If all the World Were Cedar Rapids or Spokane—Still!

Abstract

Back in the halcyon days of the 1960s—for those of us with lives and memories stretching that far back—urban geography was changing fast: indeed for some of us it was entirely new. 2 The stimuli for those changes came from a few centers where exciting work was being done. All of them were in the United States and many were reporting theory-driven, quantitative, empirical work conducted on a small number of case study areas. Just as much of what we had learned about the sociology of American urban areas was derived from work on Chicago, so our new appreciation of urban geography drew on a few places—such as Cedar Rapids and Spokane. Over recent years, we have been reminded (or told for the first time!) about the excitement of those years through a series of papers given at special sessions organized at AAG Annual Meetings by Jim Wheeler and Brian Berry and then (in most cases) published in this journal. They have been followed by others, dealing with later decades. As a body of recollections, they are valuable source materials for those of us interested in the history of our discipline and its subdisciplines, providing information and insights that might otherwise soon be lost to posterity. We now have four such collections: “Urban geography in the 1960s” in Volume 22, No. 6 (2001), based on papers presented at the New York City AAG meetings; “Urban geography in the 1970s” in Vol. 23, No. 5 (2002), based on papers presented at the Los Angeles meetings; and “Urban geography in the 1980s” and “Urban geography in the 1990s” in Vol. 24, No. 4 and Vol. 24, No. 5 (2003), respectively, based on papers presented at the New Orleans meetings. But there is a problem. In effect and with very few exceptions, the conference sessions and the subsequent papers concentrate on North American urban geography but their titles, both on the journal’s contents pages and for most of the individual pieces, suggest that they are wider than that, covering the entire subdiscipline rather than how it has been practiced in two countries (with the emphasis very much on one of those). It is implicit throughout all four sets of papers that American geographers dominated urban geography not only in the 1950s and 1960s, when they probably did, but in the following decades