Thinking relationally is at once an insistence on the connection between space and time and a recognition that no place is isolated from the larger story of space. Within this view, space is not simply an empty container waiting for something to fill it with content but is instead always and already filled with matter in the double sense of physical substance as a noun and in terms of having significance as a verb. Relational space also attempts to attend to the question of what “relations” mean, their nature, and crucially how they relate to questions of power. A relational geography is, in short, a way to try to make sense of a world that is infinitely complex and in an ever-changing process of becoming. Yet relational space is also indicative of a politics, one with great possibility for expanding our circle of empathy and reorganizing the landscapes of power though strengthened bonds of solidarity. So rather than simply becoming, space, in its idealized political form, is about becoming beautiful.
Simon Springer, The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), p. 5.