Space-Time Expansion

Chapter 1 examines the forms of space-time expansion that are endemic to globalization. The chapter contextualizes the diminishing economic activity of low-skilled workers in Romania by contrasting the idleness of communist-era breadlines with the boredom of homelessness and unemployment in the global economy. While breadlines once forced Romanians to spend long hours waiting for basic goods, displacement from the global economy breeds ever-intensifying forms of deprivation. Once-affordable goods and services quickly become unaffordable, slowing down displaced persons’ movement about the city and access to information and reducing their ability to maintain connections with family and friends. For the economically precarious, globalization causes their relationship with time to slow and their relationship with space to expand.