NYTimes Shrinks the Western World into the Geography of Paris

Today the NYTimes provided an incredible example of how they and others like them have the power to reorgazine space, time, and power through the geographical imagination. The newspaper labeled photographs of Michael Bloomberg’s two Victorian residences in New York City and London as the West Bank and East Bank in Diane Cardwell’s “Trans-Atlantic Living in the Bloomberg Style.” The labels given to the two photographs of these urban mansions equated the U.S. and Europe as the center of cosmopolitan upscale living with the Atlantic Ocean as our calm Seine River.  The resultant effect reads like David Harvey’s notion of “time-space compression”–globalization and modern capitalist economies pull us closer and closer together, as if he entire “developed,” Western world was the city around which the “rest’ of the world gathered.  As such, Cindi Katz’s “time-space expansion” comes out as well–when political and economic processes pull us closer together, we push others farther apart and suffer them to further disinvestment.