Influence of the social sciences

New practices in human geography have been closely linked to parallel

changes in the social sciences, in some of which the quantitative-
positivist approach has come under attack. The arguments were
extended to the spatial-analysis approach with its geometric emphasis.
By reducing all decision making to economic criteria, subject to
immutable laws regarding least costs, profit maximization, and
distance minimizing, geographers, it was claimed, were ignoring (even
denigrating) the role of culture and individuality in human behaviour.
By proposing to use those laws as bases for spatial planning, they were
simply reproducing the status quo of capitalist domination; and by
assuming universal patterns of behaviour, it was argued, they
were patronizing those who chose to operate differently.

Stimulating and growing out of these arguments were three main

strands of work. In the first, geographers led by David Harvey (who
was Cambridge-trained but worked largely in the United States)
explored Marxist thinking. This involved not only the workings of the
economy—to which they added an important spatial dimension—but
also the class conflict underpinning Marxian analyses and the
consequent unequal distribution of power. The positivist aspects of
locational analysis were attacked as largely irrelevant; they assumed
constant conditions for economic decision making and, thus, universal
laws of behaviour, whereas for Marxist scholars continuous change
was the norm.

A popular alternative approach for some of a generally Marxist

persuasion was critical realism. This accepts that there are general
tendencies within capitalism but contends that they are only realized
when implemented by individuals making decisions in local contexts:
the profit motive is general, but individual entrepreneurs decide how
to pursue it. The outcomes then change the local contexts—for
example, by changing the maps of economic activity within which
decisions are made, so that the contingent circumstances for future
decisions also change—and there can be no general laws of outcomes,
only of basic processes. This argument was forcefully made by the

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British geographer Doreen Massey. Furthermore, decision makers
learn from the consequences of previous decisions. There is a
continuous interplay between context and decision maker (or between
structure and agency). Realists can explain why events have
occurred—why a factory is located at a particular site—but not as
examples of general laws of location. For them, explanation means
accounting for specific events in context, relating how decision makers
react to circumstances in order to meet imperatives within the
constraints of their particular situations (what they know, what they
believe their competitors will do, and how they manipulate that
knowledge).

Marxist-inspired approaches to understanding spatial arrangements

covered a wide range of issues, many relating to inequalities in society.
Access to various goods and services—e.g., housing and health care—is
a function of class position, not only locally and regionally but also
nationally and internationally. The geography of development,
embracing not only wealth and income but also the quality of life and
life chances, reflects a global economic system that varies at several
levels.

Marxism is more than a mode of analysis based on axioms regarding

capitalist economic systems: it has an associated politics. Many
geographers inspired by this approach in the context of the world
situation in the 1960s and ’70s were attracted to the politics and
adopted the term “radical geography.” Others accepted the power of
Marxist-inspired analysis without also agreeing with the associated
socialist agenda. From these twin positions, a more broadly based
critical geography emerged that identified spatial problems of
contemporary societies and their causes and promoted solutions,
while at the same time meeting principles of
social justice and ethical practice.

This critical geography also drew on a second strand of work, which

developed out of writings on gender and the growth
of feminist scholarship. Feminist geographers contended that
geography was a male-dominated discipline whose concerns reflected
masculinist epistemologies. Women were subordinated and largely

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ignored in geography, and feminists pointed out the gender divisions
and campaigned to remove bias against women. In spatial science, for
example, they showed how patterns of accessibility discriminated
against women in labour markets, demonstrating how space had been
manipulated to promote male interests and in the process had become
part of society’s definition of gender roles.

Feminists also contended that gender is one of the multiple positions

that individuals occupy within a society, rejecting the predominant
class position at the core of Marxian analyses. From this foundation
emerged wider concerns with identity and positionality, embracing
not only gender divisions but also ethnic and national distinctions, as
well as sexual orientation and other criteria on which individuals’
identities are based—such as the position of those in postcolonial
societies. Thus, gender had to be subdivided to recognize the different
positions (and politics) of white and black women, of women in
societies with developed and developing economies, and in various
religions. Appreciating those divisions—plus the many hybrid
positions that emerge through, for example, the mixing of peoples in
multiethnic cities—requires appreciating discrimination and
difference. To many, this cannot be achieved by the abstract theorizing
of either spatial science or Marxian analysis. It requires
interpretative methodologies aimed at understanding
through empathy, gained through a variety of qualitative research
methods, such as participant observation, focus groups, in-depth
interviewing, and the examination of archived resources. These enable
access to not only how people interpret their place in the world and act
accordingly but also to how they create worlds within which to act, at
all spatial levels from the smallest (their individual bodies) outward.

An example of such analyses is critical geopolitics. Political

geography was a marginal subdiscipline for several decades
after World War II, with geopolitical thinking disparaged because of
its association with the work of geographers in 1930s Nazi Germany.
Its revival involved regaining an appreciation of how influential
political thinkers and politicians develop and propagate mental maps
of the world as structures for action. These mental maps are created by
key thinkers, adopted by politicians, and disseminated by various

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media. They form contexts for developing political strategies and
determining tactics, to which the wider population’s attitudes are
molded. The world of politics is a world of mental maps and of
dominant views that underpin behaviour: we act in perceived worlds
that intersect with, but are often more powerful than, real worlds,
which are composed of physical phenomena.

Such work came to be associated with another major development in

the social sciences: postmodernism. This concept maintains that there
are no absolute truths, so no grand theories can provide universal
explanations and guides to action. Truths are the beliefs on which
people act, and there are multiple truths of which none can claim
primacy, although the value of competing truths in any context can be
assessed ethically, according to local conceptions of right and wrong.
People learn their truths from others—through either direct or indirect
sources. Therefore, much learning takes place in contexts, and, since
most people live relatively spatially constrained lives, those contexts
are territorially defined. They are the places and areas within which
people interact and learn—their homes and neighbourhoods, their
schools and universities, their workplaces, and the formal
organizations in which they participate—and that they create and
maintain through local interactions.

This appreciation of the role of context put the concept of place on

centre stage in much human geographical research, displacing space
from the primary position it occupied for several decades. It differs
from the former regional tradition in which environmental features
dominated. Places are defined more fluidly: they are made, remade,
and dissolved by people; they may overlap, or they may be bounded
and defended. Places occupy core positions in human existence and
everyday lives. People learn attitudes and behaviour patterns in places
where they interact with others and to which they ascribe meanings—a
theme developed by humanistic geographers over several decades, as
in books on topics such as Topophilia: A Study of Environmental
Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values (1974), by Yi-fu Tuan. Their
identities and their politics are associated with the nature of their
places. As people learn and change themselves, so too do they change
their environments. Furthermore, as critical geopolitics illustrates,

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such place making involves not only creating an identity for one’s
home area but also separate identities for those of other areas.
Geographers have been stimulated by Edward
Said’s Orientalism (1979), which portrays how Western societies
created images of the East in opposition to themselves. These images,
portrayed in literature and other media, are the basis for attitudes
toward many non-Western cultures, presenting “the other” as not only
different but also inferior and thus not deserving equal treatment and
respect—as was exemplified in Derek Gregory’s seminal The Colonial
Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (2004).

This revived interest in places is a feature of the third contemporary

strand, with geographers engaged in the field of cultural studies,
which encompasses scholars from the humanities and social sciences
studying human action in context. Such work ranges over many
aspects of behaviour, including the microscale of the individual body,
and seeks to understand the meanings that underpin actions—many of
which are never recorded during the processes of everyday life—and
how communities and groups identify with places and spaces. The
relationships between people and nature are also being reconsidered,
breaking down artificial boundaries between these long-considered
opposites. New approaches for interrogating actions are being
explored: geography quite literally studies where events take place,
and the impact of those events is reflected in places’ characters.
Indeed, such is the contribution of geography to cultural studies that
some identify a “spatial turn” within the humanities.

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