Milton Santos * The Nature of Space
Major geographer of the Global South, offers a sharp, enduring critique of planetary urbanization from a distinctly Brazilian vantage point. His most influential entry is The Nature of Space, where he dissects the unequal architectures of globalization through the tension between a “technical-scientific-informational milieu” and the lived, local rationalities that resist it. For Santos, urbanization is not a universal destiny but a territorial project shaped by power, in which global networks impose homogenizing logics while everyday practices generate counter-geographies of resilience. From this friction emerges his key insight: the South is not a delayed version of Northern modernity, but a laboratory of alternative spatialities capable of reframing the very idea of the urban. His work thus transforms the city into a site where global flows, peripheral creativity, and structural injustice collide—opening a critical, decolonial lens for reading contemporary urban transformations. He argues that the discipline must fundamentally renew its analytical categories to understand the profound transformations of human space. Santos describes the current form of globalization as "perverse," driven by a technocratic logic that exacerbates inequalities between countries and social classes, and even leads to a "perversion of science" itself by subordinating it to utilitarian and economic interests. The book's core project is to redefine geography's object of study: space. Santos defines space not as a mere container or a system of things, but as a dynamic "relational reality" formed by the inseparable combination of geographical objects (both natural and social) and the society in movement that animates them. This leads him to meticulously distinguish between key concepts: landscape is the visible, material domain we perceive; territorial configuration is the total system of fixed objects in a territory; and space is the living, structural reality that emerges from the marriage of society with this configuration. To analyze this complex reality, Santos proposes focusing on "fijos y flujos" (fixes and flows)—the fixed instruments of work (like infrastructure, cities, institutions) and the movements (of capital, goods, people, information) they generate. He calls for a "global geography" capable of understanding how the worldwide unification of production creates, paradoxically, increasingly singular and specialized places. The book concludes by advocating for a unified geography that overcomes the traditional split between physical and human branches, recognizing that in the modern world, the natural and the artificial are inextricably intertwined, demanding a new, critical, and holistic theoretical framework for the discipline. The book "From Totality to Place" is a foundational work that compiles his reflections on the relationship between society and space over more than two decades. Santos criticizes the traditional geographical view that reduces space to a mere backdrop for human action and instead proposes understanding it as a dynamic social construct, inseparable from historical and economic processes. Across three parts, the author analyzes social formation and the nation-state as spatial totalities, examines urbanization in the Third World—introducing innovative concepts such as the "two circuits of the urban economy"—and explores the impact of globalization and the techno-scientific-informational environment on contemporary territory. A central idea is that the place, despite globalizing forces, remains a crucial space for resistance, identity, and the construction of alternative futures.
