Writing

Humans have a deep-seated desire to control geographic space. Geographer Robert Sack called it territoriality: the attempt to assert and delimit control over place. It plays out at the geopolitical scale, and it plays out at the desk-booking scale. What does territorial instinct reveal about how people actually experience the modern workplace?

In the 1960s, knowledge work was concentrated in time and place: standard hours, centralised offices, analogue tools. That world is gone. Work has since diffused across space and time in ways that bring both remarkable flexibility and genuine confusion. Human geography has a framework for understanding exactly what happened, and what it means for workplace strategy.

Hägerstrand's time geography was built on a fundamental premise: humans can only be in one place at a time. That was 1960. Since then, a third dimension has entered our daily lives, the digital realm. The space-time model no longer captures reality. So what does the updated version reveal about how knowledge workers experience work today?

In the 1960s, Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand developed a model to visualise how people move through space and time across a single day. It is called the space-time path. Applied to the workplace, it reveals something quietly profound: the constraints shaping where and when knowledge workers show up are not just logistical. They are geographic.

Human geography studies the interrelationship between people, space, and place across time. It is a discipline that has spent over a century asking questions that workplace strategy is only beginning to take seriously. Before we go further, it is worth understanding what human geography actually is, and why it matters for the world of work.

For a while, I kept deferring the idea of a newsletter. The abundance of workplace discourse left me wondering: is there more noise than value out there? But I kept sensing a real desire for deeper exploration, to go beyond the surface and apply a human geography lens to how and where we work. That is exactly what this series is about.