Social geography

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Social geography is the branch of human geography that is interested in the
relationships between society and space, and 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,[1] there is no consensus on its explicit content.[2] 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".[3] Since then, despite some calls[4] for convergence centred on
the structure and agency debate,[5] its methodological, theoretical and topical
diversity has spread even more, leading to numerous definitions of social
geography[6] and, therefore, contemporary scholars of the discipline identifying a
great variety of different social geographies.[7] However, as Benno
Werlen remarked,[8] 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.[9][note 1]
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.[10] 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[11] for a phenomenological perspective on social geography),[12] 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'".[13] 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. [14] In contrast, within
some continental European traditions, social geography was and still is considered
an approach to human geography rather than a sub-discipline,[15][note 2] or even as
identical to human geography in general.[16]

Contents

• 1History
o 1.1Before the Second World War
o 1.2Post-War Period
▪ 1.2.1Continental Europe
 • 2See also
• 3Notes
• 4References
• 5Further reading
o 5.1Textbooks
o 5.2Others
• 6External links

History[edit]
Before the Second World War[edit]
The term "social geography" (or rather "géographie sociale") originates from
France, where it was used both by geographer Élisée Reclus 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,[1] Paul Vidal de la Blache, who noted that
geography "is a science of places and not a science of men", [17] 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.[1] Jean
Brunhes, one of Vidal's most influential disciples, included a level of (spatial)
interactions among groups into his fourfold structure of human geography. [18] 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.[19][20][note 3] However, Vidal's works were influential for the
historical Annales School,[21] who also shared the rural bias with the contemporary
geographers,[22] and Durkheim's concept of social morphology was later developed
and set in connection with social geography by sociologists Marcel
Mauss[23] and Maurice Halbwachs.[24]
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[25] 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.[1] Percy M. Roxby, a former student of Herbertson, in 1930 identified
social geography as one of human geography's four main branches.[26] 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.[27] Harlan H.
Barrows, a geographer at the University of Chicago, nevertheless regarded social
geography as one of the three major divisions of geography.[28]
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 spaces.[29][30]
Post-War Period[edit]
Continental Europe[edit]
In the German-language geography, this focus on the connection between social
groups and the landscape was further developed by Hans Bobek and Wolfgang
Hartke after the Second World War.[31][note 4] For Bobek, groups
of Lebensformen (patterns of life)—influenced by social factors—that formed the
landscape, were at the center of his social geographical analysis. [32] In a similar
approach, Hartke considered the landscape a source for indices or traces of
certain social groups' behaviour.[33] The best-known example of this perspective
was the concept of Sozialbrache (social-fallow),[34] i.e. the abandoning of tillage as
an indicator for occupational shifts away from agriculture. [35]
Though the French Géographie Sociale had been a great influence especially on
Hartke's ideas,[36] no such distinct school of thought formed within the French
human geography.[37][38] Nonetheless, Albert Demangeon paved the way for a
number of more systematic conceptualizations of the field with his (posthumously
published) notion[39] that social groups ought to be within the center of human
geographical analysis.[40] That task was carried out by Pierre
George and Maximilien Sorre, among others. Then a Marxist,[41] George's stance
was dominated by a socio-economic rationale,[42] but without the structuralist
interpretations found in the works of some the French sociologists of the
time.[43] However, it was another French Marxist, the sociologist Henri Lefebvre,
who introduced the concept of the (social) production of space. [44] He had written
on that and related topics since the 1930s,[45] but fully expounded it in La
Production de L'Espace[46] 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.[47] 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",[48] an
idea influenced by existentialism.[49]
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.[50]
See also[edit]
• Geographical segregation
• History of geography
• Human ecology
• Sociology of space