Rediscovering Geography New Relevance for Science and Society (1997) / Chapter Skim
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3 Geography's Perspectives
3 Geography's Perspectives
Pages 28-46
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From page 28... ...
Due to space limitations, it does not attempt to cite the many excellent examples of research illustrating geography's perspectives; the citations refer mainly to broad-ranging summaries of geographic research that are intended as resources for further reading. Taking time to understand geography's perspectives is important because geography can be difficult to place within the family of academic disciplines.
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From page 29... ...
iThe term synthesis, as used in this report, refers to the way in which geographers often attempt to transcend the boundaries traditionally separating the various natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities disciplines in order to provide a broad-ranging analysis of selected phenomena. Such research benefits not only from bringing into one analysis ideas that are often treated separately in other disciplines but also from critically examining the disjunctures and contradictions among the ways in which different disciplines examine identical phenomena.
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From page 30... ...
, for example, showed how the daily activity patterns of people can be understood as the outcome of a process in which individuals are constrained by the availability and geographic accessibility of locations with which they can interact. Research in this tradition since has shown that the temporal and spatial sequences of actions of individuals follow typical patterns in particular types of environments and that many of the distinctive characteristics of places result from an intersection of behavioral sequences constrained by spatial accessibility to the opportunities for interaction.
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From page 31... ...
A global rise in average temperature could have highly differentiated local impacts and may even produce cooling in certain localities because of the way in which global, regional, and local processes interact. By the same token, national and international economic and political developments can have highly differentiated impacts on the economic competitiveness of cities and states.
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From page 32... ...
Although the work of geographers in this domain is too varied for easy classification, it includes three broad but overlapping fields of research: human use of and impacts on the environment, impacts on humankind of environmental change, and human perceptions of and responses to environmental change. Human Use of and Impacts on the Environment Human actions unavoidably modify or transform nature; in fact, they are often intended specifically to do so.
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From page 33... ...
They have examined arguments about the roles of carrying capacity and population pressures in environmental degradation, and they have paid close attention to the ways in which different cultures perceive and use their environments (Butzer,1992~. They have devoted considerable attention to the role of political-economic institutions, structures, and inequities in environmental use and alteration, while taking care to resist portraying the environment as an empty stage on which social conflicts are acted out (Grossman, 1984; Zimmerer, 1991; Carney, 19931.
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From page 34... ...
Efforts to understand the feedbacks among environmental processes, including human activities, also are central to the geographic study of environmental dynamics (Terjung, 1982~. As in the other natural sciences, advancing theory remains an overarching theme, and empirical verification continues to be a major criterion on which efficacy is judged.
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From page 35... ...
This research also focuses on historic changes in the spatial characteristics of taxa or communities as reconstructed, for example, from land survey records, photographs, age structures of populations, and other archival or field evidence. Biogeographers also reconstruct prehistoric and prehuman plant and animal communities using paleoecological techniques such as pollen analysis of lake sediments or faunal analysis of midden or cave deposits.
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From page 36... ...
, the natural rates of change must first be understood. Human-Societal Dynamics: From Location Theory to Social Theory The third domain focuses on the geographic study of interrelated economic, social, political, and cultural processes.
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From page 37... ...
Studies of urban and rural landscapes examine how the material environment reflects, and shapes, cultural and social developments, in work ranging from interpretations of the social meanings embedded in urban architecture to analyses of the impacts of highway systems on land uses and neighborhoods (Knox, 19941. Researchers have also focused on the living conditions and economic prospects of different social and ethnic groups in particular cities, towns, and neighborhoods, with particular attention recently to how patterns of discrimination and employment access have influenced the activity patterns and residential choices of urban women (e.g., McDowell, 1993a, b)
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From page 38... ...
Geographers who study migration and residential choice behavior seek to account for the individual actions underlying the changing social structure of cities or shifting interurban populations. Research along these lines has provided a framework for modeling the geographical structure of interaction among places, resulting inter alla in the development of operational models of movement and settlement that are now widely used by urban and regional planners throughout Europe (Golledge and Timmermans, 1988~.
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From page 39... ...
How geographers represent geographic space, what spatial information is represented, and what space means in an age of advanced computer and telecommunications technology are critical to geography and to society. Research linking cartographic theory with philosophies of science and social theory has demonstrated that the way problems are framed, and the tools that are used to structure and manipulate data, can facilitate investigation of particular categories of prob
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From page 40... ...
Geographers also study cognitive spatial representations for example, mental models of geographic environments in an effort to understand how knowledge of the environment influences peoples' behavior in that environment and make use of this knowledge of cognitive representation in developing approaches to other forms of representation. Visual representation of geographic space through maps was a cornerstone of geographic inquiry long before its formal recognition as an academic area of research, yet conventional maps are not the only visual form used in geographic research.
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From page 41... ...
Geographers have drawn new attention to the power of both verbal and visual representations, exploring the premise that every representation has multiple, potentially hidden, and perhaps duplicitous, meanings (Gregory, 1994~. A current field of research linking verbal and visual forms of spatial representation concerns hypermedia documents designed for both research and instructional applications.
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From page 43... ...
and developing structures for digital geographic databases. Recent efforts to apply the approaches of cognitive science to modeling human spatial decision making have opened promising research avenues related to way finding, spatial choice, and the development of GIS-based spatial decision support systems.
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From page 44... ...
This research is particularly important because solutions to key generalization problems are required before the rapidly increasing array of digital georeferenced data can be integrated (through GISs) to support multiscale geographic analysis.
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From page 45... ...
Approaches stressing the role of political and economic structures in constraining the actions of human agents, drawing on structural, Marxist, and structurationist traditions of thought that emphasize the influence of frequently unobservable structures and mechanisms on individual actions and thereby on societal and human-environmental dynamics carrying the implication that empirical tests cannot determine the validity of a theory (Harvey, 1982~.
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From page 46... ...
For example, neopositivist and structural accounts of the development of settlement systems have evolved through active engagement with one another, and debates about how to assess the environmental consequences of human action have ranged from quantitative cost-benefit calculations to attempts to compare and contrast instrumental with local and indigenous interpretations of the meaning and significance of nature. In subsequent chapters we have not attempted to mark these different perspectives, choosing instead to stress the phenomena studied rather than the approaches taken.
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