Modern geography and contemporary reality

Abstract

In the last generation geography has been increasingly defined as the study of human organisation in space and as such correlative with the resulting spatial organisation. Geography, which in the 1950s was still conceived of as a natural science, has since affirmed itself as a social science. The transformation begun thirty years ago was not effected without clashes. In the apparent disorder of the 1970s three epistemological families can be discerned (Gregory 1978). Some conceived of Geography as the science of space, as the geometry of human relations. In order to put this conception into practice they mobilised an arsenal of statistical and mathematical methods which have since offered little. The second current, which appeared a little later, was a reaction to the excesses of the first. Can society after all be treated as an object separate from ourselves? Can forms of organisation marked by injustice and inequality be tolerated? From these concerns an orientation which saw itself as fundamentally critical and which in the course of the 1970s increasingly turned to Marxist theory was born. Sometimes Das Kapital was invoked. Sometimes the source of inspiration was the direction taken at the beginning of the century by Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg, and sometimes it was the ideas made popular by Gramsci. The philosophical inspiration generally came from Continental Marxists or Radicals: Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, or Manuel Castells. David Harvey's Social Justice and the City (1993) expresses well the critical spirit and ambitions of the new movement. And by introducing the category of critical science to accompany those of the positive and the hermeneutic sciences, Jurgen Habermas (1968) provided the radicals with the formula they were looking for. He, thus, became the theoretician of a scientific millenarianism which perfectly matched the direction of the radical ambitions. The third current was less confident. It could not claim methodological traditions as old as either positivism or Marxism. It started with a general observation: that the term "social" science was meaningless if human beings, human nature, human experience and the sources of their motivation were not taken into consideration.