Geography

E

The 20th Century: Environmental Determinism and Regions

In seeking to establish a firm basis for the existence of the discipline, geographers at the turn of the century were inevitably influenced by broader developments within the scientific community. In particular, the publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin and the subsequent wider acceptance of his ideas on evolution had a profound influence on their approach to studying the physical and human environments.

Many researchers concerned with the physical environment applied the concept of evolution to the development of landscapes over time, an approach that brought them closer to geologists rather than to other geographers. These early practitioners of what came to be known as geomorphology tended to play down, if not ignore totally, the biological elements of nature, including human beings—encouraging the split between physical and human systematic geography that still characterizes the discipline. This trend, which was strongest in the United States, was possibly not surprising given the fact that many of the leading names in the early development of academic physical geography were geologists by training and many geography departments grew out of geology departments. Probably the most influential name here is the American William Morris Davis. Although he argued for the unifying nature of geography his research and teaching was almost exclusively within the field of geomorphology. He is best known for his development of the “geographical cycle”. This was a model of erosion, first published in 1899, based on the evolution of landscapes through youth and maturity, to old age as a result of the interaction of structure, process, and time. Although criticized at the time and subsequently, the Davisian cycle provided the core focus of physical geography research and teaching in the United States and Britain until the 1940s.

In human geography the main impact of Darwin’s ideas was in terms of approaches to the relationship between people and the environments in which they lived. In particular the concept of evolution was associated with what came to be known as environmental determinism. The German geographer Friedrich Ratzel is generally considered to be the founder of environmental determinism, as well as the founder of modern human geography. In the first volume of his chief work, Anthropogeographie (1882) he broke new ground in demonstrating that cultural as well as natural phenomena could be subject to systematic study. However, he also stressed the extent to which people lived under nature’s laws, and argued that cultural forms were adapted to and determined by the local physical environment. In the second volume, published in 1891 Ratzel modified his views, concentrating more on the historical and cultural background to the distribution of settlement forms and migrations. However, it was the first volume of Anthropogeographie that had the most impact internationally, being taken up particularly by American geographers who in some cases used it as the basis to develop extreme deterministic arguments. Notable among these were Ellen Churchill Semple and Ellsworth Huntington, who argued that the physical environment also affected the character of a people. From such arguments they, and others, derived a number of essentially racist conclusions about peoples from different parts of the world.

In Europe, the leading geographers largely rejected determinism. Nonetheless, the influence of the environment remained very important. Geographers such as Paul Vidal de la Blache, the most influential figure in regional and human geography in France or Herbert J. Fleure in Britain evolved the concept of environmental possibilism, in which the environment influences human activity without determining it, while in return human beings affect the physical environment. The debate between possibilists and determinists was one of the principal characteristics of human geography throughout the early decades of this century. However, by the 1940s, for a variety of reasons, including lack of academic rigour and the rise of Nazism in Germany, which utilized deterministic arguments, environmental determinism had been discredited.

During this period, geographers in Germany, France, and Britain were also developing the idea of the region, seeing in it an analytical approach that by providing a synthesis between the physical and human aspects of the environment was uniquely geographical—and as such an answer to the discipline’s academic critics. In Germany Ferdinand von Richthofen, working at the turn of the century, and, subsequently, Alfred Hettner developed the methodological framework established by Humboldt and Ritter. Both followed Kant in taking a chorological approach, in that they argued that the purpose of systematic geography was to provide an understanding of causal relationships of phenomena in particular areas, and that this understanding was to be expressed in general principles applicable to the interpretation of individual regions. In other words the study of unique phenomena was needed to construct generalizations, or laws, and laws were needed to understand the particular combination of unique phenomena that make up regions. Hettner was particularly concerned about the growing split between human and physical geography. In his monumental work Die Geographie, ihre Geschichte, ihr Wesen, und ihre Methoden (Geography, Its History, Its Nature, and Its Methods; 1927) he argued that the role of geography was to bridge the gap between the human and physical sciences. Through this book and other publications he dominated German geography until the 1940s.

The French geographical tradition is intimately concerned with the work of Paul Vidal de la Blache. His approach reflects two factors. First, in contrast to the geological background of most early US and British academic geographers, his training was in classics and history. Secondly, and again in contrast to the US and British experience, in France the main criticisms of geography as an independent discipline came from historians and sociologists rather than geologists. Vidal de la Blache thus approached geography from its human and cultural aspects. At the same time, however, he emphasized that the natural and human environments were intimately linked, acting upon each other to produce unique genres de vie, or lifestyles, located in distinct regions, or pays. Because of this he believed regional rather than systematic studies were at the core of geography. His theories and methodology were refined and developed by researchers such as Jean Brunhes and Emmanuel de Martonne.

In Britain, Mackinder was a strong proponent of the regional approach. He argued that advances in physical geography had outstripped those in human geography, and that it was only possible to understand the latter in the context of geomorphology and biogeography. He thought this could best be achieved by the study of regions rather than by a systematic approach. Another influential British proponent was Andrew Herbertson who concentrated on the identification of physical regions based on climate and vegetation. He largely excluded people from his influential work on the major natural regions of the world, published in 1905. In contrast, Fleure wrote about human regions. He focused on “lived experience” and emphasized relationships not just between people and environment, but also between different groups of people, defining regions by the types of communities contained within them.

In the United States by the 1920s a growing number of geographers were concerned about both the widening divisions within systematic geography and the inadequacies of environmental determinism. One of the foremost was Carl Sauer who, influenced particularly by the French school of human geography and by the anthropologist Franz Boas, argued for a chorological approach based on the fact that the “area or landscape is the field of geography”. In 1925 he published a famous paper on the morphology of landscape, which marked not only the beginning of the end for determinism, but also the start of the modern concept of landscape geography in the English-speaking world. In addition it represented the beginning of the reintegration of geography in the United States with the wider regional tradition in Europe. The regional approach in the United States was given new impetus in 1939 when Richard Hartshorne published his seminal overview of the discipline: The Nature of Geography: A Critical Survey of Current Thought in the Light of the Past. Influenced by the German geographers, he also viewed geography as a chorological science and reiterated Kant’s idea that geography’s role was the analysis and synthesis of phenomena in space and at a particular time, normally the present. The approach it inspired emphasized empirical studies in contemporary regional analysis, in contrast to Sauer’s concern with the historical and cultural, and finally established regional geography as the predominant approach in the English-speaking world.

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The 1960s: The Quantitative Revolution

Regional geography continued to flourish until the mid-1950s when it suffered from a series of intellectual attacks that resulted in its eclipse as the main approach to the discipline. A new generation of geographers emerged who were keen to turn geography into a true science based on the testing of theories and the construction of laws. The opposition to the traditional approach was spearheaded, in the United States, by Fred Schaefer, who in 1953 published a critique entitled Exceptionalism in Geography. He and others argued that the regional approach, which had become in the United States and Britain characterized mostly by description and very little explanation, was lacking in analysis and scientific rigour. In particular they criticized its emphasis on the uniqueness of each region, which prevented the development of general theories or models. Scientific methods of hypothesis testing and modelling were thus introduced to give geography more scientific respectability. Furthermore, the validity of the concept of the region as a self-contained unit was also challenged. It was argued that regions could no longer be considered separate from the national and international processes of economic development. Urbanization, industrialization, and the greater mobility of people and information had changed old ways of life to such an extent that it had become impossible to demarcate the boundaries of regions.

The systematic branches of geography had made more attempts to develop useful generalizations but were still seen as not having the academic respectability of other sciences. In particular, it was felt that human geography was being hampered by its lack of a scientific, theoretical basis. These criticisms led to the rise of a new approach to geography that rapidly became the dominant methodology, particularly in human geography, and which came to be generally known as the “quantitative revolution”.

The main characteristics of this approach were first, that it was underpinned by logical positivism, a philosophical approach that identifies knowledge with science, and which emphasizes empiricism and verifiability. The resultant methodology, largely borrowed from other disciplines, involved using models and statistical analysis to test and verify hypotheses, with the aim of establishing universal laws and of being able to predict, in the way that physics has laws and can predict events subject to those laws. Secondly, the focus of the new methodology was location, or the position of phenomena in space and the interactions between them. Hence, this approach to human geography came to be known as locational or spatial analysis. Many geographers, especially human geographers, felt that this new approach provided the discipline with a unique field of study capable of replacing regional geography: spatial science.

In contrast to earlier approaches to human geography, locational analysis ignored the natural environment. In the models constructed to simplify the complexities of real life and to allow underlying processes to be analysed and understood, the Earth was considered to be uniform, that is, flat and with no differentiating features to make one part of the surface more attractive for human activity than another. Most of the initial work utilizing such models was carried out in the United States, where locational analysis was spearheaded. It was largely inspired by the work of earlier researchers, few of whom were geographers. The most influential of these were the agricultural land use model proposed by the German landowner Johann Heinrich von Thünen as long ago as 1826; the urban development model first developed by the American sociologist Ed Burgess in 1924, and the subsequent modifications to it; the central place theory model of settlement location developed by the German geographer Walter Christaller in 1933, and the similar but more complex model developed by the German economist August Lösch in 1940. Although many researchers tended to focus at first on empirical work to refine these models, much original work of lasting importance was also undertaken. Among the best known are the work of Torsten Hägerstrand in Sweden on diffusion theory and that of Peter Haggett in Britain on central place theory and systems analysis.

Physical geographers also adopted a much more quantitative approach at this time, based round two main trends. The first was morphometry, or the quantitative study of the shape (morphology) of landforms based on detailed field and laboratory measurements and the development of models of the basic physical principles and relationships between form and process. This trend drew particularly on the work of civil engineers. The second was the application of systems analysis to the study of landforms, such as drainage basins. In this approach, derived from the general systems theory developed by the biologist L. Von Bertalanffy in the 1950s, a system is a set of interrelated elements and processes that (in the case of an open system) exchanges energy with its surroundings and through which materials flow; in a closed system only energy is exchanged.

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Contemporary Trends

Physical geography has continued to use more quantitative methods with an emphasis on form and process that has come to be known as the functional approach. The essentially scientific nature of this approach has allowed the development of models that have become increasingly accurate in terms of the prediction of short-term landform changes over small areas. Efforts are now under way to increase both the spatial scale and time periods covered by the models in an attempt to develop a better understanding of the landscape as a whole.

Within human geography, however, quantitative methods were coming under attack by the early 1970s. The use of models was initially criticized because of the exclusion of the natural environment. A more widespread criticism of locational analysis, however, related to its dependence on the assumptions of neo-classical economic theories generally, and particularly on the existence of a human being whose decisions are entirely determined by economic rationality (see Economics, History of: Neo-Classical Economics). Thus, the cheapest journey is always undertaken, the cheapest goods or services always purchased. The first response to such criticism was the development of new approaches known as behavioural geography, which emphasized the nature of the decision-making process and the role of the decision-maker. The identification of individual preferences, values and, indeed, prejudices assumed great importance in attempts to understand location. Such studies gained greatest prominence in the investigation of industrial location but were not confined to this area.

The criticisms continued, however. In the world at large the growth of the civil rights movement, feminism, and greater interest in the problems of the economically developing countries meant that increasing attention was being paid to social, political, and economic inequalities, and to what became known as social justice. Within human geography this engendered a much more radical approach that drew on Marxist theories. Such radical geographers become increasingly concerned with analysing the relationship between power and inequality in society, and with trying to understand the social, economic, political, and cultural patterns that arise from the distribution of scarce resources. The work in the 1970s of the American geographer Ray Pahl on “managerialism”, for example, was influential in establishing how the distribution of, and access to, resources such as housing and health care is controlled by “urban managers”, such as local authority housing managers and doctors. Also influential was the work of the British geographer David Harvey, then based in the United States. His book Social Justice and the City (1973) examined the functions and structures of urban areas, and how they influence the economic lives of people living in them, especially in the formation of ghettos. Not only was he instrumental, by being one of the first to use Marx’s theories and methodology, in affecting the approach of the new generation of human geographers, his work also encouraged researchers to concentrate on exploring how the distribution of urban facilities and services affected the “poor”.

At the same time other human geographers rejected the quantitative approach as being overly scientific and impersonal. Even within behavioural geography the place of people, their feelings, perceptions, and aspirations were not a consideration. Thus a more humanistic approach emerged, concerned with the effect of human subjectivity in the use of space. Such geographers began to emphasize the importance of understanding the link between the way groups of people perceive space and the way they behave in it. This led to the adoption of more qualitative and subjective approaches. Following the work of David Ley in Philadelphia’s black inner city, many humanistic geographers began to take an ethnographic approach to research based on first-hand fieldwork.

During the past 20 years the separation between human and physical geography has become even more extreme. The two sides, for example, no longer generally talk the same language when it comes to that formerly central geographical concept, space. Most physical geographers still accept the three-dimensional Euclidean view, while for many human geographers it has become a subjective concept, socially and culturally constructed. Within the two branches there has also been such an increase in specialization that many researchers now have more in common with their counterparts in other disciplines than with other geographers. These trends have led a number of geographers to express concern about the future of geography, fearing at the worst that it could cease to exist as a separate academic discipline—with physical geography subsumed within the earth sciences and human geography within the social sciences. To counter this there have been calls for a reassessment of and re-emphasis on geography’s role as a discipline of synthesis—with place replacing space as the focus for understanding the interactions between the human and physical environments, or rather between the human world of experience and the physical one of existence. Without such an integrative approach our understanding of problems like environmental degradation, pollution, and climatic change can be only partial and our solutions incomplete.