ABOUT THIS BOOK

In The Nature of Space, pioneering Afro-Brazilian geographer Milton Santos attends to globalization writ large and how local and global orders intersect in the construction of space. Santos offers a theory of human space based on relationships between time and ontology. He argues that when geographers consider the inseparability of time and space, they can then transcend fragmented realities and partial truths without trying to theorize their way around them. Based on these premises, Santos examines the role of space, which he defines as indissoluble systems of objects and systems of actions in social processes, while providing a geographic contribution to the production of a critical social theory.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Milton Santos (1926–2001) was Professor of Geography at the University of São Paulo and the author of many books, including The Shared Space: The Two Circuits of the Urban Economy in Underdeveloped Countries.

Brenda Baletti teaches in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University.

Susanna Hecht is Professor of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles and Professor of International History at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

REVIEWS

“Milton Santos was one of the most important Black thinkers in the Americas writing in the last four decades, one of the most important Brazilian intellectuals of all time, and one of the most cited and noteworthy geographers in Latin America. This extremely important translation subverts our tendencies to ignore scholarship being produced in the global South and marks a key step in decolonizing thought in US academe.”

-- Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, author of Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil

“Milton Santos is one of the most distinguished intellectuals of our epoch. So many of us have learned from him. I have long seen in his work something that became one of my modus operandi: transversality . . . not the familiar knowledge silos but the cutting across of those silos.”

-- Saskia Sassen, Columbia University

"Milton Santos has offered one map for crossing the perilous terrain of academic specialties. At a time when so many take geography for granted as maps appear at our fingertips with the click of a button, this deeply humanistic guide may prompt us to ask anew where in the world we have been set down."

-- Lawrence Rosen Boston Review

"There is little doubt that Milton Santos (1926–2001) is the most important Brazilian geographer of all time. . . . The most obvious audience of this work is advanced graduate students and scholars from departments across social sciences. Geographers will benefit from being exposed to one of the most important Brazilian books in our field of knowledge, and other social scientists will acquire tools to increasingly recognize the importance of space as a relevant category of analysis of society in our current times, a mo(ve)ment that is long overdue."

-- Thiago Bogossian AAG Review of Books

"The Nature of Space was originally published twenty-five years ago, but its insights about the unavoidable, unstable dialectical relationships between global rationality and local responses have since been reinforced in various ways by social media, climate change, and now the Covid-19 pandemic. . . . Santos was right. The world has shifted to a new geographical reality. This English translation of his book offers a valuable point of departure for making some sense of it."

-- Edward Relph Society & Natural Resources

“Opening this book [connected] me to a world of geography scholarship for the most part ignored, actively or otherwise, in the Anglophone academy.”

-- David McLaughlin Environment, Space, Place

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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