Unit 2: Approaches to human geography

The study of Human Geography has evolved significantly over time, transitioning through various philosophical and methodological paradigms. These "approaches" dictate how geographers view the relationship between humans and their environments, how spatial phenomena are analyzed, and what methodologies are deemed appropriate. This unit explores four critical approaches that emerged as reactions to earlier, more rigid paradigms (such as environmental determinism and the quantitative revolution).

1. Social Determinism

Social determinism is a theoretical approach positing that social interactions, societal structures, and cultural constructs alone determine human behavior, spatial organization, and individual actions. It emerged primarily as a counter-argument to Environmental Determinism (which argued that physical geography strictly dictates human culture) and Biological Determinism.

Key Concepts

• Primacy of Society: The physical environment is viewed merely as a passive backdrop. Human spatial patterns—such as urban layouts, agricultural practices, and resource distribution—are driven entirely by social laws, economic systems, and cultural traditions.
• Social Construction of Space: Space is not a pre-existing container but is actively produced by social relations. Concepts of borders, territories, and property are socially constructed.
• Structural Forces: Individual behavior is heavily constrained or determined by social structures like class, race, gender, and political systems.

Contrast with Other Determinisms

Criticisms and Limitations

• Over-socialization: It ignores the very real constraints and affordances provided by the physical environment (e.g., natural disasters, resource depletion, climate change).
• Loss of Individual Agency: By arguing that society determines behavior, it fails to account for individual free will and the ability of humans to resist or change social structures.

2. The Behavioural Environment

Emerging in the late 1950s and 1960s, the behavioural approach sought to correct the flaws of the Quantitative Revolution, which relied on the concept of Homo economicus (Economic Man)—a hypothetical human who possesses perfect information and always makes perfectly rational, profit-maximizing spatial decisions. Behavioural geography introduced psychology and cognitive science into spatial analysis.

The Objective vs. The Behavioural Environment

The core of this approach, heavily influenced by William Kirk, is the distinction between two environments:

1. The Objective Environment: The actual, physical world as it exists, independent of human perception.
2. The Behavioural Environment: The world as it is perceived, filtered, and interpreted by the human mind.

Geographers argued that people make decisions based on their behavioural environment, not the objective one.

[Conceptual Model of Spatial Decision Making]

Objective Environment  -->  Perceptual Filters (Culture, Class, Values, Past Experience)
                                     |
                                     v
                           Behavioural Environment (Cognitive Map)
                                     |
                                     v
                              Decision Making (Bounded Rationality)
                                     |
                                     v
                              Spatial Behaviour (Migration, Shopping, etc.)

Core Concepts

• Bounded Rationality: Coined by Herbert Simon, this concept states that human decision-making is limited by the cognitive capacity of the mind, the time available, and the imperfect information they possess. Instead of optimizing, humans satisfice (make decisions that are "good enough").
• Cognitive Mapping: (Developed by Kevin Lynch). The mental representations people build of the physical world. A person's mental map of a city determines where they travel, shop, and feel safe, which may differ vastly greatly from a physical cartographic map.
• Hazard Perception: Applied significantly in understanding how humans perceive natural hazards (e.g., why people continue to build homes in flood plains despite objective risks).

Methodologies

• Use of questionnaires, interviews, and psychological testing.
• Asking subjects to draw mental maps.
• Evaluating decision-making matrices.

3. Welfare Human Geography

Welfare geography emerged in the 1970s as a radical reaction to spatial science. Geographers realized that quantitative models of optimal facility location and transport routes ignored the crushing realities of poverty, inequality, and social injustice.

The Core Premise

The central theme of welfare geography was famously formulated by David M. Smith (1977):

"Who gets what, where, and how?"

• Who: Refers to different populations categorized by class, race, gender, or age.
• Gets What: Refers to the distribution of "goods" (income, housing, healthcare, education) and "bads" (pollution, crime, traffic noise).
• Where: The spatial distribution of these goods and bads (e.g., inner city vs. suburbs, Global North vs. Global South).
• How: The mechanisms and institutional processes (capitalism, zoning laws, government policies) that create these spatial distributions.

Key Themes

• Territorial Social Indicators: Moving beyond GDP to measure human well-being geographically (e.g., mapping infant mortality rates, literacy, or access to green spaces).
• Spatial Inequality: Analyzing how capitalism and political systems inherently produce uneven development.
• Access to Public Services: Studying the "friction of distance" not just as an economic cost, but as a barrier to social justice (e.g., poor public transit limiting access to hospitals for marginalized communities).

Significance and Legacy

Welfare geography fundamentally shifted the discipline toward public policy and social relevance. It laid the groundwork for later critical geographies, including Marxist geography, feminist geography, and contemporary studies of environmental justice.

4. Humanistic Geography

Also emerging in the 1970s, Humanistic Geography was a reaction against both the dehumanizing statistics of the Quantitative Revolution and the deterministic views of structuralism/Marxism. While welfare geography looked at humans as groups suffering spatial inequalities, humanistic geography looked at the individual human experience, consciousness, and meaning.

Philosophical Roots

• Phenomenology: The study of subjective experiences and consciousness. It asks how phenomena present themselves directly to human awareness.
• Existentialism: Emphasizes individual existence, freedom, and the creation of personal meaning.

Key Proponents and Concepts

• Yi-Fu Tuan:
  • Introduced the concept of Topophilia (the affective, emotional bond between people and place).
  • Differentiated between Space and Place. Space is abstract, geometric, and meaningless. Place is space that has been given meaning through human experience, memory, and dwelling. (e.g., A house coordinates on a map is "space"; your childhood home is a "place").
• Edward Relph:
  • Wrote extensively on the concept of Placelessness—the eradication of distinctive places and the making of standardized landscapes (e.g., strip malls, identical fast-food chains, airport terminals) that lack historical or cultural meaning and foster a sense of alienation.
• Anne Buttimer:
  • Explored the concept of Lifeworld (Lebenswelt), a phenomenological term describing the taken-for-granted pattern and context of everyday living through which people experience their geographical realities.

Methodologies

Humanistic geography rejects rigid scientific methods (positivism) in favor of qualitative approaches:

• Participant observation and ethnography.
• Analysis of literature, art, and poetry to understand how places are felt and represented.
• Autobiographical and biographical reflections.

Criticisms

• Methodological Vagueness: Critics argue its methods are unscientific, subjective, and difficult to verify or replicate.
• Elitism: Some Marxists criticized humanistic geography for focusing on abstract emotions and aesthetics while ignoring the harsh, concrete realities of economic exploitation and class struggle.