Chapter 4 - Trainspotting in Bethlehem

Summary

On 29 July 1971, Doreen Massey and I boarded a flight from Stanstead airport near London bound for New York City’s Kennedy airport, with an ongoing connection to Philadelphia where we had enrolled in the one-year master’s degree in Regional Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

In those days, cross-Atlantic flights stopped to refuel in Maine or Newfoundland, but it was not the duration of the flight that lingered in my mind. What I most recall is the overwhelming humidity that struck us like a downpour as we exited the plane onto the tarmac at JFK. The sensation of drowning on dry land stayed with me for the next six weeks, as we laboured through what was called a Summer Mathematics Institute, but we called “remedial maths” (mostly calculus, linear algebra and microeconomics).

The culture shocks induced by adjusting to graduate education in the US were immense, but from the outset we were curious and omnivorous consumers facing the smorgasbord of opportunities offered by a challenging (and welcoming) faculty. But looking back, I see that as we learned together, we shared a growing discontent. Neither of us ended up disappointed in the education that Penn provided, and we never would dismiss or disown what we learned that year. Yet neither of us went on to pursue conventional regional science research.

This chapter seeks to explain these outcomes. It is a personal account of twelve transformative months in our lives and education, beginning from the summer of 1971. Needless to say, our experiences differed, and I make no pretense of accurately recording Doreen’s story, nor of providing a comprehensive narrative of my own.

LONDON, 1966–69: INTRODUCTIONS

In the 1960s, London was described as “swinging”, which I experienced as an energetic, experimental and optimistic spirit. Harold Wilson was prime minister, expounding what he called a “white-hot” technological revolution in Britain even though much of his time was spent trying to quell the old-time socialists scattered within the Labour Party. Typical weekends saw large and noisy demonstrations against American involvement in Vietnam.