Generative Relational Economics - Chapter 15: Generative Spacetime

This chapter develops generative spacetime as an analytical framework for studying the temporal, spatial, relational, and historical organization of economic processes within Generative Relational Economics (GRE). Rather than representing economic change solely as a succession of contemporaneous states, the framework treats economic configurations as historically situated structures whose development depends on events, processes, trajectories, relations, capacities, institutions, and changing sets of accessible futures. "Spacetime" is used here as a bounded analytical construction rather than as a claim concerning the physical ontology of social reality. The chapter begins with events and processes and develops several analytically distinct trajectories, including state, resource, value, relational, capability, and institutional trajectories. Where linear temporal ordering is insufficient, histories may be represented through partially ordered event structures and higher-order trajectory complexes. Physics-inspired constructions, including spin-foam-like representations, are introduced as heuristic and formal resources while their ontological interpretation remains suspended. This architecture supports the analysis of heterogeneous presents, relational distance, causal and generative accessibility, sequence dependence, path dependence, delayed and latent generation, spatial propagation, and multiscale organization. The framework is subsequently extended to structural transformation, value processes, and intervention. Particular attention is given to distinctions among practical accessibility, represented or evidential support for possible trajectories, transition costs, and normative evaluation. Historical re-epistemization is treated as a change in the evidential, conceptual, or evaluative conditions through which an already-occurring history becomes intelligible, without implying alteration of the past trajectory itself. The final section identifies several power-relevant asymmetries that become visible within generative spacetime, including unequal temporal position, unequal reach, unequal capacities to delay and exit, and unequal influence over future option sets. These asymmetries provide an analytical interface with subsequent inquiry into power, justice, and governance while preserving distinctions among structural asymmetry, dependence, power relations, normative judgment, and institutional response. The chapter thereby provides a spatiotemporal foundation for examining economic processes in which history, accessibility, structural transformation, and the organization of future possibilities are analytically consequential.