Spatial Science and the Quantitative Revolution

        A critical time in geography came during the 1950s, when the quantitative revolution changed how people thought of it.  Prior to this, regional geography had been the dominant mode of study in the field.  What inspired the change was an insecurity about geography being relevant in a changing world, which in academia was placing higher value on the sciences than the humanities.  The Quantitative Revolution introduced scientific methods to the discipline of geography, enticing theorists with grandiose propositions about spatial laws that could be interpreted as universal and general.  This appealed to many geographers because it promised to make the subject more prestigious as it became more scientific.

            There were several critiques of regional geography that took place during this period.  One was that its generalizations about regions were not consistent enough (Johnston and Sidaway 2004: 58) to support further research.  Too much information about regions was being presented with too many discrepancies in the facts.  Another was that too many regions that were being documented lacked the true vividness, flavor, or personality of the cultures embodying them, such as West Africa (Johnson and Sidaway 2004: 58).  Furthermore, there was disagreement by geographers on what regions entailed, and where their boundaries lay.  Without clearly defined boundaries, the revolution in spatial science allowed for a shift in perspective that made research in geography more rigorous, with the intention of better approximating regions or doing away with them altogether.  This new research would involve more quantitative methods based on spatial laws than the previous qualitative methods of regional geography.

            Part of the issue had to do with the range of study geography is involved with.  In Harvey’s Explanation of Geography, he states that “in physical geography law-statements are important, but in human geography such statements are irrelevant” (Harvey 1969: 69).  A spatial science of the physical world has been appropriate since the roots of geographic study, back when Eratosthenes (3^rd c. BC) first measured the circumference of the Earth and proposed grid-like systems of measurement like the longitude and latitude we know today.  Human geography is far more nebulous than physical geography.  It allows for loosely defined concepts of regions to be described by particular sets of data.  Because of the multivariate nature of human geography, it is difficult to prove social laws based on the scientific method or statistical analysis (Harvey, 1969: 76).  With physical geography, there was already an appropriate system for deducing scientific knowledge, which is what the spatial scientists of the Quantitative Revolution were seeking.  Extending this concept to human and regional geography was an ambitious goal that did not seem entirely out of reach at the time.

            A key figure in the Quantitative Revolution was Fred Schaefer.  He was an empiricist who strongly believed geographic research should be reformed using quantitative methods.  In his seminal paper Exceptionalism in Geography…, he argued that since the major pattern-producing variables in geography are spatial, laws could be used to predict their output through determinism (Schaefer 1953).  Ideally this would apply to social laws as well as physical ones.  As human and regional geography were limited to descriptions (Schaefer 1953), they could never be taken as seriously as other scientific fields if they didn’t primarily use quantifiable data.  To Schaefer, it was only through analytical and statistical methods that facts could be gathered to deduce spatial laws.  He believed that geographers needed to embrace science to improve the integrity and prestige of the field, so that more research opportunities would become available from higher universities like Harvard, which had disbanded its geography program in 1948 for being too focused on regions.

            William Bunge expanded on Schaefer’s ideas to include mathematical modeling as a cornerstone of regional analysis and cartography.  To Bunge, regions should be assigned by aerial classification based on what actual data suggests (Bunge 1962: 20), not by arbitrarily describing them.  This placed more value on the study of geography because models can better predict what happens in any given region.  Bunge also elaborated on the statistical diffusion of movement, explaining how human activities tend to show patterns by optimizing distance (Bunge 1962: 211).  Such optimization leads to a geometric interpretation of activity, which can more easily be applied to cartography as a spatial structure (Bunge 1962: 212).  Thus, it became evident that cartographers could use modeling to enhance their maps by coding or iterating sets of data, resulting in spatial transformations that more accurately described regions.  Later in the century, computers would demonstrate this in action after Geographic Information Systems were developed.

            As universal laws began to describe movement in geography, so did they describe physical processes, with more accurate results.  Arthur Strahler, a pioneer in geomorphology, subscribed to the idea that mathematical modeling could determine the general laws that created landforms. (Strahler 1952: 936).  He stressed that geographers were behind scientists in other fields because of the lack in using equations, models, and dynamic systems in their research (Strahler 1952: 937).  Geomorphology- the study of physical features on earth related to geology- arose from applying these quantitative methods to physical geography.  But crucially, the human side of geography, best described by movement and agency, was not addressed by him.  A similar field might have arisen that applied to human geography, but since humans are less predictable than natural processes, one never developed. 

Instead, there were a number of reactionary movements against the Quantitative Revolution from a human perspective, rendering most of its appeal to physical geographers.  In the 1970s and 1980s, humanist, Marxist, feminist, postmodern and poststructuralist geographers sequentially shifted the focus back on agency as it applied to the individual or society, addressing the power structures that the Quantitative Revolution was ignoring.  These reactionary movements also shifted the focus back to quantitative research, which is why geography is still seen as a social science today.

While the reactionary movements had valid points, the shortcomings of the Quantitative Revolution need not distract them from its crucial contribution to human and regional geography.  As most human activity can be approximated by mathematical models, it became useful for cartographers to use spatial laws in depicting human relationships, even those involving power structures.   For instance, a cartographer could model the behavior seen in one type of governed society vs. another, making a stronger argument for disparities in social relationships.  That was the point Schaefer and Bunge were making; social behavior that can be statistically analyzed using quantitative methods supports a stronger argument in the hard sciences than qualitative data does in the soft sciences.  Their mistake was leaning too heavily on the universal, which seemed to reduce human structures to a mechanized, predictable set of behaviors- ominously similar to environmental determinism.  By adopting the universal appeal of Strahler’s geomorphology and discarding Harvey’s view that social laws were too multivariate to be proven, they mistakenly placed too much importance on quantifying behavior.  Given a set of parameters, humans don’t always act the same way, whether they are in groups or as individuals.

The spatial scientists of the Quantitative Revolution were too concerned with prestige to see that geography is a marriage of physical and social sciences; that you can’t ignore the human component, or a divorce causes it to crumble.  Because regions are mostly defined by the boundaries humans create, agency will always be part of the “equation”.  Regions can’t be ignored for the same reason; they are most appropriate at conveying information about places, whether it is physical or human.  Adopting quantitative methods to geographic research was important for the field, but the ambitious drive to find universal spatial laws seemed like an overreaction to a single university’s rejection (Harvard).  By more subtly integrating quantitative methods, the movements that followed might have been more comprehensive than reactionary.

 

References:

            Bunge, W.W. (1962) Theoretical Geography, Royal University, Lund.

            Harvey, D. (1969) Explanation in Geography, Edward Arnold, London.

Johnston, R.D. and Sidaway, J.D (2004) Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American Human Geography Since 1945, Arnold, London.

Schaefer, F.K. (1953) Exceptionalism in geography: a methodological examination. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 43, 226-249.

Strahler, A.N. (1952) Dynamic basis of geomorphology. Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, 63, 923-938.