II.

Historical Development

Human geography began to emerge as a distinct subject area within geography as a whole towards the end of the 19th century. This was a time when the first geography departments were beginning to open in universities and geographers were looking to establish the subject as a reputable academic discipline with a distinct approach and methodology. In particular, they were seeking to overcome geography’s image as being, through its identification with exploration, merely the handmaid of imperial expansion and a repository of travellers’ tales that had hindered its acceptance as an academic discipline for most of the previous century.

The early studies of human beings in relationship to places tended to follow one of two approaches. The first was through regional geography, which though distinct from human geography was very closely associated with it in the early years. Regional geographers sought to identify regions with a character of their own that would distinguish them from other regions, and to study the factors giving rise to such regional variations. For many geographers, like Richard Hartshorne in the United States, the development of regional geography was important because it provided a uniquely geographical object of study, and because it provided a framework for synthesizing the study of human and physical aspects of geography, without imputing any particular directionality. For these and various other reasons, regional geography in a variety of guises formed the basis of most geographical teaching, particularly in Europe, during the first half of the 20th century.

The second approach developed by some early geographers, notably in the United States, was environmental determinism, or simply determinism. The physical environment played an important role in regional geography, for example the soil and climate obviously affect the type of agriculture practised, while the presence of large coal deposits might have an important effect on the location of industrial activity. Determinists, however, elevated the role of the environment to a dominant one. Influenced particularly by the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin, they argued that physical conditions determined not only the activities carried out by people but the nature of the people themselves. The German geographer Friedrich Ratzel is considered to have originated the idea of environmental determinism, but it was taken furthest by several American geographers, notably Ellen Churchill Semple and Ellsworth Huntington, who argued that the physical environment affected the character of a people as well. 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, an influential figure in regional and human geography in France or H. J. Fleure in Britain evolved the concept of environmental possibilism, in which the environment constrains 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 the first half of the 20th century, separate studies of the physical and human aspects of regions had led to the development of systematic geography. This approach involved the development of sub-disciplines within geography so that, for example, economic, social, and political geography began to form areas of study in their own right. As the various sub-disciplines of human geography evolved they also subdivided as greater and greater specialization occurred. For example, economic geography divided into industrial and agricultural geography. However, even though greater and greater specialization was occurring, the essential elements of geography remained much the same, and during the 1930s and early post-war years, there was a period of some stability in the evolution of the subject.

This stability gradually disintegrated in the 1950s and 1960s as new pressures developed, linked to geography’s generally low reputation as a science. Criticisms were increasingly levelled at regional geography for being based purely on description and focusing on the unique aspects of regions at the expense of developing general theories. The systematic branches of human geography had made more attempts to develop useful generalizations but were still seen as not having the academic respectability of other social sciences, like economics or psychology. In particular, it was felt, human geography was being hampered by its lack of a scientific, theoretical basis. These criticisms led to the rise of a new approach to human geography that rapidly came to be the dominant methodology.

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 (simplified versions of reality) 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, say, physics has laws and can predict events subject to those laws. Secondly, the focus of the new methodology was location. In this sense, location refers to the position of phenomena in space and the interactions between them. Hence, this approach to human geography came to be known as locational analysis or spatial analysis. Because of the central importance of models and mathematical techniques in the new methodology, the changes during this period are often dubbed the quantitative revolution, although the description is not strictly accurate.

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. Such an area is known as an isotropic plain.

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, and most of whom were German; their work was first translated into English at this time. The most influential of the models developed by these early researchers include: 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 proposed by Homer Hoyt (1939) and Harris and Ullman (1945); and 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 in locational analysis tended to focus at first on empirical work to refine and provide exemplars of the above 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 of analysis.

Although physical geographers also adopted modelling and quantitative techniques at this time, the focus of human geography on locational analysis meant that the long-standing trend towards separation of the two aspects of geography, which Regional Geography had attempted to overcome, was accelerated. For the first time human geography became divorced from the physical environment. The separation was most marked in the United States, but was also to be found in Europe, notably in the United Kingdom. Even so, many geographers, especially human geographers, felt that the new approach provided the discipline with a unique field of study capable of replacing regional geography: spatial science. The methodology of spatial science was shared with other sciences, and it was therefore as rigorous as they were, but the spatial element meant that geography could be distinguished from them in a way that, say, an earlier transport geographer could not readily be distinguished from a transport economist.

The use of models in geography was initially mainly criticized because of the absence of any environmental element. A more telling criticism of locational analysis models, however, relates to their dependence on the assumptions of Neo-Classical economic theories, and particularly on the existence of a totally “rational being”, whose decisions are entirely determined by economic rationality (see Economics, History of: Neo-Classical Economics). Thus, the least-cost journey is always undertaken, the cheapest goods or services always purchased. Unlike environmental factors, which were ignored, the rational being was an essential ingredient of locational analysis. One result of the criticism of locational analysis 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. Such an emphasis demanded that the motivations of locational decision-makers were examined. 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.

Criticisms of locational analysis, however, continued mainly because it was too scientific and impersonal. Even within behavioural geography the place of people, their feelings, and their aspirations was not a consideration. At the same time, during the later 1960s and into the 1970s 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 greater attention was being paid to inequalities in life, and to what came to be known as social justice. The influence of these developments on many, particularly young, human geographers led to changes in the evolution of the discipline that have continued to the present.