Space, time and the human being

Peter Gould

Introduction

In some rather deep sense, we are all geogra- phers, historians and philosophers, aware of space and place, of change over time and of our ability to reflect carefully upon the natural and human worlds and how we should conduct ourselves within them. As formal fields of inquiry in schools and universities, geography, history and the social sciences are relatively recent disciplines, since many of their questions were posed and answered previously under the rather spacious intellectual umb- rellas of philosophy and the- ology. But in the same way that the individual physical sciences hived off from natural philosophy at the end of the seventeenth cen- tury, with the biological sciences following in the eighteenth, so the human sciences, including geogra- phy and history, began to

sidered to be under the purview of previously established subjects in the university.

It is worth remembering these origins, grounded in the more holistic thinking that was still possible in an earlier and considerably sim- pler world, in order to acknowledge that all divisions and partitions of human knowledge and inquiry are artificial human constructs. Today we see constantly the emergence of new fields formed by the splitting off of subdisci-

Peter Gould is Evan Pugh Professor of Geography at Penn State University, Uni- versity Park, PA 16802, USA. Author and editor of seventeen books, his con- sistent research theme has been processes of spatial diffusion. One of his most recent books, The Slow Plague, exam- ines, in a style accessible to a lay audi- ence, the spread of AIDS. He has served as a consultant in many countries of Africa, Europe and North and South America.

define themselves as distinct areas of inquiry in the nineteenth century. It is then that we find separate departments forming in universities, inevitably in some tension with established fields like philosophy, theology, medicine and jurisprudence. Such tensions eventually abated, but we should not be surprised that they arose. After all, since everything exists in space and time, it is perfectly possible to have a geogra- phy and a history of almost anything that attracts human curiosity, including matters con-

- plines - which sometimes strengthen into new disci- plines in their own right. But if modern intellectual life sometimes seems like a tree constantly sending out finer and more specialized twigs, it is also possible to view it through another metaphor - that of the braided stream, with its wat- ers constantly flowing from one channel to another. Many of the most important and difficult problems today demand the skills and per-

spectives of a number of disciplines connected by such cross-braiding of individual channels, and if this is true of the larger intellectual realm, it is also true within the traditionally eclectic field of geography.

A physical-human dichotomy?

Scholars in other traditions, when viewing con- temporary geography from the outside, are often

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puzzled that physical geography and human geography can exist side by side. Their often unspoken assumption is that a science dealing strictly with the physical-biological world of things, where strong regularities may well be labelled laws leading to predictions, cannot be compatible with a human world where regu- larities, if they can be found at all, never lead to predictions which cannot be obviated by those about whom the predictions are made. So clear has such a separation seemed at times, that even geography departments have divided into two curricula, or have sloughed off the physical component to adjacent earth sciences like geology and meteorology. Nevertheless, two trends countering such a drastic separation appear increasingly strong today.

The first is a much heightened awareness on the part of scholars and laypeople that the human and natural worlds are often intimately interconnected. That the latter can affect the former is obvious every time a tectonic plate slips, a hurricane lashes a coast, rains and spring meltwaters overflow riverbanks, or warm water slops from the West Pacific to cover the cold upwelling waters off Peru - the well-known El Nifio effect. Increasing evidence indicates that Sahelian drought is in part caused by global teleconnections originating in the ‘hot box’ of the Pacific. But the causal arrow is not just one-way and may involve very complex chains of events. Physical effects on the human world may be exacerbated by human intervention, not least those interventions displaying a certain amount of hubris. Huge levees are built to con- tain all but the ‘200-year flood’, but the Missis- sippi River takes no notice of such computed probabilities and inundates vast built-up areas constructed on its flood plain. The Volta dam reduces sediment flow so much that the sea now eats into some of Ghana’s most fertile areas of food production. The Aswan dam of Egypt halts fertility-renewing floods, wipes out the protein-rich fisheries of the Eastern Mediter- ranean and uses much of the electric energy to produce artificial fertilizers. Moreover, the sheer pressure of the human presence impacts with ever greater causal strength upon the physical world, whether it be local groundwater pol- lution, the cutting and burning of tropical rain- forests with their extraordinarily delicate eco- systems, or the increase in gaseous emissions

leading to global warming and ozone holes. The human being and the natural world appear increasingly inseparable and therefore should be studied together.

But there is also a second trend countering any drastic separation of these worlds. Some of the most fruitful concepts for studying the human world in space and time have come from drawing analogies from the physical world, especially the formal field of classical physics. As theoretical and quantitative approaches have become increasingly prominent in geography, particularly with the extraordinary increases in size and speed of computing, so many fruit- ful analogical perspectives have emerged into greater prominence. Concepts generally con- sidered under the rubric of ‘gravity models’ underpin many formal approaches to spatial interaction, diffusion, the daily journey-to-work and even global transmission of diseases and their principles may be derived directly from analogous theories of entropy maximization (Wilson and Bennett, 1985). Many formal math- ematical models employed in the physical sciences appear to have direct and illuminating applicability in the human realm. The ethical dangers of thus reifying the human world, of treating human beings en mame as ‘things’, have been noted frequently, although any theor- etical or collective view must inevitably reify if it is prepared to make statements beyond individual idiosyncracy.

Thus, for the contemporary geographer, any intellectual dislocation between physical and human geography is more apparent than real. Indeed, many undergraduate curricula these days purposefully supplement their basic teach- ing in physical and human geography with intermediate courses focusing specifically on human-nature interactions. An older theme in geographic inquiry, one that fell into justified ill repute for its extreme determinism, has refreshed and renewed itself in light of newer global perspectives, supplemented by vastly increased analytical possibilities brought about by remote-sensing, geographical information systems and supercomputing power. Thus, our first cut to give us a perspective on geography today considers physical geography. Its treat- ment must inevitably be concise, even super- ficial in a proper sense, because it is less com- plex than the human side of the discipline. Such

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a statement, if it is not to be radically misunder- stood, must be carefully qualified.

Contemporary physical geography

To say that physical geography is ‘less com- plex’ in no way minimizes the difficulty of many of the problems it presents. It is simply to note that, in general, the formal framework for theorizing about physical processes, whether terrestrial, atmospheric or oceanic, is still New- tonian physics. In general, the framework appears to serve its practitioners well at what we might call the meso-scales at which earth processes are examined. Such studies require neither the microworld of quantum mechanics nor the relativistic conceptions appropriate to astronomical scales. For example, all global cir- culation models employ differential equations that would be perfectly familiar to late eight- eenth-century mathematicians, the only differ- ence being that the consequences of their inter- relationships on a global grid are now com- putable to levels of finite observability.

At the same time, there is a growing awareness that traditional continuum mathemat- ics, while sometimes useful as a language for very general theorizing, may bear little relation to our always finite computing abilities. This is particularly true when attempting to compute dynamic models over long stretches of time, stretches that may range from a few years in an epidemiological model, to centuries or mil- lennia in atmospheric, oceanic or terrestrial models, some of which are linked together. Such realizations have opened up new possi- bilities for thinking in physical geography, but have inevitably produced some intellectual fads. For example, catastrophe theory has made us much more sensitive to the fact that small changes in critical values can flip-flop a large system from one stable mode to another. More- over, we have known since experiments with atmospheric models that our always limited abilities to measure, when combined with digital computing, will always accumulate error terms which eventually reduce purported predictions to random chaos. Chaos theory is of the greatest importance when it leads us to reflect upon our mortal finitude and human limitations, but not

when it leads to silliness, or even hubris. For example, artificial terrains, particularly when enhanced by skillful computer graphics, may resemble terrestrial or lunar landscapes, but any earth scientist worth her salt knows perfectly well that the Himalayas are not the output of a Mandelbrot set. Similarly, there are other earth scientists, whose grasp on the classical scientific paradigm of prediction is difficult to dislodge, who spend large amounts of time and money looking for ‘strange attractors’, regions of a state space for which a dynamic system may have a certain predilection. Even if such an attractive region can be delimited, it still serves no useful, i.e. predictive purpose, since, by def- inition, the system is still computably chaotic.

That the criterion of utility should be invoked for research in physical geography and adjacent fields should come as no surprise in these days of global warming, in which the role of the human use of fossil fuels appears to play a part. The issue of global warming has become highly politicized, both nationally and inter- nationally, and is now the focus of a large academic industry, with large sums of money, and much personal prestige, at stake. Its con- flicts could well become the focus of a penetrat- ing study of science as a socially negotiated enterprise, rather than an ideal endeavour seek- ing the truth in all its purity. Prudence dictates that the topic be taken seriously, even though evidence marshalled by one side or another may be highly selective. For example, to compute a half-degree centigrade rise in global tempera- tures over the past 100 years from thousands of observations around the world, one must have a great deal of faith in the accuracy of those original observations. As for the atmospheric circulation models, which come in half a dozen varieties, they are all so mechanistically simple and crude in their specifications that doubling the carbon dioxide content, an act of simulation that has almost achieved the status of the sacred, is bound to produce a heating effect. That we appear to be at the top of a Milankov- itch cycle, one that we can record repeatedly over the past 400,000 years from oxygen iso- tope ratios (Imbrie, 1985), seems to be dis- counted, as is the fact that basic components are either wished away, or given great precision when only order of magnitude estimates are really available. For example, the global carbon

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The Geographer: painting by David Teniers the Younger. Frankfort MuseudRoger-Viollet.

cycle, the revolving door both generating and fixing carbon in its many forms, has to be able to balance the global book made up of atmospheric, oceanic and terrestrial components. The role of the latter has only been estimated with great uncertainty, and such error terms inevitably impinge in still unknown ways on estimates made for the atmospheric and oceanic portions of the global budget.

As for the possible human consequences, such research, which must inevitably be highly speculative to the point of futuristic scenario writing, has no foreseeable utility in the sense that anything can conceivably be done with the results. Any effects over the next hundred years are irreversible, and this minimum impact time already represents four human generations. Such speculations and scenarios have no meaning for the vast majority of farmers in the world, whether a huge agribusiness in the United States, or a peasant farmer in Pakistan or Chad,

for any possible consequences will be so slow that they will be beyond most finite perceptions.

Even in an inevitably selective review, to imply that all physical geography focuses on global warming would be quite misleading. The causal arrow in human-nature relations appears more and more prominently to point from the former to the latter and the impact time may extend far into the future. We recall that the half-life of plutonium 239, 7.5 kilogrammes of which could kill every human on earth if effec- tively distributed, is 24,000 years, or roughly five times the portion of human history since the pyramids of Egypt were constructed. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, in an exemplary publication (1979), has documented the geo- graphic distribution of numerous forms of can- cer, many of which raise very strong hypotheses of environmental cause, especially those resulting from industrial pollution. In North America, it becomes more and more difficult,

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which means more and more expensive, to pro- duce public water supplies that are not contami- nated by chemicals or bacteria in the aquifers or other water sources. Many European rivers can no longer sustain aquatic life, and mam- mals, such as the Baltic seal and the otter, are being wiped out by PCBs and other organo- chlorides. Physical geographers have enor- mously important roles to play in environmental education at all levels and at all geographic scales. Apart from long and costly court actions, normally beyond most citizens, education is the only road to a world in environmental balance and health.

Contemporary human geography

In contrast to physical geography, where research is generally conducted under the same broad and classical paradigm, human geogra- phy, and its informing and renewing research, is characterized by a large number of very dif- ferent perspectives which may appear to the uninitiated as a ‘cacophony of fission’. Such an initial impression would be a mistake, however, for both the broad humanistic and specialized scientific traditions provide perspectives on the human condition that are seldom captured by other fields. Even these broad categories of humanistic and scientific may be misleading if they are construed too narrowly. The research of many geographers may be driven by humanistic concern, yet make genuine claims to scientific procedures and methodologies. The complexity of human life in space and time is only distorted by a too rigid insistence on a division between the humanities and sciences, a division which obscures the simple fact that science is always a human endeavour. It is impossible in such a review as this to limn all perspectives, demon- strate connections between them, or even to do justice to those selected. However, the refer- ences, most of which have extensive biblio- graphies, should provide rewarding starting points for future explorations.

Humanistic perspectives

The humanistic tradition would certainly include those attempts by geographers to reflect care-

fully on the intellectual tradition and develop- ment of their own field, including their own personal experiences and development (Haggett, 1990). In the past decade or so, there has been a remarkable change in such studies from the previous hagiographic, and too often defensive, writings trying to delimit intellectual bound- aries. Part of the change is undoubtedly due to the greater maturity and sophistication gained by a thorough grounding in adjacent areas of intellectual history, particularly of science and philosophy. It is difficult now to consider the development of geographic thought as some- thing occurring in isolation and as a smooth progression along some path leading to geo- graphic truth from which the young must be taught not to digress. It is seen increasingly as a contested enterprise and always very much a child of its times (Livingstone, 1992). A second and quite marked characteristic of virtually all human geographic writing is its openness to other fields, and a rather amused disdain for those who would continue to define delimiting boundaries which are seen as simply irrelevant in today’s world. Whether drawing upon, or contributing to, such diverse fields as literary theory (Barnes and Duncan, 1992), language (Pred, 1990), aesthetic stances (Tuan, 1993), intellectual history (Glacken, 1967), or cultural studies (Watts, 1991 ; Western, 1992), geo- graphic writing is open in its willingness to draw upon other traditions and confident it can provide perspectives from its own spatial heri- tage to contribute to a larger enterprise of understanding.

One of the most remarkable developments in the humanistic tradition has been the renewal (one is tempted to say renaissance) of cultural, social and historical geography. This is an extremely complex development, in which the braided stream analogy is worth recalling to emphasize the many informing and influential connections internal to the disciplinary develop- ment. There has always been a richly main- tained tradition of historical geography (Meinig, 1986-93, and many geographers, working over a very broad spectrum of inquiry, would note that any study failing to acknowledge changes over historical time may have an unsatisfactory feel to it. What one can only call a spatio- temporal fascination to know how things were, and how they came to be the way they are,

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Representation of El Niiio. Early in the nineteenth century, fishermen noticed the appearance in certain years of abnormally warm weather off the Pacific coast of South America, usually shortly after Christmas. That local phenomenon is part of a very large and complex one known as the El Nifio Southern Oscillation (ENSO), with interactions between the atmosphere, the ocean, and land surfaces. Its magnitude varies from year to year, and when it is particularly large, as in 1983, it can have devastating effects, reversing ocean currents and leading to drought and bushfire in Australia on the other side of the Pacific, as well as torrential rain and flooding in South America. Eclrth Space Research Croup. R.R.

drives large areas of geographic research. The question, then, is: what are the newer ingredi- ents building upon such a tradition that allow us to speak of a renewal and renaissance?

Much of the renewing impulse has come from a highly sensitized and greatly amplified social concern, usually expressed as a deep dis- satisfaction with the way things are. Such dis- satisfaction inevitably leads to questions about the reasons for why things came to be this way, questions asked on geographic scales from the local city neighbourhood, through the region and nation, to the global level. The underlying catalyst appears to be an ethical concern for

obviously grave disparities between peoples and nations, heightened by a sense of injustice that inevitably challenges the status quo. At its best, research motivated by such concern illuminates, often in ways unique to geographic inquiry (Harvey, 1983, the marginalization of groups of people on economic, religious, political, eth- nic and the myriad of other grounds the human family has managed to devise to make distinc- tions between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

It comes as no surprise that a major pos- ition informing socio-geographic research is Marxist, often producing deeply perceptive attempts to examine older theoretical bases in

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light of the changes of the last century and a half (Harvey, 1982). Such re-examinations almost inevitably require a consideration of the geography of capital and an acknowledgement of cultural differentiation. Research informed in varying degrees by Marxist concern is not con- fined to centre-periphery distinctions on inter- national or global scales. Much of it focuses on places and people marginalized within their own, often opulent, societies (Dear and Wolch, 1987), while being aware that a single place or neighbourhood with which people identify themselves is itself the nexus of huge flows of goods, people and information reaching up to the global level. One of the great contributions of a renewed social-cultural geography is its emphasis on a hierarchy of geographic scales and connecting relations, a theme which appears again and again in either highly formal, algebraic ways, or in specific topics, such as medical geography (see below).

Cartography: between the scientific and humanistic

Few areas in human geography today demon- strate better the dangers of dichotomized scien- tific-humanistic thinking than the many perspec- tives to be found in contemporary cartography. Here is a field crucial to geographic research that has exploded in terms of its technical abili- ties, while at the same time undergoing an inter- pretive, indeed philosophical, revolution. Ironi- cally, both developments have been disturbing to traditionalists. Few people outside the disci- pline are fully aware of the technical explosion, ranging from computer cartography, the grow- ing capabilities of geographic information sys- tems (GIs), to analytical abilities in the spatial and temporal domains simply unthinkable only twenty years ago. Many areas of cartographic- based analysis require huge amounts of data to be handled quickly, so increasingly machines with large random access memories and high speed are needed. For many smaller research programmes, the size and speed of microcom- puters has kept pace, but for projects relying on remote sensing, supercomputers are generally required. It is difficult to make a meaningful distinction today between GIS and analytical programmes, since they are often part of the same routines. In terms of analytical perspec-

tives, however, they have opened up a world of spatial analysis which was only on the theor- etical horizons a few years ago. Many analyses involve the interrogation of spatial series, parti- cularly to answer questions of significant clus- tering. To give but one example, many statis- ticians denied that childhood leukemia clustered significantly close to an atomic reprocessing plant in Northern England, until the geographer Openshaw (1987) used GIS abilities to test nine million separate hypotheses on different scales, plotting the significant (p=0.002) ones on the map. At the end, a huge black ‘blob’ was centred over Sellafield, indicating significant clustering on nearly all scales of analysis.

Nor has the dynamic perspective been ignored. Variations on the ‘expansion method’ (Jones and Casetti, 1992) employ spatial and temporal series simultaneously, using these approaches to predict not simply values down the time horizon, but where these values are to be expected. Here spatial adaptive filtering (Gould et al., 1991) allows the geographer to use all the spatial information in the (x,y,t) cube (or, in less jargonistic terms, a series of maps showing the changes in a single variable over a succession of time periods), in order to predict the next maps. Predicting the geographic out- come of a process treated traditionally in a simplistic temporal way has also employed neu- ral nets as transformations or mappings to pre- dict often hard-to-measure variables from those more easily observed (Hewitson and Crane, 1994).

Yet at the same time that scientific and technical developments have underpinned a graphical and analytical revolution in cartogra- phy, an equally profound change has come about on the humanistic side (Harley, 1988). One of the major advances of the last decade has been an intense awareness of the general relevance for any area of inquiry of the her- meneutic revolution within certain areas of con- temporary philosophy. This involves more than cartography, but here its impact has been pro- found. Few geographers today view cartography as a slow march towards the ideally truthful map, but recognize that what the map-maker and the reader bring to the map controls the interpretation and the meaning. In brief, a map, any map, is not a neutral, mute text with the same meaning for any reasonable person, but a

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human construction to be interpreted from many different perspectives.

It is little wonder, then, that there has been intense and continuing interest in visualization. Part of such interest arises from the simple fact that no human being can comprehend the liter- ally billions of bits of information making up a multi-channelled stream from satellite remote- sensing. Somehow one has to compress, filter, enhance and simplify everything into a visual image that allows an intellectual grasping of complexity to give it meaning. But part also arises from the deeper understanding of dynamic processes when animation of success- ive images is possible. For example, there is much, and quite understandable, interest in the question of the global transmission of diseases. In principle, one could simulate the movement of a virus, from any one of the world’s 4,028 airports, as a succession of probabilistic smears that intensify over time (Gould, 1995). If a series of such global images were linked together by animation, one could produce a dra- matic and dynamic sequence disclosing major routes and possible ‘chokepoints’. The seren- dipity effects of animation may be startling, as spatial patterns suddenly take on movement leading to hypotheses not even thinkable before.

(Social) scientific perspectives

Given the great variety of geographic research, one might well ask what common thread weaves its way through such an apparently heterogeneous mixture of topics. The answer would be a way of approaching and looking at the human world that can only be labelled the ‘spatial perspective’. Emphasizing the spatiality of human existence recognizes that no discipline can make exclusive claims to this aspect of human life and society, while still acknowledg- ing that there is something peculiarly ‘geo- graphic’ about the geographer’s emphasis on space. To most readers, the phrase ‘geographic space’ probably conjures up the traditional map lying open on an atlas page, or the homo- geneous m d smooth space of the theoretical social physicist. Neither are totally irrelevant, although both today are inadequate. The reason is simple: the smooth spaces of theory are only starting points, while the topographic surfaces of the atlas display a type of structured space

that has become less and less important over the past two centuries of technological advance. In an electronic age of Internet and e-mail there may be no space but a dimensionless point, and in that sense no ‘geography’.

But to declare the disappearance of geogra- phy would be both an exceptional and naive view, somewhat akin to equally fatuous state- ments about the ‘end of history’. It is not the geographic space on the map that may be important, but how that space has been struc- tured by the human presence and its technology. It is these structured, often multidimensional spaces that control much of the dynamics of human society, and one of the reasons for tak- ing an example from medical geography is sim- ply that diseases are forms of human data often recorded and so can be used as ‘tracers’. For example, in the New York metropolitan region it is possible to transform the traditional geo- graphic map of boroughs and counties into a ‘commuter space’ whose ‘distances’ are meas- ured by the intense flows of the daily journey- to-work (Gould and Wallace, 1994). If the HIV is injected at any point into this highly struc- tured space, it is drawn quickly into Manhattan, which sits like a spider at the centre of its geographic and commuter webs. Here the virus quickly proliferates in marginalized populations and is carried by commuters to the furthermost suburbs. Indices measuring the intensity with which each county is connected to all other parts of the daily commuting system predict AIDS rates over time and at different places to a high degree (r=0.93). It will be of interest to other social and behavioural scientists that difficult, sometimes impossible to measure para- meters, such as transmission rates from one social group to another, are simply irrelevant in such analyses. Once the structure of the appro- priate space has been discovered, much else follows to allow close predictions in both space and time.

In this, and many other examples, human interaction itself structures the geographic space of the map, so it is hardly surprising to find gravity model ideas at the heart of many spatio- temporal processes, including the diffusion of news, ideas, innovations and diseases. But such a perspective also recognizes that movements of all kinds may be acutely affected by cultural, political, economic, religious and even ethnic

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barriers. In other words, human movements and interactions may not be some relatively simple mathematical function of size, distance or cost, but may be shaped by truly human factors dif- ficult to measure in any precise quantitative form. Indeed, it was in reaction to the first wave of perhaps overenthusiastic quantifying and reifying of the human ‘spaces’ that we saw the first reactions and objections that led to the revival of social and cultural geography. Such a counter-reaction reflected the dismay of many geographers that human aspects of importance, delicacy and nuance were being ignored.

The reactions themselves are various, and increasingly incorporate perspectives and topics that few geographers would have considered even twenty years ago. Again, and inevitably to oversimplify, these perspectives can be characterized as ‘language’, ‘gender’ and ‘post- colonial’. Geography shares with all social sciences a greatly heightened awareness of the implications of what we might loosely call the ‘postmodern linguistic revolution’, an awkward phrase, but one that catches implications with two profound consequences. First, it has made human geographers reflect, to a degree not seen before, on the manner in which language shapes thought; in brief, an awareness that what each person brings to a ‘text’ (whether verbal, graphical or algebraic) shapes the meaning of that text. This raises, as philosophers know so well, the question of ‘truth’, for every act of geographic writing, every construction of a map, and every derivation of an equation, constitutes an act of selection and therefore an act of power. To write, to inquire, to carry out any research at all, is always an act of power (Olsson, 1991). and all power corrupts. To be quite immediate and concrete, this review essay is such an act of power and cannot be other- wise. Even if the editor of the Journal had given me unlimited space, I could not help selecting topics, leaving out others, or placing different emphases on various aspects of con- temporary geography. One tries to present a fair and balanced picture knowing in advance that one must fail.

But the second consequence of linguistic awareness is that it has drawn human geography much closer, and often in an intense dialogue, to the humanities, particularly modern philosophy, literary criticism and various schools of psy-

chiatry. While some are still enamoured with theory as it is defined by such fields (definitions unrecognizable to those whose meanings are acquired in the physical sciences), others are arguing with great logical power and persuasion that the human sciences should move beyond theory (Strohmayer, 1993). The result is some pretty heady writing, criticism and dispute, between an annoyed older generation and younger geographers who enjoy the role of criti- cal gadfly. The result is some overexaggeration on both sides, but the questions raised are undoubtedly healthy. A discipline in which old ways are not tested by intense questioning and criticism is probably in trouble.

A second questioning perspective comes from an increasingly strong feminist movement, based on a sense of injustice to half the human race, most of whom live in strongly dominant patriarchal societies, together with an awareness that gender shapes perceptions and so geo- graphies. That there might literally be a woman’s world, or better still ‘worlds’, was barely think- able twenty-five years ago. Today, there are standard undergraduate courses on the geogra- phy of gender, emphasizing that space and place may have radically different meanings for men and women. At their best, the writings of femin- ist geographers have greatly heightened the sen- sitivity of an entire discipline to such issues, either in thoughtful, general statements (Hanson, 1992), or by exemplary research that demon- strates by concrete example the intellectual rich- ness of a feminist perspective (Friberg, 1993; Massey, 1994). At its less than ideal, it has become shrill protest from which even strongly feminist geographers demur.

A third perspective questioning much tra- ditional geographic research may be labelled postcolonialist, with strong ties to literary criti- cism and subaltern studies (O’Hanlon, 1988), from which major influences can be traced. Research in this tradition is intent on opening up and re-examining the human and geographic consequences and experiences of a once colonized people. In one sense, this is not necessarily a difficult task: most former colonial regimes provide ample material from which to fashion evidence of paternalism, cultural arro- gance, economic dominance and all the other ills which appear when one people take over another. What is difficult to provide is a fair,

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balanced and objective picture when the prior assumptions are that all colonial regimes are inherently unfair to the point of evil and that objectivity is impossible in light of both the writer’s moral certainty and his new sensitivity to language and power. Like a person of con- vinced ideological persuasion, post-colonial geographies display on occasion a tendency to find what they are looking for. The added irony is that virtually all geographic research and writing is conducted by a generation that has never known colonialism, either as colonizer or colonized. The result is often a genre of geo- graphic writing that might fairly be labelled ‘cathartic geography’, itself an interesting phenomenon.

Like any field, human geography generates its intellectual fads and enthusiasms, but it would be unjust and ignorant to dismiss these as intellectually unimportant, for these often constitute new and enriching perspectives from which to view the human geographic world (Gregory. 1994). As successive bandwagons roll by, and every social science experiences them, they come under intense scrutiny and criticism from those who are not caught up in the enthusiasms and latest revelations of truth. The result is that most perspectives-of-the-moment do not dry up entirely and blow away, but leave valuable residues of insight and new conditions of possibility for thinking and undertaking more perceptive geographic research in the future. They often also point to strong and informing links with other areas of the humanities and human sciences and these nearly always consti- tute a two-way street.

Conclusion: a spatial century?

From a somewhat inward-looking and defensive field at mid-century, contemporary geography has exploded during the past two generations of geographers to form one of the most vital components of a university. The bases of its growing strength are varied and have complex histories, but include a series of healthy reac- tions and counter-reactions, starting with chal- lenges to establishment views in the late 1950s and early 1960s. There is little question that quantitative and theoretical developments were strong catalysts, enhanced by the rapid growth

of computing power which provided the practi- cal means of handling large quantities of data and the means of exploring methodological approaches previously beyond finite human capacities. These not only included many areas of multivariate analysis but entirely new areas of statistical analysis that were still unthought by statisticians (Wrigley, 1995). Humanistic reactions to such approaches were not long in coming and these generated in their turn per- spectives on geographic analysis grounded in strong ideological positions. Yet these have been challenged in their turn by postmodern views which, while highly varied in themselves, have at their core a clear sense that one perspec- tive or approach to geographic inquiry can never capture all that is essential. Fortunately for the future health of geography, postmodern- ists themselves must face the paradox that most of their own strong claims against essentialist viewpoints come close to essentialism of an often highly dogmatic kind.

Such intellectual ferment is to be prized, not only internally to the discipline itself, but in terms of its interdisciplinary contact and influence. In the last ten years, more and more adjacent areas of the human and physical sciences, as well as the humanities, have exhib- ited a much deeper awareness of the crucial importance of space and place. People, both scholars and practitioners, are slowly recalling that almost every physical process and human endeavour has a geography as well as a history. At one level, to say that everything exists in space and time may be little more than a rather banal truism, but at a more reflective and intense level it develops into an acute awareness of ‘spatio-temporality’ that can open up and illuminate a topic in extraordinarily effective ways. Indeed, it is not impossible to think of the twenty-first century as the ‘spatial century’, a time when a sense of the geographic emerges prominently once again into human thinking. Intellectually, more and more scholars are sens- ing that place is always defined in a larger, often multi-dimensional space. In practical terms, it means that every planning decision involves not simply a when, but also a where, and a where always positioned in a space struc- tured in complex ways by prior decisions.

In such a resurgence into general thinking, geographic education has an enormously

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important role to play, whether at the level of ‘local’ political decision . . . all these and many the school or university, or in the public realm. more can have an impact around a world drawn Events in today’s world are too interconnected in so many ways into tighter contact. In a very and immediate not to have meaning, i.e. not to deep sense, nothing is unconnected in today’s ‘make sense’, to an educated citizen of the world, which is perhaps why it is important not world. An accident at a nuclear plant, the to channel braided streams, but to let them mix emergence of a new virus, the emission of their currents and find their own respected ways. atmospheric destroying gases, an aggressive

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