The calculus of speed: Accelerated worlds, worlds of acceleration

Acceleration is in some ways old news.People have been bemoaning it and praising it in equal measure for at least two centuries.The essence of the debates remains the role of speed in society.Their relative speed has been identified as one of the characteristic features of societies.Speed is the metric of circulation, be that measured through the movement of ideas, information, money or materials.Such circulation has two dimensionsfirst, looking at the speed of traversing the earth, i.e. speed crossing space, and, second, the speed of processing and consumption, i.e. speed intensifying time.In the former the issue is the extension of our spatial horizons, in the latter it is the foreshortening of our temporal ones.One might then characterise places and eras, and many casually and habitually do, with regard to either of these dimensions.The two dimensions have also been classically combined in characterising the pressures for and effects of urbanisation.Urban settlements can be seen as machines for intensifying time use.Thus by creating a dense set of possible interactions in a small space the city uses space to accelerate time.As we move into an era characterised by more than half the world living in cities this process may then be seen as room?Well, for sure, they do not appear likely to challenge the hegemonic time regime.But equally we should not overestimate the reach of that hegemony.