Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
mountainous areas produce dispersed forms of settlement and the
plains foster nucleation; desert areas lead to nomadic economies
whereas fertile lowlands produce dense populations and large
clusters. Generalizations of this kind offered some credible
insights but exceptions abounded. As human geographers became
more aware of the discrepancies, they turned towards more
historical and cultural sources of explanation.
The broader way of thinking that evolved in regional studies
recognized that people could modify landscapes: cultural
traditions could persist and strengthen over time; and there
were human conditions that countered and often over-rode
environmental imperatives. In other words, landscape was a
human record as well as a physical artefact. Much of this earlier
human geography was concerned with
regionalism
and the study
of places. In 1939, Richard Hartshorne, a leading American
geographer, published his
Nature of Geography
, in which areal
differentiation, or the study of areas or regions on the Earth's
surface and their causally related differences, was proposed as the
key quality of what geographers did. This rendition of geography,
with its focus on the unique blend of factors that produced
distinctive regions, reigned supreme throughout the middle
decades of the 20th century.
This paradigm came under intense criticism in the 1960s, and
urban geographers were among the main advocates of the need for
change. The established approaches for studying the geography of
towns and cities were accused of being mainly descriptive, lacking
in good measurement techniques, and failing to develop sound
theories. The remedy proposed was spatial science that applied
scientifi c methods to geographical phenomena.
The rise and fall of spatial science
As the new paradigm of spatial science became translated into
human geography, it had several distinctive characteristics
