Social geography
Encyclopedia
Social geography is the branch of human geography
that is most closely related to social theory
in general and sociology
in particular, dealing with the relation of social phenomena
and its spatial components. Though the term itself has a tradition of more than 100 years, there is no consensus on its explicit content. In 1968, Anne Buttimer noted that "[w]ith some notable exceptions, (...) social geography can be considered a field created and cultivated by a number of individual scholars rather than an academic tradition built up within particular schools". Since then, despite some calls for convergence centred on the structure and agency
debate, its methodological, theoretical and topical diversity has spread even more, leading to numerours definitions of social geography and, therefore, contemporary scholars of the discipline identifying a great variety of different social geographies. However, as Benno Werlen remarked, these different perceptions are nothing else than different answers to the same two (sets of) questions, which refer to the spatial constitution of society on the one hand, and to the spatial expression of social processes on the other.The outline of these questions is basically of dialectical purpose, and, in its original context, wasn't used as a subject's definition. (Cf. Jackson, Peter (2003): Introduction: The Social in Question. In: Anderson, Kay et al. (eds.) (2003): Handbook of Cultural Geography. London et al. (Sage): 37-42.) Also note that Werlen's original two questions that social geography has to answer slightly differ from these two, and that Buttimer (1968: 135) provides another two of such questions.
The different conceptions of social geography have also been overlapping with other sub-fields of geography and, to a lesser extent, sociology. When the term emerged within the Anglo-american tradition during the 1960s, it was basically applied as a synonym for the search for patterns in the distribution of social groups, thus being closely connected to urban geography
and urban sociology
. In the 1970s, the focus of debate within American human geography lay on political economic
processes (though there also was a considerable number of accounts for a phenomenological perspective on social geography), while in the 1990s, geographical thought was heavily influenced by the "cultural turn
". Both times, as Neil Smith
noted, these approaches "claimed authority over the 'social'". In the American tradition, the concept of cultural geography
has a much more distinguished history than social geography, and encompasses research areas that would be conceptualized as "social" elsewhere. In contrast, within some continental European traditions, social geography was and still is considered an approach to human geography rather than a sub-discipline,for a more detailed account on the German-language geography, see Bobek, Hans
(1962): Über den Einbau der sozialgeographischen Betrachtungsweise in die Kulturgeographie. Verhandlungen des deutschen Geographentages 33: 148-166. or even as identical to human geography in general.
and by sociologists of the Le Play
School, perhaps independently from each other. In fact, the first proven occurrence of the term derives from a review of Reclus' Nouvelle géographie universelle from 1884, written by Paul de Rousiers, a member of the Le Play School. Reclus himself used the expression in several letters, the first one dating from 1895, and in his last work L'Homme et la terre from 1905. The first person to employ the term as part of a publication's title was Edmond Demolins
, another member of the Le Play School, whose article Géographie sociale de la France was published in 1896 and 1897. After the death of Reclus as well as the main proponents of Le Play's ideas, and with Émile Durkheim
turning away from his early concept of social morphology, Paul Vidal de la Blache
, who noted that geography "is a science of places and not a science of men", remained the most influential figure of French geography. One of his students, Camille Vallaux, wrote the two-volume book Géographie sociale, published in 1908 and 1911. Jean Brunhes, one of Vidal's most influential disciples, included a level of (spatial) interactions among groups into his fourfold structure of human geography. Until the Second World War, no more theoretical framework for social geography was developed, though, leading to a concentration on rather descriptive rural and regional geography
.As Paul Claval (1986) puts it: "At mid-century, French geography was more open to social problems than other schools, but there is nothing like a recognised social geographical field." (p. 15) However, Vidal's works were influential for the historical Annales School
, who also shared the rural bias with the contemporary geographers, and Durkheim's concept of social morphology was later developed and set in connection with social geography by sociologists Marcel Mauss
and Maurice Halbwachs
.
The first person in the Anglo-american tradition to use the term "social geography" was George Wilson Hoke, whose paper The Study of Social Geography was published in 1907, yet there is no indication it had any academic impact. Le Play's work, however, was taken up in Britain by Patrick Geddes
and Andrew John Herbertson. Percy M. Roxby, a former student of Herbertson, in 1930 identified social geography as one of human geography's four main branches. By contrast, the American academic geography of that time was dominated by the Berkeley School of Cultural Geography led by Carl O. Sauer
, while the spatial distribution of social groups was already studied by the Chicago School of Sociology
. Harlan H. Barrows, a geographer at the University of Chicago, nevertheless regarded social geography as one of the three major divisions of geography.
Another pre-war concept that combined elements of sociology and geography was the one established by Dutch sociologist Sebald Rudolf Steinmetz and his Amsterdam School of Sociography
. However, it lacked a definitive subject, being a combination of geography and ethnography
created as the more concrete counterpart to the rather theoretical sociology. In contrast, the Utrecht School of Social geography, which emerged in the early 1930s, sought to study the relationship between social groups and their living space
s.
was further developed by Hans Bobek
and Wolfgang Hartke after the Second World War.Though the term "Sozialgeographie" had been used before, the first call for a systematic consideration of social groups within German-language geography came from Richard Busch-Zantner (1937): Zur Ordnung der anthropogenen Faktoren. Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen 83: 138-141 [139]. (Cited by: Werlen, Benno (2008): 75-76.). However, he died in the Second World War. For Bobek, groups of Lebensformen (patterns of life), formed by both social factors and the landscape, were at the center of social geographical analysis. In a similar approach, Hartke considered the landscape a source for indices or traces of certain social groups' behaviour. The best-known example of this perspective was the concept of Sozialbrache (social-fallow), i.e. the abandoning of tillage as an indicator for occupational shifts away from agriculture.
Though the French Géographie Sociale had been a great influence especially on Hartke's ideas, no such distinct school of thought formed within the French human geography. Nonetheless, Albert Demangeon paved the way for a number of more systematic conceptualizations of the field with his (posthumously published) notion that social groups ought to be within the center of human geographical analysis. That task was carried out by Pierre George and Maximilien Sorre, among others. Then a Marxist, George's stance was dominated by a socio-economic rationale, but without the structuralist interpretations
found in the works of some the French sociologists of the time. However, it was another French Marxist, the sociologist Henri Lefebvre
, who introduced the concept of the (social) production of space. He had written on that and related topics since the 1930s, but fully expounded it in La Production de L'Espace as late as 1974. Sorre developed a schema of society related to the ecological idea of habitat
, which was applied to an urban context by the sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe. For the Dutch geographer Christiaan van Paassen, the world consisted of socio-spatial entities of different scales formed by what he referred to as a "syn-ecological complex", an idea influenced by existentialism
.
A more analytical ecological approach on human geography was the one developed by Edgar Kant in his native Estonia in the 1930s and later at Lund University
, which he called "anthropo-ecology". His awareness of the temporal dimension of social life would lead to the formation of time geography
through the works of Torsten Hägerstrand
and Sven Godlund.
Human geography
Human geography is one of the two major sub-fields of the discipline of geography. Human geography is the study of the world, its people, communities, and cultures. Human geography differs from physical geography mainly in that it has a greater focus on studying human activities and is more...
that is most closely related to social theory
Social theory
Social theories are theoretical frameworks which are used to study and interpret social phenomena within a particular school of thought. An essential tool used by social scientists, theories relate to historical debates over the most valid and reliable methodologies , as well as the primacy of...
in general and sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
in particular, dealing with the relation of social phenomena
Social phenomenon
Social phenomena include all behavior which influences or is influenced by organisms sufficiently alive to respond to one another.-See also:*Forms of activity and interpersonal relations*List of sociology topics*Social fact-References:...
and its spatial components. Though the term itself has a tradition of more than 100 years, there is no consensus on its explicit content. In 1968, Anne Buttimer noted that "[w]ith some notable exceptions, (...) social geography can be considered a field created and cultivated by a number of individual scholars rather than an academic tradition built up within particular schools". Since then, despite some calls for convergence centred on the structure and agency
Structure and agency
The question over the primacy of either structure or agency in human behavior is a central debate in the social sciences. In this context, "agency" refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. "Structure", by contrast, refers to the recurrent...
debate, its methodological, theoretical and topical diversity has spread even more, leading to numerours definitions of social geography and, therefore, contemporary scholars of the discipline identifying a great variety of different social geographies. However, as Benno Werlen remarked, these different perceptions are nothing else than different answers to the same two (sets of) questions, which refer to the spatial constitution of society on the one hand, and to the spatial expression of social processes on the other.The outline of these questions is basically of dialectical purpose, and, in its original context, wasn't used as a subject's definition. (Cf. Jackson, Peter (2003): Introduction: The Social in Question. In: Anderson, Kay et al. (eds.) (2003): Handbook of Cultural Geography. London et al. (Sage): 37-42.) Also note that Werlen's original two questions that social geography has to answer slightly differ from these two, and that Buttimer (1968: 135) provides another two of such questions.
The different conceptions of social geography have also been overlapping with other sub-fields of geography and, to a lesser extent, sociology. When the term emerged within the Anglo-american tradition during the 1960s, it was basically applied as a synonym for the search for patterns in the distribution of social groups, thus being closely connected to urban geography
Urban geography
Urban geography is the study of areas which have a high concentration of buildings and infrastructure. These are areas where the majority of economic activities are in the secondary sector and tertiary sectors...
and urban sociology
Urban sociology
Urban sociology is the sociological study of social life and human interaction in metropolitan areas. It is a normative discipline of sociology seeking to study the structures, processes, changes and problems of an urban area and by doing so providing inputs for planning and policy making. Like...
. In the 1970s, the focus of debate within American human geography lay on political economic
Political economy
Political economy originally was the term for studying production, buying, and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government, as well as with the distribution of national income and wealth, including through the budget process. Political economy originated in moral philosophy...
processes (though there also was a considerable number of accounts for a phenomenological perspective on social geography), while in the 1990s, geographical thought was heavily influenced by the "cultural turn
Cultural turn
The cultural turn was a movement among scholars in the social sciences to look at culture differently. The cultural turn has been described by one of its most prominent historiographers as a “wide array of new theoretical impulses coming from fields formerly peripheral to the social sciences,”...
". Both times, as Neil Smith
Neil Smith (geographer)
Neil Smith was born 1954 in Leith, Scotland. he is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography, at the Graduate Center department of the City University of New York. From 2008 he holds a twenty percent appointment as Sixth Century Professor of Geography and Social Theory, at the...
noted, these approaches "claimed authority over the 'social'". In the American tradition, the concept of cultural geography
Cultural geography
Cultural geography is a sub-field within human geography. Cultural geography is the study of cultural products and norms and their variations across and relations to spaces and places...
has a much more distinguished history than social geography, and encompasses research areas that would be conceptualized as "social" elsewhere. In contrast, within some continental European traditions, social geography was and still is considered an approach to human geography rather than a sub-discipline,for a more detailed account on the German-language geography, see Bobek, Hans
Hans Bobek
Hans Bobek was Professor of Geography, University of Vienna , noted for his works on social geography, urban geography and the geography of the Near and Middle East, then primaly known as the "Orient". He was, among others, the author of Iran: Probleme eines unterentwickelten Landes alter Kultur...
(1962): Über den Einbau der sozialgeographischen Betrachtungsweise in die Kulturgeographie. Verhandlungen des deutschen Geographentages 33: 148-166. or even as identical to human geography in general.
Before the Second World War
The term "social geography" (or rather "géographie sociale") originates from France, where it was used both by geographer Élisée ReclusÉlisée Reclus
Élisée Reclus , also known as Jacques Élisée Reclus, was a renowned French geographer, writer and anarchist. He produced his 19-volume masterwork La Nouvelle Géographie universelle, la terre et les hommes , over a period of nearly 20 years...
and by sociologists of the Le Play
Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play
Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play , was a French engineer, sociologist, and economist.-Life:...
School, perhaps independently from each other. In fact, the first proven occurrence of the term derives from a review of Reclus' Nouvelle géographie universelle from 1884, written by Paul de Rousiers, a member of the Le Play School. Reclus himself used the expression in several letters, the first one dating from 1895, and in his last work L'Homme et la terre from 1905. The first person to employ the term as part of a publication's title was Edmond Demolins
Edmond Demolins
Edmond Demolins was a French pedagogue.-Life and work:Demolins was a student of Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play. He was the director of the journal La Science Sociale...
, another member of the Le Play School, whose article Géographie sociale de la France was published in 1896 and 1897. After the death of Reclus as well as the main proponents of Le Play's ideas, and with Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain...
turning away from his early concept of social morphology, Paul Vidal de la Blache
Paul Vidal de la Blache
Paul Vidal de la Blache was a French geographer. He is considered to be the founder of the modern French geography and also the founder of the French School of Geopolitics...
, who noted that geography "is a science of places and not a science of men", remained the most influential figure of French geography. One of his students, Camille Vallaux, wrote the two-volume book Géographie sociale, published in 1908 and 1911. Jean Brunhes, one of Vidal's most influential disciples, included a level of (spatial) interactions among groups into his fourfold structure of human geography. Until the Second World War, no more theoretical framework for social geography was developed, though, leading to a concentration on rather descriptive rural and regional geography
Regional geography
Regional geography is the study of world regions. Attention is paid to unique characteristics of a particular region such as natural elements, human elements, and regionalization which covers the techniques of delineating space into regions....
.As Paul Claval (1986) puts it: "At mid-century, French geography was more open to social problems than other schools, but there is nothing like a recognised social geographical field." (p. 15) However, Vidal's works were influential for the historical Annales School
Annales School
The Annales School is a group of historians associated with a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century. It is named after its scholarly journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, which remains the main source of scholarship, along with many books and...
, who also shared the rural bias with the contemporary geographers, and Durkheim's concept of social morphology was later developed and set in connection with social geography by sociologists Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss' academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology...
and Maurice Halbwachs
Maurice Halbwachs
Maurice Halbwachs was a French philosopher and sociologist known for developing the concept of collective memory.Born in Reims, Halbwachs attended the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. There he studied philosophy with Henri Bergson, who influenced him greatly. He aggregated in Philosophy in 1901...
.
The first person in the Anglo-american tradition to use the term "social geography" was George Wilson Hoke, whose paper The Study of Social Geography was published in 1907, yet there is no indication it had any academic impact. Le Play's work, however, was taken up in Britain by Patrick Geddes
Patrick Geddes
Sir Patrick Geddes was a Scottish biologist, sociologist, philanthropist and pioneering town planner. He is known for his innovative thinking in the fields of urban planning and education....
and Andrew John Herbertson. Percy M. Roxby, a former student of Herbertson, in 1930 identified social geography as one of human geography's four main branches. By contrast, the American academic geography of that time was dominated by the Berkeley School of Cultural Geography led by Carl O. Sauer
Carl O. Sauer
Carl Ortwin Sauer was an American geographer. Sauer was a professor of geography at the University of California at Berkeley from 1923 until becoming professor emeritus in 1957 and was instrumental in the early development of the geography graduate school at Berkeley. One of his best known works...
, while the spatial distribution of social groups was already studied by the Chicago School of Sociology
Chicago school (sociology)
In sociology and later criminology, the Chicago School was the first major body of works emerging during the 1920s and 1930s specialising in urban sociology, and the research into the urban environment by combining theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, now applied elsewhere...
. Harlan H. Barrows, a geographer at the University of Chicago, nevertheless regarded social geography as one of the three major divisions of geography.
Another pre-war concept that combined elements of sociology and geography was the one established by Dutch sociologist Sebald Rudolf Steinmetz and his Amsterdam School of Sociography
Sociography
Sociography is writing on society, societal sub-divisions, and societal patterns, done without first conducting the in-depth study typically required in the academic field of sociology...
. However, it lacked a definitive subject, being a combination of geography and ethnography
Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...
created as the more concrete counterpart to the rather theoretical sociology. In contrast, the Utrecht School of Social geography, which emerged in the early 1930s, sought to study the relationship between social groups and their living space
Living Space
"Living Space" is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. It was first published in the May 1956 issue of Science Fiction and reprinted in the 1957 collection Earth Is Room Enough...
s.
Continental Europe
In the German-language geography, this focus on the connection between social groups and the landscapeLandscape
Landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including the physical elements of landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of...
was further developed by Hans Bobek
Hans Bobek
Hans Bobek was Professor of Geography, University of Vienna , noted for his works on social geography, urban geography and the geography of the Near and Middle East, then primaly known as the "Orient". He was, among others, the author of Iran: Probleme eines unterentwickelten Landes alter Kultur...
and Wolfgang Hartke after the Second World War.Though the term "Sozialgeographie" had been used before, the first call for a systematic consideration of social groups within German-language geography came from Richard Busch-Zantner (1937): Zur Ordnung der anthropogenen Faktoren. Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen 83: 138-141 [139]. (Cited by: Werlen, Benno (2008): 75-76.). However, he died in the Second World War. For Bobek, groups of Lebensformen (patterns of life), formed by both social factors and the landscape, were at the center of social geographical analysis. In a similar approach, Hartke considered the landscape a source for indices or traces of certain social groups' behaviour. The best-known example of this perspective was the concept of Sozialbrache (social-fallow), i.e. the abandoning of tillage as an indicator for occupational shifts away from agriculture.
Though the French Géographie Sociale had been a great influence especially on Hartke's ideas, no such distinct school of thought formed within the French human geography. Nonetheless, Albert Demangeon paved the way for a number of more systematic conceptualizations of the field with his (posthumously published) notion that social groups ought to be within the center of human geographical analysis. That task was carried out by Pierre George and Maximilien Sorre, among others. Then a Marxist, George's stance was dominated by a socio-economic rationale, but without the structuralist interpretations
Structural Marxism
Structural Marxism was an approach to Marxist philosophy based on structuralism, primarily associated with the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser and his students. It was influential in France during the 1960s and 1970s, and also came to influence philosophers, political theorists and...
found in the works of some the French sociologists of the time. However, it was another French Marxist, the sociologist Henri Lefebvre
Henri Lefebvre
Henri Lefebvre was a French sociologist, Marxist intellectual, and philosopher, best known for his work on dialectics, Marxism, everyday life, cities, and space.-Biography:...
, who introduced the concept of the (social) production of space. He had written on that and related topics since the 1930s, but fully expounded it in La Production de L'Espace as late as 1974. Sorre developed a schema of society related to the ecological idea of habitat
Habitat
* Habitat , a place where a species lives and grows*Human habitat, a place where humans live, work or play** Space habitat, a space station intended as a permanent settlement...
, which was applied to an urban context by the sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe. For the Dutch geographer Christiaan van Paassen, the world consisted of socio-spatial entities of different scales formed by what he referred to as a "syn-ecological complex", an idea influenced by existentialism
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
.
A more analytical ecological approach on human geography was the one developed by Edgar Kant in his native Estonia in the 1930s and later at Lund University
Lund University
Lund University , located in the city of Lund in the province of Scania, Sweden, is one of northern Europe's most prestigious universities and one of Scandinavia's largest institutions for education and research, frequently ranked among the world's top 100 universities...
, which he called "anthropo-ecology". His awareness of the temporal dimension of social life would lead to the formation of time geography
Time geography
Time geography or time-space geography traces its roots back to the Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand who stressed the temporal factor in spatial human activities. The time-space path, devised by Hägerstrand, shows the movement of an individual in the spatial-temporal environment with the...
through the works of Torsten Hägerstrand
Torsten Hägerstrand
Torsten Hägerstrand , was a Swedish geographer. He is known for his work on migration, cultural diffusion and time geography....
and Sven Godlund.
Textbooks
- Jackson, Peter and Susan J. Smith (1984): Exploring Social Geography. Boston, London (Allen & Unwin). 239 p.
- Smith, Susan J. et al. (eds.) (2010): The Sage Handbook of Social Geographies. London (Sage). 614 p.
- Valentine, Gill (2001): Social Geographies: Space and Society. New York (Prentice Hall). 400 p.
- Werlen, Benno (2008): Sozialgeographie: Eine Einführung (3. ed.). Bern et al. (Haupt). 400 p.
Others
- Gregory, Derek and John Urry (eds.) (1985): Social Relations and Spatial Structures. Basingstoke et al. (MacMillan). 440 p.
- Gregory, Derek (1994): Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, MA (Blackwell). 442 p.
- Werlen, Benno (1993): Society, Action and Space: An Alternative Human Geography. London, New York (Routledge). 249 p.
External links
- Social Geography Open access journal
- Social & Cultural Geography Peer-reviewed journal
- Environment and Planning D: Society and Space Peer-reviewed journal
- Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie (Journal of Economic & Social Geography) Peer-reviewed journal