In this collection, some papers draw on economic anthropology and sociology, including work on commensuration studies and convention theory that have their own uncertain mobility across disciplinary boundaries of the social sciences (Beckert and Aspers, 2011; Boltanski and Thevenot, 2006; Davies, 2013; Espeland and Stevens, 1999; MacKenzie et al., 2007; Muniesa, 2012, 2017; Stark, 2011a, 2011b). Some of the papers (those of Midgeley and Hercelin and Dörry) recognise this routing and speak back to it, others focus more on the quantification of valuations (Johnson et al. and Barnfield), while others again are rooted in the normative through exploration of forms of exploitation, extraction, and expropriation (Randell-Moon, Otchere-Darko, and Moiso and Rossi).

For those who emphasise the processes of valuation, the tendency is to stress different approaches that attribute to an object, situation or configuration a measurement of some kind, commonly accompanied by a future possibility, propensity or affordance. This most easily sits with analysis that contrasts ways different regimes of scholarship or practice come to value the same subject differently. A piece of land might have a monetary value of the contemporary market measured in sterling or dollars, a carbon footprint, an ecosystem efficacy, a network of routes that measure mobility and traverse in minutes and hours. These are all legitimate but very different ways of numbering things, a logic that points to collecting and aggregating baskets of incommensurable measures, following the development economic nuances of Amartya Sen (1979, 1999, 2009) and the gendered philosophy and feminism of Martha Nussbaum (2000). Measures of value in this sense reflect disciplinary traditions and epistemologies as much as they measure the objects of attention themselves. So, when comparing regimes of valuation we need to consider both the institutional space from which such claims emerge and the language and logic of the particular disciplinary tradition invoked (Desrosières, 1998).

In Austinian terms, language is always both performative and constative (Austin, 1962). Both are germane for this special issue. It is not news that all knowledges perform in a manner akin to Austin’s sense of the term. They also articulate claims to truth that can be subjected to challenge. This performance rests on the constitution of an audience for whom the claim makes sense. As studies in rhetoric demonstrate, even the most quantitative forms of science and mathematical theory itself do not erase the tropes and configurations of the rhetorical when arguing with numbers (Wynn and Reyes, 2021). We have moved some way from what David Stark once described as the ‘Parsons’ Pact’ between economics and sociology; the dictum that ‘you economists study value, while we sociologists study values’ (Stark, 2011a). Stark and others have addressed the fashion in which studies of values and valuation also serve to justify particular ways of seeing the world, developing notably from the convention theory most closely associated with the work first published in French in 1987 by Boltanski and Thevenot (2006). Boltanski and Thevenot worked at the intersection of social justice theory and pragmatic linguistics, considering how such tropes are both forms of justification of knowledge regimes and forms of exploration of the world.

Geographical influences in the collection

Two of the papers in the special issue are closest to the traditions of economic sociology and the emerging field of valuation studies.

In a lucidly written piece considering mining reform in Madagascar, Hercelin and Dörry demonstrate how what appear to be progressive green reforms assume an economic logic and performative power of their own that generates a particular economistic representation of the sustainable. They use convention theory to highlight how specific representations of economic reason justify the legitimation of particular regimes of lithium extraction. The progressive decarbonising drives of the planet reproduce an old model of north-south unequal exchange. In a piece so well structured, it is nevertheless interesting to see that scale jumping the case studied might also strengthen their argument. Their analytical gaze of methodological nationalism foregrounds Madagascar as the primary focus but in the cases of both the old World Bank Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) mentioned and their reference to the global realities of contemporary lithium demand, the global geopolitical dimension is almost absent. In the first case, the SAPs were the tool of The World Bank, whose developmental politics were shaped by the Cold War and, in the latter case, the global extractivism of the climate crisis reflects the geopolitical foresight and extraordinary success of China’s strategic control of planetary value chains and logistical networks. This sense of how scale multiplies the plurality of time-spaces of valuation might strengthen the logic of their argument.

Midgeley likewise critiques the neoliberal logic that has driven reforms in the field of global philanthropy and humanitarianism. In a beautifully written article, she highlights the unintended consequences of an ostensibly apolitical attempt to rationalise supply chains and procurement practices. In a competition for the moral high ground, an unintended consequence of major players’ actions in global philanthropy has been to drive efficiency through market mechanisms with perverse effects for those being ‘helped’ and competition between International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs) that have become major corporates in their own right. The paper draws on the work of Fourcarde and Boltanski and Thevenot to illustrate how evaluative framings consequently hide as much as they reveal. Midgeley dwells less on alternative means by which collaborations across organisations and geographies might be served better. There are different architectures of markets and for some progressive organisations it is occasionally worth remembering that the earlier work of Adam Smith on Moral Sentiments was not quite the same as the later Smith of the Wealth of Nations. The former was more concerned with the most logical and fair way of aggregating individual preferences and allocating values in a fashion that was fundamentally ethical. The latter was associated more directly with the role of governments, the value of competition and the imperative to privilege consumers over producers through undermining forms of political capture (Rothschild, 2002). The earlier work was written against monopolies and rent seeking, valorising the market as a space of revealed preference, the wills of the majority. In a sense, Midgeley’s paper returns to one of the oldest puzzles of economic sociology and beyond, namely the tension between markets and hierarchies in the efficient allocations of scarce resources.

In a paper that addresses the geographical most explicitly the contribution by Barnfield demonstrates the power of particular kinds of reasoning rooted in the UK Treasury’s structuring urban policy of the last Conservative government. The paper is substantively interesting but conceptually slightly more problematic. It focuses on the performativity of value in its contribution to geographical non-representational theory. There are three problems with this. The first is that following Austin, speech acts are – as described above – invariably performative and constative. In terms of performativity scholarship, from Goffman’s dramaturgical roots through to Butler’s contemporary twists, the performative always assumes a staged juxtaposition of an actor and their audience. And the performance invariably represents as it presents in order to communicate. As Midgeley’s paper (p. 4) makes clear one way to unpack discrepancies and contradictions of such language is to refer to ‘the different representations of value’ (her emphasis). Most forms of policy-related knowledge making – certainly standard neoclassical economics – attempt to represent realities and so the representational is rarely absent from processes of valuation.

The piece provides a strong sense of how Treasury norms, rooted in particular forms of neoclassical reasoning structure the sorts of intervention that are allowed in programmes of urban change. The author states that the key finding from the article is that HM Treasury ‘has an influential position in how value is understood and enacted’, important if unsurprising. Interesting findings also leave less space for the ways in which this process is rooted in the institutional power of Treasury, in how gearing ratios in the UK between central government core support and the propensity to raise tax from the local fiscus demonstrate the inordinate financial dependency of British local government on the centre. The paper highlights the problematic Treasury Green Book rules that circumscribe what is possible at a local level, correctly recognising various attempts made to mitigate this impact over time. However, it explores less the potential for local actors to ‘mirror dance’ in the face of such power, how other actors might reshape the Foucauldian-Deleuzian diagram described in the piece that drives orthodoxy.

The anthropologist Michael Taussig identified the mirror dance in colonial contexts where those subjected to oppressive power occupy the identity positions and language forced on them to subvert the categories themselves by the ways in which they can be occupied. Most British town halls can tell tales similarly of how central government thinking generates taxonomies whereby troughs of cash can be accessed by ‘mirror dancing’ central government guidelines and orthodoxy, a phenomenon that some describe as ‘troughing’ as those most successful at playing the competitive funding game are those who whose performances appear to be what central government want but in reality are providing the ‘winners’ with funds for what they wanted to do all along (Keith, 2003; Verlinghieri et al., 2024).

Johnson et al. focus more directly on the negative consequences of relying on orthodox models of real estate valuation. The piece argues convincingly that the path dependencies of existing models promote values of sunk capital constraining effective intervention, promoting unintended consequences of decline and high rates of property vacancy in British high streets. Its stress on the time-space contextual nature of real market values exemplifies the famously paradoxical logic of the 20th-century statistician George Box in his claim that ultimately ‘all models are wrong but some are useful’. The article’s argument is strong although there is a finite time that hope values, a calculus of optimistic futures, can offset the day-to-day maintenance and tax obligations that register the costs and losses of the present day. In this sense, the ‘confirmatory market practices’ they critique can only last so long, high streets eventually evolve or die. And so, while the article provides a powerful description of the lock-ins through which path-dependent valuations privilege capital futures over contemporary amenity and utility, it says less about the deliberative and governance processes of land use planning and state intervention that might adjust this trade-off. This is particularly important for the many experimenting with new ways of rescuing the British High Street, not least through rethinking conventional development control taxonomies and geographies of land use and residential, consumption and retail mix. In any such reset, there will be winners and losers financially, an interesting consequence of the logics clearly demonstrated here.

Two of the papers have a much more strongly rooted normative edge to them, one by Moiso and Rossi, the other by Randell-Moon. They draw respectively on the Italian autonomist Marxian tradition, and particularly the work of Hardt and Negri, and the postcolonial critiques of the consequences of the horrific decimation, dispossession, and degradation that constituted British occupation and rule in Australia. Moiso and Rossi show how the city as an object is secured as territorialisation of new governmentalities of extraction. In both Finland and Naples, emergent forms of state capitalism have reconfigured the architecture of markets and the rule of law. New forms of economic development rest on casualising labour relations, growing the precariat and securing freedoms of a particular kind for what are ostensibly highly successful start-ups in gaming and software. The piece provides a strong empirical example of the social relations of labour in new digital economies. Its sense of value is generally focused on a standard political economy sense of the term. It also speaks to long-standing state theory of scholars such as Bob Jessop alongside its appeal to Hardt and Negri’s landmark works. This is fine if not without tensions in its own terms but as Foucauldian theorists of governmentality have long argued, the state (and certainly the urban state) is not singular in its institutional form and sustains multiple registers of both valuation and values, something that might have been explored productively in the piece.

Randell Moon provides an excoriating account of the legacies of colonial rule in Australia and the complete neglect and de-valuation of many centuries of occupation and caring of indigenous people. The paper’s focus on property rights works from the powerful work of Bhandar on the logics of settler colonialism. It contrast regimes of colonial dispossession with geographical valuations of First Nations’ presence in Welcome to Country ceremonies. The article does not quantify but looks for the opportunity to do so, stressing that ‘there is a need for a more systematic approach to quantifying cultural activity and products that are not commodified’. ‘Welcome to Country ceremonies challenge some of the dominant market binaries of “culture” and the “real” economy that is reproduced in relation to accounts of First Nations economies’. The paper shows how territory has been abstracted and counted as property, measured in cash values. There is also an appeal to alternative valuations but no suggested quantification of them, not least in the context of sometimes rivalling measures of sustainability.

In contrast, Otchere-Darko provides a well-argued analysis of land valuation in the face of contemporary extractive practice in the petro-geographies in Southwest Ghana and Tanzania’s Lindi-Mtwara. The piece carefully contrasts physiocratic, Georgist and Marxist convntions of land valuation, all set in the context of contemporary (‘neoliberal’) market formation and in contrast to the intergenerational obligations of both the human and the non-himan. Most powerfully, it emphasise the importance of setting these alternative regimes of valuation against not only the temporal logics of the intergenerational but also the evolving social and ecological formation of particular contexts.

How space matters in valuation studies: From the discrete to the continuous

Valuation fragments the continuous into the discrete. Even the standard typology of nominal, ordinal, discrete, and continuous data cannot grasp the fundamental messiness of the world that is simplified and ‘cut’ at the moment of measurement or valuation. As mathematician Giuseppe Longo (2019) argues the attempt to value ultimately faces the problem of measuring the static and the dynamic at the same time, the quantum impossibility of measuring mass and velocity simultaneously.

In this context, some time ago, the late Doreen Massey and Ed Soja crossed swords over the nature of David Harvey’s work on the postmodern. But what all three of them shared was both a credentialising appeal to the discipline of geography but also a claim to treat the geographical – in all its generative plurality – as seriously as the historical (see also Schwanen and Kwan, 2012). While this was in part a redescribe play for the moral seriousness of the discipline it was more productively also advocating that we should describe – and even redescribe (Simone and Pieterse, 2018) – not in the register of the historical or the geographical alone but always in the lexicon of time-space.

There is an extraordinarily productive social science literature of the last 30 years about why ‘space matters’ in thinking about the social world. There is also an occasional disciplinary elbow akin to Northrop Frye’s deterministic critic who seeks to place what interests them most (in this case place and space) into a causal relationship with what interests them less. Occasionally, this can appear as a plaintive call or disciplinary land grab for the relevance of the discipline of Geography to another sphere of inquiry. With some exceptions (such as May and Thrift, 2001), there is not always attention to what Doreen Massey (1994) characterised as neither the progressive nor reactionary binarization of time and space nor the privileging of one or the other register of analysis but instead the imperative to recognise the inevitable interweaving of the temporal and the spatial (p. 260).

Instead what might be taken as axiomatic is that in making sense of timespace – or what Latour describes as the fifth dimension – is that both the geographical and the historical are continuous. They are characterised in Bergsonian terms by ‘duration’. And as May and Thrift (2001) characterise timespace, duration has a rhythm. It is always a synthesis of the temporal and the spatial (p. 27). The moment of valuation in contrast generates a space of the discontinuous and the discrete out of the rhythms and durations of things that are measured.

At such times the geographical juxtaposition of the representational and non-representational is less helpful in its recognition of the power of either the spatial or the temporal but instead in the less frequently acknowledged sense of the active power of time and space together, the dynamics of timespace.

In contemporary geography non-representational theory is in large part a refutation of the geographical traditions that through a new cultural geography of the 1990s focused on the power of representation in the (historical geography) reading of landscapes and the (social geography) recognition of intersectionalities of the demos of gender, race and sexuality (Cresswell, 2010). It comes from within the single discipline of geography but also speaks back to it (the clue is in the ‘non’ of the non-representational). But if its power secures epistemological networks within the discipline it speaks less, if at all, across the other domains of scholarship in the social sciences and beyond, limiting its power as a bridging device for interdisciplinary research or transdisciplinary dialogue.

In contrast, there is both a passive and an active sense in which the spatial nuances and contributes to valuation studies. Passively, we know that places are cherished, religious sites celebrated, historical boundaries of conflicts reproduced over time through both representational and non-representational praxis. Cherishing the beautiful and the sacred, the aesthetic and the affective, means that specific sites in cities may cling tenaciously to space longer than others. Passively, space interrupts. It dislocates claims to the universal.

But more interestingly for this author, the spatial is active and generative. Actively, the configuration of time-space is both disruptive of specific regimes of the epistemological and also through its evolutionary powers generative of new orders of value and valuation. To take just one example, materialities become much more active when we think through time-space instead of privileging either chronology or cartography in the lens through which valuation is studied. The material appearance of emplacement generates a certainty that is disrupted by ontologies that are also on the move, in time if not in space. They are changing at different speeds: the slow speed of the geological, the temporalities of the climate crisis, the half-life of decay, the timelines of retrofit and repair, all actively restructure through registers of the temporal how we might think about place and space. To give one example, in cities the combinations of the human and the more-than-human, the organic and the inorganic, the routines of practice and the invisible flows of the cultural and the metabolic alike all encourage us to think more about urban fabric than the neat determinisms of geographical urban form that flow from the logic of the built environment (Bhan et al., 2025).

Fabric is unstable, sustaining both a residue of the past and an unfolding and refolding of the present. It retains a propensity to disrupt, dislocate, and disorder the city. Following the architect Annie Albers’ assertion that weaving and building follow similar logics, fabric also shapes the city through folding, looping, tucking, weaving, braiding, and knotting. There is a sense in which fabric unstitches and restitches urban life, recognising the autonomy of what is non-human, the interfaces of material objects, the power of organic life, and the boundaries of intentionality. It is messy and continuous across timespace, always in disequilibrium. It does not stand still for its photograph to be taken. It is characterised by duration and rhythm. Such duration is unstable. In some senses, it defies valuation. Or more precisely it qualifies valuations, limits their accuracy to specific timespaces.

So we might recognise that the logic of the scalar is as germane in thinking about time as much as space. To take a mundane example, the time-space scalar is germane precisely not because a more granular understanding is better (or worse) but because we find that at different scales specific logics play out in timespace in contradictory ways, a generalisation of what in spatial science is known as the modifiable areal unit problem and the modifiable temporal unit problem. Seen at the scale of the nation or the city the economic benefits and positive externalities of migration tend to be far greater than the costs. Labour arrives, generally schooled and skilled, the nation is freed from the welfare costs of the very young, a beneficiary of contributions to the national purse of the newly arrived. At the scale of the neighbourhood the time-spaces of change may generate more costs than benefits in the shorter term, more productive gains over the longue durée. In the here and now migration disrupts settled orders, it places demands on specific social infrastructures and where it is associated with competitions for scarce public resources (for example in housing, education or public space), it may be genuinely detrimental in particular places at specific times. But the challenging of the social order may be innovative and productive, the creolisations of cultures the source of newness that is spectacular aesthetically, generative socially and productive economically over a different timeline.

Geographies of values and valuation also share a power to challenge conventional wisdoms and certainties of the here and now. Those concerned with policy making might both critically qualify the rule of experts (Mitchell, 2002) and productively explore their interface with languages of propensity, possibility and opportunity, all of which speak through both temporal and spatial registers (Heinich, 2020). These are explorations that might take at their heart a notion of affordance. Particularly identified with the work of the anthropologist Tim Ingold and the psychologist James Gibson the affordance invokes a sense of what a situation, configuration, or assemblage might generate. Scholarship considering the present configuration of the spatial, recognising path dependencies of the past alongside the trade offs of future systemic dislocation, interventions and repairs has the opportunity for particularly powerful interventions in the policy domain that might thereby draw on the geographies of values and valuation.

What is redundant in the here and now can become powerful or valuable in the near or distant future. Legacies of the past in another country can resonate in those past futures present across the globe. This sensibility, sensitive to the topologies of the multi-dimensional sees time running backwards and forwards simultaneosuly, at different speeds through rhizomatic spatial configurations. It is directly relevant to the consideration of values and valuation because implies an imperative to make visible the plural forms through which propensities, affordances and relationalities are shaped and in turn shape pasts present and futures yet to come across multiple geographies. These futures are messy and continuous. Geographies of valuation curate timespaces of the discontinuous and the discrete. They narrate the power of specificity. They need also to explore the ethics, epistemologies and possibilities of alternative geographies, invariably understood as timespaces of the possible.