A Necessary Man - 3

PART III: SPACE AND METHOD
[From the text "Milton Santos (1926-2001), A Necessary Man" (2001), by Miguel Panadero Moya Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha]

This was the emotional and intellectual field Milton Santos was dealing with at those moments. A little later, in the autumn of 1990, he returned to La Mancha to take part in two more conferences. He attended the meeting of the CEISAL working group of "Regional Studies", organized by the Department of Geography of Castilla - La Mancha University in the historic city of Almagro, and later in Albacete, in a series of lectures where he was accompanied by the Chilean regionalist Sergio Boisier. His works during this phase would give testimony to his splendid intellectual maturity: Space and Method (1985), O espaço do cidadao (1987), Metamorphoses do espaço habitado (1988), Metrópole corporativa fragmentada. O caso de Sâo Paulo (1990).

In Almagro, where we spent some days of reflection and companionship, it became clear that the thoughts of our guest had become even richer and, in the debates that followed, his delicately-presented and at times ironic opinions would describe stunning and clarifying lines. Milton Santos again questioned there the consequences of the interrelations between technological revolution and territory, and the model of the new specific spatial realities of our time. His theoretical framework was perfect. In the present phase of history (scientific-technical period), the geographical space, to which he attributed a privileged role and identified as "scientific-technical informational means", would strengthen its place between the past and the future. The new signs that defined this time and, at the same time, shaped our space, were the perception of event simultaneity on a global scale, the uniqueness and universality of the technique, the globalisation of the added values thanks to the planetary diffusion of businesses and international banks, the emergence of metropoli as omnipresent realities and, finally, the growing role of information as a means of change in society and territory.
He showed that all these signs belong to the same system of relations. The expansion of the banking system accompanied by the increment of the salaried jobs and the growing demand for fixed capital, phenomena which are present in an ever growing number of territories where space accumulates science and technology incessantly. As the productive process would tend to concentrate in more limited spaces, the new world space necessarily should be configured as a unique market. The role of large businesses in this reorganization, which at the same time was a disorganization of the preceding spatial order, had given rise to a "vertical" segmentation of territory.