The Dictionary of Human Geography

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‘suspended in the air’. In his contrary view,

drawing on advances in the physical sciences,

it was essential to conceive of ‘Nature’ as pro-

viding a portfolio of opportunities within

which societies and cultures made variable

selections (seepossibilism: Andrews, 1984).

Sauer worked on the marchlands between

geography and history too, and the studies

produced by the firstberkeley schoolare

often described as ‘cultural–historical geog-

raphy’. He was also keenly interested in an-

thropology, however, and this led him to

formulate an approach in which a collective

(and quasi-Durkheimian) culture worked

on the raw materials of the so-called ‘natural

landscape’ to produce a climacticcultural

landscapethat not only evolved over time

but also differed from place to place.

Human geography’s interest innaturehas

continued to provide important axes of de-

bate. The rise ofspatial scienceafter the

Second World War briefly threatened to erase

the physicality of human life from human

geography, with many of itsmodelsrelying

on the physical sciences for stimuli (either

through physical analogies about thefriction

of distanceor throughneo-classical eco-

nomics, which was rooted in statistical mech-

anics). Many practitioners of spatial science in

human geography soon returned to a consid-

eration of environmental issues, however,

through a behavioural geography that

urged the importance ofenvironmental per-

ceptionand through a systems approach that

dissected, or at any rate diagrammed, the

intersections of nominally ‘human’ and ‘phys-

ical’systems. At that time,urban geography

was markedly less interested in these ques-

tions, and it took much longer for urban geog-

raphers to recognize that modern cities were

not triumphant memorials to a human victory

over ‘Nature’ and that the physico-ecological

vertebrae of cities were crucial objects of en-

quiry. But it is now widely acknowledged that

studies ofpollution, waste andwaterin cit-

ies address more than questions of public

healthand policy located at the crossroads

ofmedical geographyandurban planning:

they also intersect with concerns aboutenvir-

onmental justice,governmentalityandso-

cial exclusionthat have become central to

human geography more generally (see, e.g.,

Gandy, 2006a,c). This new agenda was ad-

vanced in part through a critique of spatial

science that emphasized the material bases of

capitalismas amode of production– the

production of space was thus intimately

related to theproduction of nature, most

viscerally in studies ofpolitical ecology

(Watts, 1983a; Peet and Watts, 2003 [1996];

Robbins, 2004) – and in part through an en-

gagement with other forms ofsocial theory

that brought the biopolitical foundations of

modern life into view (seebiopolitics). The

convergences between these streams of work

have suggested a series of intrinsically ‘hybrid

geographies’ (Whatmore, 2002a).

These developments reactivated and refor-

mulatedlong-standing questions about the

relations between human geography and

physical geography, but it is only recently

that the relations between the sub-disciplines

of human geography have provoked equal dis-

cussion. The relative importance of the sub-

disciplines has changed over time. Many of the

core models of spatial science were the main-

springs for aneconomic geographydomin-

ated bylocation theoryand driven by the

search for systematic structures within a mod-

ernspace-economy. The subsequent critique

of spatial science had many sources (Gregory,

1978a), but much of its vitality derived from a

political economybased on a close reading

of Marx’s analysis ofcapitalism. This not

only reshaped economic geography, where it

set the space-economy in motion and allowed

for more incisive analyses of (for example) the

crisis-ridden dynamics of capitalaccumula-

tion, spatialdivisions of labour, industrial

restructuring,commodity chainsand the

circulation ofcapitalin multiple forms. It also

opened the doors to a revitalizedpolitical

geographythat more closely and critically

engaged with the powers and practices of the

state, and asocial geographythat became

centrally concerned with spatial formations

of class and ethnicity. These two sub-

disciplines drew on contributions tosocial

theorythat spiralled far from Marx’s original

writings – though a diffuse Westernmarxism

remained a significant source of inspiration to

both of them – and these interactions issued in

the rise ofcritical geopoliticsand the emer-

gence of vigorousfeminist geographiesthat

widened their horizons still further. These

interdisciplinary exchanges also projected a

central question for thehumanitiesand the

social sciences into the centre of human geog-

raphy. Just as there were (for example) ‘two

anthropologies’ and ‘two sociologies’, one em-

phasizinghuman agencyand the other em-

phasizing systems and structures, so there

were two human geographies: one an avow-

edlyhumanistic geography(in whichideal-

ism vied withmaterialism) and the other

much more invested in structural logics and

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HUMAN GEOGRAPHY