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Here is a compilation of essays on the ‘Approaches to Human Geography’ for class 11 and 12. Find paragraphs, long and short essays on the ‘Approaches to Human Geography’ especially written for school and college students.
Approaches to Human Geography
Essay Contents:
- Essay on Humanistic Geography
- Essay on Behavioural Geography
- Essay on Time-Space Geography
- Essay on Welfare Geography
- Essay on Radical Geography
Essay # 1. Humanistic Geography:
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It is an approach in human geography, distinguished by the central and active role it gives to human awareness and human agency, human consciousness and human creativity. It is an attempt at understanding meaning, value and the human significance of life events. The revival of humanism in geography in the 1970s owed much to a deep dissatisfaction with the more mechanistic models developed during the quantitative/spatial science revolution.
For this reason, its early steps were taken alongside behavioural geography. But the two soon parted company and humanistic geography came to recognise the essential ‘subjectivity’ of both the investigator and the investigated in ways which departed from the formal structures of behaviourism.
Indeed, humanistic geography shared in the more general critique of positivism’s claim to ‘objectivity’ (in which behavioural geography was itself inculcated). It came to be represented as a form of criticism through which geographers can be made more aware and cognizant of many of the hidden assumptions and implications of their methods and research, rather than as a coherent and robust methodology for the ‘post-behavioural revolution’ in geography. But humanism was intended to be more than just a critical philosophy.
Anne Buttimer (1978) attempted to bring forward the tradition of Vidal de la Blache, and argued that historical and geographical studies go together. She emphasised the need to understand each region and its inhabitants from the ‘inside’ (that is, on the basis of local perspective) and not from the perspective of the researching ‘outsider’. There undoubtedly are affinities between the French School of la geographie humaine and humanistic geography.
Idealist Approach:
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Leonard Guelke (1981) advocated an idealist approach, and expressed his ideas to historical geographers, as a counter to the arguments that they should adopt the approaches and techniques of positivism. He points out, ‘it is obvious that quantitative techniques will often be useful, but statistical methods put in harness with positivist philosophy is a dangerous combination.
Historical geographers need to rethink not their techniques but their philosophy. This can be best achieved by moving from problem-solving contemporary applied geography, towards the idealist approach widely accepted by historians’. A well-verified idealist explanation will be one in which a pattern of behaviour can be shown to be consistent with certain underlying ideas.
The idealist philosophy combines two positions, according to Guelke:
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(a) A metaphysical argument that mental activity has a life of its own which is not controlled by material things and processes; and
(b) An epistemological argument that the world can only be known indirectly through ideas, and all knowledge is ultimately based on an individual’s subjective experience of the world, and comprises mental constructs and ideas. There is no ‘real’ world that can be known independently of the mind. Positivist spatial science is thus criticised because it believes in the existence of a real world, the nature of which it seeks to explain via general laws of behaviour.
Behavioural geography was equally criticised, not for its response to perceived images and subjective evaluation, but because of two assumptions within this field that:
(a) Identifiable environmental images exist which can be measured accurately; and that
(b) There are strong relationships between revealed images and preferences and actual (real world) behaviour.
Such an approach, according to Bunting and Guelke, puts human geography into a single-cause model, much like the earlier environmental determinism, and if one accepted this model, research in behavioural geography has failed to validate it. They argue for an idealist approach, which focuses on overt behaviour and its interpretation—in searching for the truth a scholar conducts a critical dialogue with his evidence and in due course he puts the results before his colleagues for their appraisal.
Guelke considered that geographers should attempt to discover what the decision-maker believed and not why he believed it. Thus, the human geographer does not need to develop theories, since the relevant theories which led to the action under study already existed in the minds of the decision-makers.
Hays (1979) points out the inherent weaknesses in the idealist approach that it ignores the possibility of either unconscious or sub-conscious behaviour. He further points out that the objective facts must influence behavioural outcomes, in addition to the thoughts of the actors. To him, idealism acts as a reductionist, but the world is more than a large number of independent decision-makers.
Mabogunje also criticises the idealist approach of Guelke, and argues that such a retreat from objective theory formulations as a means of seeking explanation to certain events would exclude from our consideration the exploration of the consequences of social actions.
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Instead of retreating to a focus of particular cases, seeking special explanation for each situation in which a different value system can be shown to be operative, the geographers should attempt to build better theories encompassing these differences in value systems. Some scholars have expressed doubts as to how an idealist interpretation could be verified.
Hermeneutic Approach:
Idealism implies one type of Hermeneutic Approach, which is the theory of interpretation and clarification of meaning. It took its place in the German tradition of ‘Geisteswissenchaften’, the human sciences.
Its arguments were then developed to embrace the reader (or interpreter) as well. The dialectic between the subject and the object leads on to what has been called ‘double hermeneutics’. In geography, hermeneutics has been formally employed in a similarly general fashion to contest the epistemology of positivism and hence to reject the exclusive claims of spatial science.
The critical impulse which hermeneutics entails has been generalised through claims for a presuppositional approach in human geography capable of giving direction to its emerging social conscience.
However, hermeneutics has much to offer to regional geography. On the one hand, it can provide the epistemology for a self-reflective, historical, geographical science of the region. On the other hand, it has specific contribution to make concerning the characteristics of the Earth, space and place, culture and especially, language, and thus it could be a means of reconstructing regional geography.
Phenomenological Approach:
Phenomenology has attracted more attention among human geographers than idealism. The term was first used by Sauer as early as 1925, but it had only become widely known during 1970s. It was Relph who first attempted to introduce a phenomenological approach, when he pointed out that the basic aim of phenomenology is to present an alternative methodology to the hypothesis-testing and theory building of positivism, an alternative grounded in humankind’s ‘lived’ world of experience.
Phenomenologists argue that there is no objective world independent of man’s existence—all knowledge proceeds from the world of experience and cannot be independent of that world – ‘Idealism’, on the other hand, accepts that there is a real world outside the individual’s consciousness.
Kirk (1963) recognised two separate, but not independent environments:
(a) ‘Phenomenal environment’, which is the totality of the Earth’s surface, and
(b) ‘Behavioural environment’, which is the perceived and interpreted portion of the phenomenal environment.
Phenomenology in human geography is somewhat concerned with the phenomenal environment. The contents of that environment are unique to every individual, for each of its elements is the result of an act of intentionality; it is given meaning by the individual, without which it does not exist, but with which it influences behaviour. Phenomenology is the study of how such meanings are defined. It involves the researcher seeking to identify how the individual structures the environment in an entirely subjective way.
One of the well-known phenomenologists was Yi-Fu Tuan (1971), to whom geography is the mirror of man and reveals the essence of human existence and striving. To know the world is to know oneself, just as careful analysis of a house reveals much about both the designer and the occupant.
The study of landscapes is the study of the essence of the societies which mould them in just the same way as the study of literature and art reveals much of human life. Such study is clearly based in the humanities rather than in the social or physical sciences.
According to him, ‘Humanistic geography achieves an understanding of the human world by studying people’s relation with nature, their geographical behaviour as well as their feelings and ideas with regard to space and place. Scientific approaches to the study of man tend to minimise the role of human awareness and knowledge. Humanistic geography, in contrast, specifically tries to understand how geographical activities and phenomena reveal the quality of human awareness’.
There are five basic themes in Tuan’s humanistic geography:
(1) The nature of geographical knowledge and its role in human survival;
(2) The role of territory in human behaviour and the creation of place identities;
(3) The interrelationships between crowding and privacy, as mediated by culture;
(4) The role of knowledge as an influence on livelihood; and
(5) The influence of religion on human activity. Such concerns are best developed in historical and in regional geography; their value to human welfare is that they clarify the nature of the experience. ‘The model for the regional geographers of humanistic leaning is … the Victorian novelist who strives to achieve a synthesis of the subjective and the objective’.
Buttimer (1976, 282) also favoured phenomenology, as a path to understanding, on which informed planning can be built. ‘It could elicit a clearer grasp of value issues surrounding one’s normal way of life, and an appreciation of the kinds of education and socialization which might be appropriate for persons whose lives may weave through several mileux.’
Berry (1973) also supported the phenomenological orientation, calling for a view of the world from the vantage of process metageography. By metageography is meant that part of geographic speculation which deals with the principles lying behind perceptions of reality, and transcending them, including such concepts as essence, cause and identity.
Entrikin argues that ‘the humanistic approach is best understood as a form of criticism’. Whereas the positivist/quantitative movement was characterised by a great numerical superiority of practitioners over preachers, the phenomenological movement (like the idealist) has been characterised by the converse—much preaching and little practice.
However, humanistic geography has moved far from the position defined by Entrikin. It has moved from its early attack on positivism to make an assault on structuralism, and at the same time, it has developed a much more incisive methodology for empirical investigation.
Johnston (1986) distinguishes two basic streams of work. The first stream is characterised by a self-conscious drive to connect with that special body of knowledge, reflection and substance about human experience and human expression, about what it means to be a human being on this Earth, namely, the humanities.
The second stream is, perhaps, more self-consciously theoretical—in fact one of its central concerns is to clarify the ‘theoretical attitude’ itself. It draws on a range of constraints derived from the human and social sciences, most usually from existentialism and phenomenology, and from ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism.
Humanistic geography, therefore, appears to be concerned either with the study of individuals and their construction of phenomenal environments, or with the analysis of landscapes as repositories of human beings. As such, it may be considered separate from the subject matter of such human geography, notably behavioural geography, and its investigation of everyday activity within environments (most of them man-made). The phenomenological perspective has been adapted to such work, in the writing of Schultz on what he terms the ‘taken for granted’ world.
Much of everyday behaviour is unconsidered, in that it involves no original encounters. The behaviour is habitual, because all of the stimuli encouraged are processed as examples of particular types. Those types are not externally defined for the individual, but are created by him.
The phenomenology of the ‘taken for granted’ world is the study of those individually-defined typifications of the unconsidered ‘world of social reality’ rather than ‘a fictional non-existing world’ constructed by the scientific observer.
It may be that interactions within communities lead to common typifications. Quantitative methods may be used to identify the common elements, but as descriptive tools only. Quantification is not tied to positivism except when it is used to suggest laws and other generalisations.
Humanistic geography is based on a profound critique of positivist work, both that which makes major assumptions about the nature of decision making and that which seeks inductive laws of human behaviour which can be scientifically verified.
Its argument is for an understanding of man as a ‘living, acting, thinking being’. It is contended that the human condition can only be indicated by humanistic endeavour, for attitudes, impressions and subjective relation to places, and the sense of place, cannot be revealed by positivist research.
Essay # 2. Behavioural Geography:
In contrast to humanistic geography, Behavioural Geography may be seen as a developing criticism, from within the ‘quantitative’ movement, starting from disillusionment with theories based upon the concept of ‘economic man’.
It is an approach to human geography, and in particular to the processes responsible for human spatial behaviour, which especially draw on behaviouralism, or on cognition, as a key to understanding human spatial behaviour.
Behavioural geography treats man as a responder to stimuli. It seeks to identify how different individuals respond to particular stimuli (and also how the same individual responds to the same stimulus in different situations) to isolate the correlates of those varying responses to build models that can predict the probable impact of certain stimuli. The end-product is the input to processes aimed at either providing environments to which people respond in a preferred way or at changing the stimuli.
Behavioural geography has maintained strong ties with the positivist/spatial science tradition. Data are collected from individuals, but there almost all are concerned with the conscious elements in action; they are usually aggregated in order to allow statistically substantive and significant generalisations to be made about spatial behaviour, almost certainly in the context of the normative model of the spatial science school.
Though it was once assumed to be a ‘behavioural backlash’ to a conventional spatial science, behavioural geography was really a ‘logical outgrowth’ of the commitment to positivism enshrined in the quantitative revolution.
Kates (1962) was a major exponent of the behaviouristic approach. In his study of the flood-plain management, he said, ‘the way men view the ranks and opportunities of their uncertain environments plays a significant role in their decisions as a resource management’. Kates developed a scheme which seemed to have relevance to a wide range of behaviours.
His scheme was based on four assumptions:
1. Men are rational while taking decision:
Such a decision may be either prescriptive—describing how men should behave—or the descriptive of actual behaviour. The latter appears to be the most fruitful, both for understanding past decisions and for predicting those yet to be made. Decisions are made on a rational basis, but in relation to the environment as it is perceived by the decision-maker, which may be quite different from either ‘objective reality’ or the world as seen by the researcher.
2. Men make choices:
Many decisions are either trivial or are habitual so that they are accorded little or no thought immediately before they are made. Some major decisions regarding environment and its use may also be habitual, but such behaviour usually develops only after a series of conscious choices has been made. This leads to a stereotyped response to similar situation in the future.
3. Choices are made on the basis of knowledge:
Only very rarely can a decision-maker bring together all the information relevant to his task, and frequently he is unable to assimilate and use all that he has.
4. Information is evaluated to pre-determined criteria:
In habitual choice, the criterion is what was done before, but in conscious choice the information must be weighed according to certain rules.
Kates’ study aimed at understanding why people choose to live in areas which are prone to flooding. Their information was based on their knowledge and experience, and they could be scaled according to the certainty of their perceptions regarding further floods. In justifying their decisions, most were boundedly rational, and had made conscious choices in order to satisfy certain objectives.
It was Julian Wolpert who introduced many human geographers to the behaviourist alternative to the normative approaches then quite popular. In his paper, entitled ‘ The decision process in spatial context’, published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (1964), he compared actual and potential labour productivity on farms in Central Sweden. He observed that the sample farm population did not achieve profit maximisation, nor were its goals solely directed to that objective. The farmers were ‘spatial satisfiers’ rather than ‘economic men’.
Wolpert further continued this theme with studies of migration, aiming to model the decision-making which is behind the patterns of migration reported in census volumes and analysed by spatial scientists. He found the gravity model inadequate as a representation of such flow patterns.
To him, such individual has an action space—the set of place utilities which the individual perceives and to which he responds—whose contents may deviate considerably from that portion of the ‘real world’ which it purports to represent. Once the first decision—to migrate—has been made, then the action space may be changed as the potential mover searches through it for potential satisfactory destination If necessary, he extends the space if no suitable solution to the research can be found.
Undoubtedly, Wolpert’s papers heralded the development of behavioural geography. His behavioural approach has focused on topics related to decision-making in spatial contexts. Wolpert and his associates also prepared pioneering papers, related to political decision-making, applying the approach he set forth in his first work. Regarding the distribution of certain artefacts in the landscape, Wolpert pointed out that the location of a public facility, for example in an urban area, frequently is the product of policy compromise.
The aim in behavioural geography has been to derive alternative theories to those based on economic man. These theories are ‘more concerned with understanding why certain activities take place rather than what patterns they produce in space’.
Here the researcher uses the real world from a perspective of those individuals whose decisions affect locational or distributional pattern. He tries ‘to derive sets of empirically and theoretically sound statements about individual, small group, or mass behaviour’. Man is considered an active decision-maker, not a reactor to particular institutionally-created stimuli.
It may be noted that the initial interest in resource management was followed by an extension from environmental perception and decision-making into aspects of attitudes and motivation. These were applied to studies of migration, the diffusion of innovations, political behaviour (especially voting), perception, choice behaviour, and spatial search and learning.
‘By studying behavioural processes in these contexts, the aspiration was to increase geographer’s understanding of how spatial patterns evolve, thereby complementing their existing ability to describe such pattern. Morphological laws and systems are insufficient of themselves for understanding; the amalgamation of concepts about decision-making taken from other social sciences with geography’s spatial variable would allow development of process theories that could account for the morphologies observed’.
One aspect of behavioural geography has been the concept of mental map. This refers to the images of place, ‘mentally stored by individuals and drawn upon as resources in their interpretation of spatial desirability, their organisation of spatial routines, and their decision-making transaction as satisficing agents. Mental maps are an amalgam of information and interpretation reflecting not only what an agent knows about places but also how he or she feels about them’.
Mental maps are important to geographers not only as a means of examining an individual’s areas of spatial preference, but also as an insight into the processes whereby decisions are made, opportunities perceived and goals determined and satisfied.
‘If we grant that spatial behaviour is our concern, then the mental images that men hold of the space around them may provide a key to some of the structures, patterns and processes of man’s work on the face of the Earth’. Such maps are useful, it is believed, not only in the analysis of spatial behaviour, but also in the planning of the social investment.
According to Downs (1970), there may be two other approaches to the study of environmental images:
(a) The ‘structural approach’ which inquiries into the nature of the spatial information stored in people’s minds and which they use in their day- to-day affairs; and
(b) The ‘evaluative approach’ in which the question is, what factors do people consider important about their environment, and having estimated the relative importance of these factors, how do they employ them in their decision-making activities. With this evaluative approach, geographers moved into the wider field of cognitive mapping.
On the methods in behavioural geography, Johnston points out, ‘The behaviouristic approach is an inductive one, with the aim being to build general statements out of observations of ongoing processes…. In terms of the accepted route to scientific explanation … behavioural geography involved moving outside the accepted cycle procedure to input new sets of observations on which superior theories might be based. In doing this, the behaviourists did not really move far from the spatial-science ethos. Indeed many of their methods were those of their predecessors; Gould’s mental map studies, for example, used the same technical apparatus as the factorial ecologies’.
However, Pred presented an alternative to theory building based on ‘economic man’ in his two-volume work Behaviour and Location (1969), and proposed the use of a behavioural matrix to provide a framework in which locational decision making could be analysed.
Axes of behavioural matrix are quantity and quality of information available and the ability to use that information; economic man is located in the bottom right-hand corner. Because of the nature and importance of information flows, the position on the axis depends in part on the decision-maker’s spatial location.
His position would reflect aspiration levels, experience and norms of any groups to which he belonged. Different people in different positions in the matrix would vary in their decisions; therefore two at the same position may act on different bases and in different ways. Individuals do not stay at the same position in the matrix, and spatial patterns are not static.
In the second volume of the book, Pred introduced a dynamic element by shifting individuals through the matrix. As they shift, and change their decisions, so the environment changes for others. As people learn, they both acquire better information, and become more skilled in its use.
They shift towards the bottom right-hand corner of the matrix, some of them in advance of others, who benefit from the activities of the ‘decision leaders’. The unsuccessful are gradually eliminated, so that with time a concentration of good decision makers close to the economic man position evolves.
But changes in the external environment produce parametric shocks, which result in decision-makers becoming less informed and less certain; as a consequence they are shifted back towards the upper left-hand corner, and another learning cycle begins. As long as parametric shocks occur more frequently than the learning experience takes, an optimal location pattern will never emerge, except perhaps by chance.
Harvey (1969) criticised the model of the behavioural matrix, finding it ambiguous, unoperational and an over-simplification of the complex nature of behaviour. He also expressed scepticism about the viability of a behavioural location theory. Instead, Harvey suggested two alternatives to behavioural location theory— further development of normative theory and the construction of a stochastic location theory.
To him, both these approaches offered more immediate payoffs in terms of understanding spatial patterns than did behavioural efforts, because of the conceptual and measurement problems of the latter. Curry (1967) favoured the stochastic approach, while Weber (1972) attempted to model locational approaches.
The behavioural approach has not brought about a revolution away from the spatial science paradigm; in effect it has become an attachment to it. Behavioural geography is now widely accepted within the positivist orientation.
It seeks to account for spatial pattern within the environment (both man-made and natural) by establishing generalisations about man-environment interrelationships, and then using these as a basis for change through environmental planning activities that ‘modify the stimuli which affect the spatial behaviour of ourselves and others’.
The behavioural approach, therefore, is based on four major assumptions, according to Gold (1980):
1. The environment in which an individual acts is that which he perceives, which may well differ markedly from the true nature of the real world.
2. Individuals interact with their environments, responding to them and reshaping them.
3. The focus of study is the individual, not the group.
4. Behavioural geography is multi-disciplinary.
The behaviourist approach appears to consist of two approaches:
(a) The first is based on the study of overt behaviour using the traditional positivist formulation of dependent variables influenced by independent variables. This approach has involved the widespread application of statistical techniques,
(b) The second approach is based on attempts to identify the mental constructs that lie behind overt behaviour. However, little has been achieved in the second approach, i.e. linking cognitive schemata to behaviour, and thus extending the predictive models of the first approach.
‘In the early 1960s and 1970s, therefore, behavioural studies in geography typically examined the ways in which information is (selectively) abstracted, structured and stored in mental maps; fed into and channeled through decision-making systems, as individuals or corporations make diagonal moves through a notional behavioural matrix at movements in a recursive learning process; and disclosed in patterns of spatial behaviour through the analysis of revealed spatial preference and the reconstruction of individual- action-space’.
Essay # 3. Time-Space Geography:
Related to the behaviouralist tradition, and somewhat also to the humanistic heritage, is Hagerstrand’s Time-Space Geography. It may be seen as a critique, not so much of the ‘quantitative movement’ of the important aspects of social research in general.
It conceives of time and space as providers of ‘room (rum) for ‘collateral processes’. Time-space geography emphasises the importance of continuity and connectivity for sequences of events which necessarily take place in ‘situations bounded in time and space and whose outcomes are mutually modified by their common localization’.
An important aspect of time-space geography is that time and space are both regarded as resources which constrain activity. Any behaviour which requires movement involves the individual or group traversing a path through space and time. Movements along the horizontal axis indicate spatial traverses while those along the vertical axis mark the passage of time. Any journey, termed a lifeline by Hagerstrand, thus involves movement along both axes simultaneously.
Time-space geography is based upon four basic assumptions:
1. Space and time are resources on which individuals have to draw in order to realise particular projects.
2. The realisation of any project is subject to three constraints:
(a) ‘Capability constraints’, which restrict the activities of individuals through their own physical capabilities. They derive large measures from the individuals’ livelihood position,
(b) ‘Coupling constraints’, which operate to require certain individuals and groups to be in particular places at stated times. Such constraints define space- time boundaries,
(c) ‘Authority or steering constraints’, which impose certain conditions of access to and modes of conduct within particular space-time domain. Together, these three define the time-space prism (Fig. 15.1) which contains all the available lifeline paths for an individual starting at a certain location and needing to return there at a given time.
3. These constraints are interactive rather than additive and together they delineate a series of possibility boundaries which mark out the paths available for individuals to fulfil particular projects. These boundaries correspond to an underlying and evolving logic or structure whose disclosure requires a way of dealing with projects in space-time terms of considerable conceptual precision.
4. Within these structural templates, competition between projects for free paths and open space- times is the central problem for analysis and is mediated by specific institutions which seek to maintain an essential space-time coherence.
Time-space geography is often described as a ‘situational ecology’ concerned to incorporate certain essential biotic and ecological predicates within human geography and social theory. It has the potential for throwing new light on some of the very different kinds of questions customarily posed by ‘old-fashioned’ regional and historical geographers, as well as ‘modern’ human geographers.
Time-space geography is a challenge to turn to the ‘choreography’ of individual and collective existence—to reject the excesses of inter- and intra-disciplinary specialisation for a concern with collateral processes. It provides a method of mapping spatial behaviour and at the same time represents a reorientation of scale, away from aggregate data towards studies of individual behaviour. Hagerstrand’s time-space geography appears to be essentially humanistic, aimed to provide insight into what is especially human in man’s nature, and elucidates the specific human situation.
Human Ecology:
One aspect of the critical revolution in the mid- 1960s was the revival of Human Ecology, the application of ecological concepts to the study of the relations between people and their physical and social environment. It was a logical extension of the system of thought and the techniques of investigation developed in the study of man.
Reacting to the contention of Eyre and Jones (1966) that human ecology was aimed to launch a deliberate assault on the quantitative revolution, Stoddard attempted to remove and/or reconcile the confusion by his translation of human ecology into systems analysis.
It is this focus on the location of people within the wider ecosystem that has characterised most recent studies in geography. However, Chorley (1973) finds the traditional ecological model inadequate, because human geography is no simple extension of biogeography. To him, the ecological model may fail as a supposed key to the general understanding of the relations between modern society and nature, because it casts social man in too subordinate and ineffectual a role.
It is because of time-space geography of Hagerstrand that human ecology received explicit recognition in the contemporary geographic studies. He defined his theoretical system as ‘space-time ecology’. His so-called ‘web model’ of space-time interaction should, in principle, be applicable to all aspects of biology from plants to animals to people. Its central subject matter, in fact, is to incorporate certain essential biotic and ecological predicates within human geography and to bridge the gap between biological and human ecology.
Holt-Jenson (1981) argues that those who describe geography as human ecology have often defined the concept too narrowly and have presented studies of man’s relationships to his environment as if it only encompasses man’s relationship with nature and not to his total physical and social environment.
Kirk (1963) described the geographical environment in terms which may possibly provide a useful starting point for a discussion of systems in which both ecological and social science theories and concepts may be relevant.
Essay # 4. Welfare Geography:
One of the distinct consequences of the ‘critical revolution’ in the contemporary human geography was the emergence/development of Welfare Geography in the 1970s. It is an approach to human geography that stresses on questions of inequality.
The welfare approach emerged from the radical reaction to the quantitative and model-building emphasis of the 1960s, which was thought to be insufficiently concerned with contemporary problems. It was developed as a possible reaction to the positivist/spatial science tradition.
During the 1960s, a lot of research was reported, under the general title of factorial ecologies, but only in the 1970s was the factorial ecology set of procedures adapted to the task of mapping social welfare on any significant scale.
A movement towards the welfare approach in the contemporary human geography was in fact heralded by D. M. Smith and P. L. Knox. Smith’s work, The Geography of Social Well-being in the United States (1973) was prepared in the light of American social indication movement and the growing belief there that gross national product (GNP) and national income are not necessarily direct measures of the quality of life in its broadest sense.
His aim was to initiate the collection and dissemination of territorial social indication, to point out the extent of discrimination by place of residence which occurs in the United States. Knox (1975) stated that it was a fundamental objective for geography to map social and spatial variations in the quality of life, both as an input to planning procedures and as a means of monitoring policies aimed at improving welfare.
Smith and Knox set forth the tradition of the welfare approach in geography in an organised manner. As Chisholm stated, their works represented the geographer as a ‘delver’ and ‘dovetailer’, as a provider of information on which more equitable social planning could be based.
A number of such works, suggesting spatial policies for social improvements, were done in the 1970s. These works carried forward human geography towards ‘welfare’ issues such as poverty,
hunger, discrimination, crime, medical care, racial tension and access to social services. This corresponded to a major shift in societal concern, from narrow economic criteria of development to broader aspects of the quality of life.
The basis of the welfare approach is in ‘who gets what, where and how’. The present states of society, with respect to ‘who gets what and where’ may be represented by extension of the abstract formulation of welfare economics, and the practical objective is to give it empirical substance. The welfare approach in geography requires the development of social indication for the empirical identification of social inequality and injustice in territorial distribution.
This may combine particular elements of social well-being in a composite measure. The method in welfare geography essentially appears to be descriptive, because descriptive research provides a basis for evaluation of social well-being. However, the early preoccupation with descriptive research in welfare geography has now given way to more process-oriented work on the question of how inequality arises.
Although originally proposed as an alternative framework for human geography, the welfare approach has now been merged with other lines of inquiry within geography directed towards the fundamental problems of inequality.
Implicit in welfare approach is a recognition that the issues in question extend beyond the limits of single discipline, and in fact render-disciplinary boundaries increasingly irrelevant. The welfare approach logically requires a holistic social perspective. Welfare geography attempts to make human geography more relevant to contemporary social problem.
Essay # 5. Radical Geography:
‘Whereas welfare geography works in principle within the framework of existing economic and social system, radical geography which has been established more recently, calls for both revolutionary theory and revolutionary practice’.
Radical geography appears to be an outcome of a ‘new critical revolution’ in the contemporary human geography, which seemed to have occurred largely as a result of the critiques of positivist/spatial science tradition in human geography.
As a holistic, revolutionary science, Marxism provides a film theoretical base for the radical movement in geography. Marxism offers an opportunity to develop an integrated comprehension of reality as a whole. To Harvey (1973), Marxist theory provides the key to understanding capitalist production from the position of those not in controls of the means of production—an enormous threat to the power structure of the capitalist structure. It not only provides an understanding of the origin of the present system, with its many-faceted inequalities, but also propounds alternative practices which would avoid such inequalities.
The Marxist theory renounced that the scientific laws of society are eternal. This view sharply contrasted with the claim of positivist science that scientific laws are universal in space and time. Economic laws are not eternal laws of nature, but historical laws appear and disappear. Society has inbuilt conflicts in it which tend to resolve themselves by change both in practice and in theory.
Science and scientific development, according to the Marxist theory, must be understood in relation to social reality, To Harvey (1973), the essential difference between positivism and Marxism is that positivism simply seeks to understand the world, whereas Marxism seeks to change it.
For Peet (1977), the Marxist science begins with a material analysis of society, proceeds through a critique of capitalist control of the material base of society and proposes solutions in terms of social ownership of that material base.
The growing disillusionment in the American society, partly as a result of the Vietnam War, social inequalities and injustice, racial tension, and the unresponsive attitude of the authority to the needs of the under-privileged, on the one hand, and the Marxist theory, on the other hand, formed a broad symbiosis for radical geography.
However, according to Peet (1977), radical geography developed largely as a negative reaction to the established disciplines, a reaction which was initially formulated within existing methods of positivism. By the early 1970s, the critique however, had developed a strong Marxist base, aiming to create a radical science, which seeks to explain not only what is happening, but also to prescribe revolutionary change. A journal of radical geography—Antipode was launched in 1969 at Clark University.
The first step in the development of a mature radical practice of geography was the emergence of a liberal viewpoint. This was an attempt to find more socially appropriate uses for the existing techniques and theories, and yet to maintain the basic ideas and values of the social system. When geographers began to question the ideology underlying the existing geographic models, they moved into the critique stage of development. Next came the extraction of elements-problems.
Failure on the part of the liberal geographers to offer meaningful solutions to the major socioeconomic crisis in the United States prompted Harvey (1973) to offer a revolutionary theory, thereby overthrowing the current paradigm.
The immediate task, according to him, is nothing more than the self-conscious and aware construction of a new paradigm for social geographic thought through a deep and profound critique of our existing analytical constructs. The new paradigm would be built on a Marxist base, and it would achieve social reforms through the education process. The benefit of Marxist theory was that it can handle two crucial issues that positivist theory cannot—increase injustice, and heightened economic and social instability.
However, Peet (1977) has argued that the early ‘radical’ work by geographers in the late 1960s was liberal in its attitude. David Harvey in his book Social Justice and the City (1973) made a major contribution to the case for a Marxist- inspired, materialist theory development within geography. Peet also moved to a Marxist position replacing his earlier paper on poverty by a Marxist interpretation, based on the assumption that inequality is inherent in the capitalist mode of production.
As a mode of analysis, Marxism is a variant of the philosophy of structuralism which identifies three levels of analysis:
(a) The level of appearance or the super-structure;
(b) The level of processes, or the infrastructure; and
(c) The level of imperatives, or the deep structure.
Marxism has a materialist base. It argues that the infrastructure comprises a set of economic processes and most Marxist work concentrates on the processes operating within the capitalist mode of production. Marxist analysis seeks to identify the processes operating in the infrastructure and to relate them to the pattern in the super-structure. In human geography, this means deriving general theories of historical materialism that will account for particular patterns.
Marxist structuralism can also be presented as a variant of the realist philosophy of science which seeks to relate the contents of an empirical world to a set of infrastructural determinants—economic processes.
The Marxist/radical approach in geography has four basic components:
(1) The first is the critique of positivist spatial science and behavioural geography, and of humanistic geography.
(2) The second is to provide general theoretical frameworks, within which empirical work can be set.
(3) Thirdly, there is work that seeks to establish how individuals act within the structural imperative.
(4) And finally, there is detailed empirical work that seeks to understand particular aspects of the subject matter of human geography within the structuralist framework.
The radical geographers, with their concern for social values and political action, have rejected the traditional concept of geography. Although the radicals generally remain interested in the human/ environmental and spatial relationships, they spurn the systems of theory and methodology that are viewed as providing only partial accounts of reality and as serving the interests of a select social group or class.
Most radical geographers accept geography as a legitimate field of study and feel that it has much to offer in finding solution to the world problems. The radical geographer’s aim is the alteration of the operating societal processes by changing the relations of production.
Since radical geography is purely an American enterprise, it had no academic recognition in the former Soviet Union where its desirability and viability was doubted for not having a good understanding of Marxist-Leninist thought.
Though critical revolution in geography occurred side by side with the quantitative revolution in the 1960s and the early 1970s, as a possible reaction to the positivist spatial science tradition, but recent studies in humanistic geography, behavioural geography, time space geography, human ecology, welfare geography and radical geography reveal that there are some attempts towards some ‘revaluation’ of the positivist approach.
It is equally important to note that in geography, paradigms or rather schools of thought have not succeeded each other as Kuhn’s model suggests, but, to a large extent, continue to exist in parallel, whilst the new schools slowly absorb the older ones leaving some former contradiction to linger on within the new structure.
There is little evidence either of large-scale disciplinary consensus for any length of time about the merits of a particular approach or any of the revolutions that have been entirely consummated. Certainly the quantitative and theoretical developments followed by the critical and neo-critical revolutions have had a major impact, but there were many residuals of earlier paradigms. The failure to fit Kuhn’s model to contemporary trends in human geography leads to the conclusion that the model is irrelevant to this social science and perhaps to social science in general.