What happened to the progressive sense of place? Exploratory place writing from Kilburn to Neukölln

This paper opens a window on global culture and place in the twenty-first century. It does so through exploratory place writing, a diverse field of geographical literature that observes and documents places through media as varied as essays, poetry, lists and novels. This paper reads a contemporary example of exploratory urban place writing – Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, a novel about millennials in Berlin – against an earlier, contrasting example that many geographers will have read, but probably not as a literary work – Doreen Massey’s essay on ‘a global sense of place’. There is a lot of continuity between the two texts, Latronico painting a picture of contemporary life in which the dynamics between global and local, identified by Massey, have been amplified and accelerated through new technologies and updated through cultural change. But comparison also reveals a striking difference, a sign of changing times. Whereas, Massey was both critical and hopeful, trusting in a progressive sense of place, Latronico appears pessimistic, depicting a seductive and distracted world that young people feel powerless to shape or change. Reading Perfection, the paper first illuminates and then interrogates this geography of pessimism, before ending on a more hopeful note.