Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
were those who regarded well-used country parks as fi tting the
description. Again, the mental map of a neighbourhood held
by an elderly person with constraints on his or her mobility
was very different to that of a younger individual. Many people
would use their nearest shopping centre, but some were prepared
to travel further afi eld because they had the personal mobility
and preferred a different venue. Geographers turned to new
sources of information such as works of art and fi ctional writing
for their insights into landscape and place. There were studies
of individual painters and specifi c works that could be used
to examine the changing nature of landscape and landscape
gardening over time. Works of fi ction, such as
The Grapes of
Wrath
and many of the novels of Thomas Hardy, were used as
sources to throw light on contemporary society. This 'subjective'
reaction matured into the
new cultural geography
, and that
warrants further consideration.
Firstly, however, we can identify the second reaction to spatial
analysis, which can be described as structuralism (see box).
Basically structuralism offered a grand theory that explained
both human behaviour and its societal outcomes. A central idea
is that there are powerful forces within society that condition the
kinds of lifestyles that can be followed. Capitalism provided one
such powerful and conditioning force, and it was argued that the
growing problems of disparities of wealth and quality of life within
cities and between societies stemmed from its infl uence. David
Harvey, a British geographer working in the USA and a leading
Marxist scholar, argued that there was a clear disparity between
the sophisticated theoretical and methodological frameworks of
spatial analysis and geographers' ability to say anything really
meaningful about events as they unfolded around them. In other
words, geographers were not grasping the signifi cance of these
major structural forces and were only dealing with the surface
manifestations of a deeper process. Structuralists turned to
Marxist theory and the notion of hidden structures that had a
