Social Geography

I

Introduction

Social Geography, sub-discipline of geography, especially of human geography, that is broadly concerned with the social meanings attached to different places and with analysing the spatial structures that give rise to different social relations across space. Defining social geography is problematic because no single or universally accepted definition exists, reflecting the variety both of issues tackled and of theories and methodologies employed by social geographers. Despite this, most contemporary social geographers agree that what unites them is a desire to study groups of people who share social experiences, notably according to “race”, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability/disability, and age; to explore the spatial structuring of social relations; to understand the processes that create social inequality; and to reassert the importance of “space” in social theory.

II

Historical Development

The roots of contemporary social geography are to be found in two main bodies of work: the first rural; the second urban. Studies of how people live in rural areas were developed by the “French School” of geography, exemplified by the work of Paul Vidal de la Blache in the 1920s, which focused on the interactions between human beings and the physical environment. Early social geographers attempted to explain the patterns they identified in their studies of rural life in terms of the natural resources and environmental conditions found in different places. The emphasis was thus on studying how factors such as climate, topography, and soils could affect the way groups of people in particular places live.

Studies of how people live in urban areas were grounded in work carried out at the Chicago School of Human Ecology, the so-called Chicago School of sociology, exemplified by the work of Ernest Burgess and Robert Park in the 1920s. Influenced by the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and by the work of plant ecologists, Park developed a model of urban growth that drew on an analogy between human communities and plant communities. According to Park, urban growth could be conceived of as a series of invasions by different class-based and ethnically based groups, competing for limited space. Dominant groups would become clustered in the most desirable parts of the city. Spatial segregation would occur according to class, income, “race”, and language. Burgess’s concentric zone theory of urban growth provided a model of the city as divided into five concentric rings: a central business district encircled successively by zones of factories and warehouses, low-income housing, middle-income housing, and commuter suburbs. This model influenced the work of urban social geographers until the late 1960s, when the growth of positivist scientific methodology and the use of computers enabled a more sophisticated quantitative analysis of urban structures. Throughout the latter parts of the 1960s and the early 1970s, urban social geographers applied quantitative techniques to analyse urban residential patterns, and identified three main components of residential segregation: class, “race”, and household structure.

The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, such as those for civil rights, women’s equality, and “gay pride”, also engendered in human geography generally a much more radical approach. In social geography this was expressed by a concern with social justice and human welfare. Social geography, like other sub-disciplines of human geography, quickly became politicized, drawing on Marxist theories to explain social structures. These developments led to social geographers becoming increasingly concerned with analysing the relationship between power and inequality in society, and with trying to understand the social patterns that arise from the distribution of scarce resources. The work in the 1970s of the American geographer Ray Pahl on “managerialism” was influential in establishing how the distribution of, and access to, resources within cities, 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, notably his book Social Justice and the City (1973), which 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 social 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 as radical geographers were concerned with analysing the social patterns and processes rising from the distribution of and access to scarce resources, a more humanistic approach was also emerging, concerned with the effect of human subjectivity in the use of space. Social 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 research methods by social geographers. Following the work of David Ley in Philadelphia’s black inner city, many social geographers began to take an ethnographic approach to research based on first-hand fieldwork.

III

Research Methods

In the early development of social geography, methods included the observation and recording of detailed description and mapping, and the analysis of secondary data. In recent years social geographers have also used more qualitative techniques, such as applied factor analysis and principal components analysis, as well as more traditional sociological ones, such as questionnaires and interviews. Contemporary researchers also utilize techniques used by cultural geographers, such as the analysis of various forms of “text”: the media, popular culture, literature, and film. Increasingly important data sources and analytical tools for all human geographers are geographical information systems (GIS; see Cartography: Geographical Information Systems). These are special-purpose databases in which all the information is linked to a spatial reference system, and which integrate various kinds of data such as aerial and satellite images; census material; information about land use, such as the location of industrial and residential zones; or the distribution of health facilities. GIS can be used to help analyse, for example, the relationship between the spatial distribution of particular industries and of low- and middle-income populations within urban areas.

IV

Current Trends

Since the 1980s social geographers have been increasingly influenced by social theories, including feminism, Structuration, Modernism, and Postmodernism. Furthermore, they have become involved in researching an increasingly broad range of social issues. Contemporary social geographers are thus concerned not just with mapping and explaining the geography of social issues such as racism, crime, gender relations, and housing and health inequalities, but also with examining the role of space in the construction of these issues and analysing the spatial structures that underpin them.

One of the most important recent influences on social geography has come from cultural geography, the sub-discipline of human geography that is concerned, among other things, with understanding how people perceive both places and other people. Current trends suggest that links between the two sub-disciplines will increase, with social geographers becoming increasingly involved in examining the link between the way social groups are culturally constructed and their access to and use of space. Social geographers are drawing on cultural and literary theories to analyse the language and images used to represent different social groups and places, in order to understand how dominant groups exercise power through culture and ideology. Thus added to social geography’s traditional concern with “race” and class, and its more recent concern with gender, is a plethora of new work on the geography of “other” social groups, such as homosexual men and lesbians, children, and disabled people, which addresses the link between the way such groups are socially and culturally constructed and their use of space.