A Necessary Man - 4

PART IV: THE POWER OF PLACE
[From the text "Milton Santos (1926-2001), A Necessary Man" (2001), by Miguel Panadero Moya Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha]

Theoretical matters did not set Milton Santos apart from actuality or social commitment. Intellectual observation of the situation of regional environment was a constant in his work. For him, Latin America had shown sufficient proof of having accepted external modernisation models; with the resulting social, territorial, economic, and political contradictions and distortions which characterize such behaviour. This vision was always with him. The population of the various Latin-American countries had to face the challenge of increasing the importance of certain autoctonous values, where social values should take precedence over technology. Geography should not content itself only with being critical, he wrote, but should be analytical and not just discursive in order to be useful and also used. He added, "Criticism can even be destructive, as long as it has something to propose, explicitly or implicitly, without which it would not contribute to the advance of knowledge."

Milton Santos visited the University of Castilla-La Mancha on two more occasions during the last decade of the twentieth century. At the start of that decade, the documents that would be debated in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 in the World Conference on Environment and Development were being prepared. His thinking was an adequate reflection on the first of these last visits to Castilla-La Mancha to participate in the 1994 course on Urban Environment, which our regional university holds every summer. His proposals about environmental social components would be developed a year later in the paper "A questao do medio ambiente: desafíos para construçao de uma perspectiva interdisciplinary", included in the volume of Anales de Geografía de la Universidad Complutense, homage to Professor Joaquín Bosque. His second stay took place in March, 1997 at the end of the winter in Cuenca, to participate in the IV America Latina Group Congress organised by the Association of Spanish Geographers (AGEAL). The illness that would end his days was already visible at this time.

In his last visit, Milton Santos developed a definition of territory as a banal aggregate of spaces, a question that he had integrated in his speech of acceptance of the doctorate Honoris Causa from the University of Barcelona some months earlier. The formulations stated here would appear later in his last writings, making up the conceptual nucleus of the work "O papel ativo de la geografía; um manifesto", his last intellectual bequest, presented at the international community of geographers in Florianápolis, Brasil, a little later, at its "XI Encontro Nacional" in July, 2000. In Castilla-La Mancha, again, Milton Santos offered an approach to the comprehension of territory by analysing the process of changes that this geographical object has suffered throughout the history of Humanity. The course of an organization that in the beginning was the result of isolated community actions characterized by a high degree of organic solidarity, to the appearance of the States-Nation in the last centuries with their new forms agreed upon, and eventually the present moment where absolute internationalisation and globalisation have been imposed. A time, our time, in which the hegemonic actors are transnational businesses and supranational institutions, that impose a new regionalisation governed by money violence and information.

To puzzle out the meaning of the concept of territory as a geographical object he proposed to dispossess it of its material sense and consider it as a "thing used", retake the Perrouxian idea of "banal space", to understand it like a space of all the institutions, all the businesses, all the persons, setting it apart from the view of private spaces, or businesses, institutions and concrete persons. In his redefinition of the goals of the discipline he suggested reflection on dialectical pairs; upon "territory and world", important due to the existence of extreme modernity activities; upon "place and world" that include the influence of the routine on the upper scales; and upon "place and territory", and "territory and social formation". This methodological approach would allow us to understand our complex reality. On the one hand, the structure of the processes of the division of labour on a global scale, that is derived from rigid economic and decisional verticality and is responsible for the sphere of "global work", compared to the more plastic expressions produced in the horizontal relations in territory encouraged by "local work"; and on the other hand, the meaning of the existence of a territory of the quotidian associated with the scientific-technical-informational period, in which world society is currently embedded. His two last books reveal the content of his intellectual worries to the edge of the century change; the penultimate, "Por uma otra globalizaçâo. Do pensamento unico à consciência universal" (2000), and "O Brasil. Territorio e sociedade no inicio do seculo XXI" (2001). Both, published by the Brasilian editorial Record, provide "a portrait of the new quantities and above all of the qualities of the territory that…already used by society gains current uses, that overlap and permit the reading of interruptions in the physiognomy of regions. Certain regions are more utilized in a particular historic moment than in others. Therefore each region does not receive modernisations nor their dynamic actors in a uniform way, crystallising old uses and awaiting new rationalities".