20th Century Geographic Thought

            The dominant periods of geographic thought since the beginning of the 20^th century were regional geography, spatial science, and humanistic geographies.  Each of these advanced geographic thought and research in important ways.  It’s debatable whether each new period improved on the previous one, but I believe they did, as each added something to make the subject of geography stronger as a whole.  Regional and humanistic geographies provided key insights into socially based research that was qualitative, while spatial science provided key insights into general laws that were quantifiable and more in line with scientific methods.

            Regional geography was subjective in that it depended on the parameters one was talking about (Cresswell 2013).  For instance, regions can be characterized by different features, including climate, architecture, economics, religion, ritual, and even watersheds.  This school of thought began in France, around 1908 when Paul Vidal de la Boche published his theory about genres de vie, or ways of life (Cresswell 2013).  It was heavily influenced by possibilism, or the ways in which people make choices about how to optimize the natural attributes of a region.  Regional geography was more philosophical than practical in that it was focused on the particular attributes of a place, which is sometimes based on social constructs.  It advanced geographic thought by improving on the idea of what comprises a region and how it is always changing (Creswell 2013).  However, its shortcomings ultimately led to the quantitative revolution, as many geographers questioned its ambition, universality, and scientific prestige.

            The quantitative revolution of the 1950s and 1960s challenged regional geography’s fixation on the particular by deriving spatial laws that could be generally applied as universal (Cresswell 2013).  Many geographers found it more relevant and prestigious to academia than the arbitrariness of regional geography.  This school of thought developed out of positivism, or the belief that only things which can be experienced through the senses can be known, making it rely heavily on the use of mathematical languages and models.  The transition to spatial geography during this time vastly improved the subject because it introduced reliable quantitative methods that were more testable than regional qualitative methods.  Critics argued that its structural rigidity ignored the humanistic elements of geography by simplifying behavior into unrealistic principles that involved minimizing distance.

            Humanistic geographers in the1970s argued that since humans aren’t always predictable, distance minimization can’t be universal.  They didn’t so much propose a return to the particular of regional geography as they did an alternate version of the universal: that the essence of place as humans experience it is more universal than spatial laws (Creswell 2013).  Nonetheless, a return to the qualitative research methods favored by regional geographers was advocated, and that is why these movements are often grouped together today.  Many forms of humanistic geography emerged during the period, including ones based on literature, Marxism, feminism, and mobility in the lifeworld (Cresswell 2013).  It improved on the subject by allowing for the human experience, in all its psychological and spiritual grandeur, to manifest a superior interpretation of place.  Critics argued that humanistic geography was subjective, untestable, and elitist, crucially unconcerned with power struggles in the world.

            Each of the three periods improved on the last by adding new insights and laws to the discipline, even if they were philosophical.  However, geography did not experience the crucial paradigm shift that Thomas Kuhn predicted to elevate it as a hard science (Kuhn 1962).  Thus, it was not welcomed as a scientific discipline by universities at the time, though it was making progress.  Instead, it was relegated to one of the social sciences because of the various ways it applied to human data that wasn’t physically based.  But geography’s strength is that it balances elements of natural/physical (hard) and social/human (soft) science into a powerhouse of useful information.  This flexibility means it can be applied to virtually every other science that has emerged since the Renaissance, rendering it capable of involving more data than any other subject.  In my mind, there isn’t a subject more universal than geography.

Cresswell, T. 2013. Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Kuhn, T. S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, Il: University of Chicago Press.