Exploring the Evolution of Geographic Thought
Vila Valenti
From the consideration of the land or the observation of certain phenomena, almost always keeping in mind a couple of significant comparisons, classifications, and reflections, the planet begins to emerge. A pursued common reflection sometimes starts by looking for a cause. Why does this fact occur or occur precisely at a given place and time? Observation and reflection gain a preponderant role in what we call reflexive geography.
Pragmatic Geography
Geography has frequently sought utilitarian purposes. In this case, instead of simply trying to know or understand, geographical knowledge allows us to do: travel, for example. Let’s talk about pragmatic geography — action where this goal or activity becomes predominant.
Eratosthenes
Eratosthenes observed that the Earth was circular, deduced by the shadows.
Radical Geography
This trend began in the 1960s under U.S. environmental protest, a product of the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, the crisis of pollution, and urbanization. It emerged as a current concerned with being critical of geographic issues and their mitigation. Several adjectives are used to characterize it, such as critical geography, socially relevant geography, and radical Marxist geography. These terms designate its left-leaning and rebellious attitude.
Radical geography attempts to replace what its main authors (Harvey, Peet, Lacoste) regarded as the “new geography.” They considered the new geography pragmatic, alienated, and objective in its study of spatial patterns, rather than focusing on the processes and problems with great socio-economic and ideological function. Radical geography tries to first analyze the social processes, and then the space, the inverse of what was practiced in comparative theoretical geography.
Detroit Geographical Expedition (DGE)
The Society for Human Exploration was founded and headed by W. Bunge, drawing on his experience living in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Fitzgerald in Detroit.
The Foundation of the Union of Socialist Geographers
The U.S.G. was constituted as such in May 1974. Its objectives were: 1) organizing and working toward a radical change in our communities and 2) developing geographical theory to contribute to the revolutionary struggle.
Human Geography
The cultural landscape is structured as a whole, and its particular importance is the result of the transformation of that landscape. According to Schluter, humankind interacts with the landscape in three ways: as structure, like an axis in space itself, and as an active modifier of space. Hettner indicates the need for a comparative regional geography. General geography and regional geography are, following from these statements, complementary and necessary to ensure scientific work and also to ensure the specificity of geographical science. Hettner rejects Schluter’s strictly physiognomist view and takes a more flexible one (considering humans not only as an ornament of passage, but as a piece of its essence). However, Hettner also adds a caution by saying that the divisions of the Earth’s surface are merely results of human decisions.
Power and Territory: The Importance of Political Geography
Political geography studies the effects that power relations cause on the territory, that is, the way social groups compete for a place to organize and structure it for their benefit.
The concept of power expresses the energy capable of ensuring that the behavior of others suits one’s will.
Power relations in geographical space are characterized by: 1) the need for coherence between power relations and joint space. A well-articulated and ordered space is a material means for the operation of power and society. 2) The consideration of the domain of space by social groups. Since each group needs to dominate and control a space from the standpoint of material appropriation of the territory, they influence and intervene on the territory from a power relationship. 3) The consideration of the location of forces in their decisions concerning the organization of space (the centers of decision from which territorial organization processes will emanate).
Ratzel was the first systematizer of human geography and the creator of the terms “living space,” “boundaries of tension,” and “fight for territory.”
Chicharro Fernandez
Strabo and Herodotus addressed descriptive and regional geography.
Humboldt and Ritter
Humboldt and Ritter founded modern geography and fixed, but did not create, the basic principles of so-called scientific geography: location, correlation of events, and causality.
The most significant contribution of modern geography is the application of the inductive empirical method to achieve the rational structure of nature through the cause-and-effect relationship, a method that relies on geographic determinism.
Geographic determinism is based on an inductive method rooted in the causal or explanatory.
Quantitative and Theoretical Geography
This branch of geography studies the areas or regions that are part of a functional whole and are subject to an order.
Positivist thought: the crisis of nineteenth-century thinking logically influenced the theoretical framework of the young discipline and especially the universal desire for geographical constructs.
French Human Geography
In France, the critical determination from within geography and the defense of a new geographical concept, which guarantees both the specificity and the scientific nature of this science, was carried out by Vidal de la Blache and his disciples with the proposed eco-cultural geography. Their focus is the interaction of human groups with the environment around them (approaching the land as the dwelling place of man). The environment is only the frame and never the cause of human action as a modifier of space.
Power and Territory
The factors that link power relations to geographic area are: 1) space, well-articulated, is a material means for the operation of power and society. 2) The consideration of the domain of space by social groups. 3) Consideration of the location of forces in their decisions concerning the organization of space.
Political geography is a branch of geographical science that studies the relationships between geographic factors and political institutions.