Reviewed by: Taking Place: The Spatial Contexts of Science, Technology, and Business Greg Downey (bio) Taking Place: The Spatial Contexts of Science, Technology, and Business. Edited by Enrico Baraldi, Hjalmar Fors, and Anders Houltz . Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2006. Pp. xxi+402. $49.95. The editors of Taking Place declare that in the history of science, technology, medicine, and business, "place matters because history matters" (p. 374), and I could not agree more. This anthology's fourteen essays largely cover technoscience in the Swedish context, ranging from the eighteenth century to the present. They successfully bring together insights from both science/technology studies (how social relations are implicated in the coalescing or shattering of conceptual and material objects of technoscience) and contemporary geography (how spatial and temporal environments and relationships are implicated in these same processes) to reveal "the mutual interplay between spatiality and sociality" in the historical process (p. xii). Together, the wide-ranging contents demonstrate the editors' contention that "science is not simply an intellectual exercise conducted in a vacuum, [but] a highly social and material activity that needs to take place, literally, somewhere" (p. 375). Neither space nor time is simply a container for social activity in these stories; rather, spatial–temporal conditions are dialectically related to technoscientific productions. While "the places where science is performed are shaped and constructed by the very social side of scientific activities," these same places "in turn affect the daily performance of science" (p. 375). [End Page 416] Some of the analytical strategies will seem very familiar. Sociology-of-science research has long contrasted the constructed, quantified, and (presumably) controlled space of the laboratory with the more complicated and ambiguous world of economic, social, and political relations outside of the formal research site. The essays by Hjalmar Fors, Emma Shirran, Sven Widmalm, and Maja Fjaestad all fall into this tradition, mainly relying on architectural studies of sites as diverse as hospitals and nuclear reactors to interrogate the processes that occur there. Other authors take the wider scale of urban and regional geography as their analytic focus, with impressive results. Essays by Jenny Beckman, Per Lundin, Arne Kaijser, and May-Britt O¨hman demonstrate how conceptual examples drawn from sources as diverse as Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish and William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis can be applied to technoscientific landscape studies. The question of whether new global, technological, and largely interurban "networks" of one sort or another are a new kind of spatial–temporal relation demanding a new kind of theoretical and methodological analysis has been well debated in geography over the last two decades—especially by Manuel Castells and David Harvey—and a few of the essays here build upon these insights as well. Those by May-Britt O¨hman; Håkan Håkansson, Annalisa Tunisini, and Alexandra Waluszewski; Enrico Baraldi and Torkel Strömsten; Francesco Ciabuschi and Mats Forsgren; and Enrico Baraldi show how a careful consideration of flows—of people, materials, and ideas—can help uncover the shared history of spatially and temporally distributed projects. These essays tend to move away from technoscientific concerns, however, and into more business-oriented subjects. Finally, the last two essays explore other geographic traditions such as the spatiality of visual culture and knowledge organization (Olof Ljungstrom) or the time– space geographies of professional lives and institutional relations (Henrik Mattsson). I was surprised to see so little discussion of the space-and-time parameters of information and communication infrastructures in this volume, but, frankly, it was also refreshing to be reminded that a wider variety of technological systems than just telegraphs and the internet can (and do) engage in a spatial–temporal dialectic with social life. Apart from this lack of connection to "cybergeography" work by the likes of Stephen Graham, Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin, and Matthew Zook, Taking Place is a great primer both for students and for faculty in the history of science, medicine, technology, and business on how to engage with some of the leading geographical thinking of the past two decades, that of Castells, Harvey, Cronon, and others. Classic geographic analysis by Torsten Hägerstrand (time– space geographies), Henri Lefebvre (the social production of space), Allan...
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Jun 1, 2015
Donna Bilak 
Open Access