ELEMENTS OF THE STORY SO FAR

Those in the ‘discipline’ of geography have for long had a difficult relation to the notion of ‘space’ and ‘the spatial’. There has been much head-scratching, much theorising, much changing of mind. Sometimes the notion has been clasped whole-heartedly as the only claimable distinguishing characteristic within the academic division of labour. Sometimes it has been spurned as necessarily fetishised. There have also, along with these switchbacks, been major shifts in the way in which ‘space/the spatial’ was itself to be conceived.

The 1960s and 1970s respectively provide instances of two extremes in this lurching relationship, and it is out of that history that emerges the first argument of this essay. The fundamental message is simple; that the radical critique of the 1970s – for very understandable reasons both intellectual and political – went far too far overboard in its rejection of the importance of the spatial organisation of things, of distance and perhaps above all, of geographical differentiation.

Go back a moment to the period before 1960; that bygone age when human geography, or at least a central part of it, was plainly about ‘regions’. School and university courses were organised around sections of the world. There were courses on ‘Africa’, on ‘Asia’, on ‘The Regions of the British lsles’. The focus was on place, on difference, on distinctiveness – on uniqueness. The concern was to understand how localities come to be as they are, how they get their particular character. Certainly, it was not always the most sophisticated theoretical work. There tended to be rather a lot of chapters which simply started with geology and ended up with politics. But what this focus did give to this section of the social sciences was an element of distinctiveness. First, it was concerned with putting things together, rather than tearing them apart; with trying to understand links, relationships, synthesis, rather than being concerned only with the dissection of analysis. It was, therefore, necessarily concerned with the unique. Second, this focus gave geography an object of its own, a bit of the world (quite literally) on which it could focus – the place, the region, the locality.