The Dictionary of Human Geography

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principles of community and individuality

through an oppositionalpostmodernarchi-

tectural style. Other forms of ‘oppositional’

moral landscape might be traced in studies of

the geographies oftransgression, where land-

scapes labelled by others as immoral are up-

held as pointers towards the production of

alternativesocial space. dmat

Suggested reading

Matless (1997); Tuan (1989).

morphogenesis (The study of) change in

form over time. The term derives from develop-

mental biology, and is sometimes used as a syno-

nym forpositivefeedbackin systems analysis

(see alsocomplexity theory). Its most devel-

oped use inhuman geographyto date has been

in studies oflandscapechange inhistorical

geography.(Seealsomorphology.) dg

morphology Form orthe study of form.

Morphology became a contested term in the

struggle between thehuman geographyof

Paul Vidal de la Blache and the emerging soci-

ology of E ́mile Durkheim at the turn of the

twentieth century. Durkheim argued that the

systematicity of the social – and thus what

made its scientific study possible – was the

result of its morphology, by which he meant

the spatial forms through which individuals

were held together as a social structure. For

this reason, any account of the constitution of

social life would have to include many of the

propositions of human geography, which

Durkheim regarded as one of the ‘fragmentary

sciences’ that had to be drawn out of their

isolation to contribute to the plenary social

science of sociology (Andrews, 1993). This

sense of social morphology can be traced

through twentieth-century sociology in the

writings of Maurice Halbwachs, Georg

Simmel and others, but Vidal complained

that Durkheim’s view ignored the physical–

ecological dimension and left society sus-

pended in the air.

It was exactly this conjunction between ‘the

social’ and ‘the natural’ that prompted Carl

Sauer to insist that the morphology ofland-

scapewas the central object of geographical

enquiry. For Sauer (1963b [1925]), geog-

raphywas ‘a science that finds its entire field

in the landscape on the basis of the significant

reality of chorological relation’. Sauer’s con-

ception did not neglect spatial arrangements,

in his terms ‘the connections of phenomena’

(as these differed from place to place: see

chorology), but his emphasis on morphology

derived from J.W. Goethe’s eighteenth-cen-

tury interest in ‘the science of forms’ and regis-

tered two other claims of equal importance:

 ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ had to be seen as

interdependent in the co-production of

landscapes; and

 the same basic forms recurred across the

whole field of transformations.

The first of these was focal to Sauer’s sense of

historical geography, so that his enquiry

was not confined to the morphology of land-

scape but was directed towards itsmorpho-

genesis; that is, the development of its forms

over time. It was in this sense that Sauer

described ‘all geography [a]s physical geog-

raphy’: in its focus on physical form, on the

material inscriptions ofcultureon the surface

of the Earth. This intersected with his second

claim, because he insisted that ‘a definition of

landscape as singular, unorganized or unre-

lated has no scientific value’ and he was con-

cerned to develop a conception of landscape as

‘a generalization derived from the observation

of individual scenes’. Much later, others devel-

oped this in directions that Sauer refused to

take. In particular, some early work inspatial

scienceinvolved a search for geometrical and

mathematical regularities in the evolution of

spatial patterns of settlement (see Harvey,

1967). This too can be seen as a revivification

of the science of morphology, but it usually

acknowledged a debt neither to Goethe nor

Sauer but to D’Arcy Thompson’sOn growth

and form(1992 [1917]) and his pioneering

search for ‘essential similarities’ between ‘ani-

mate and inanimate things’.

The interest in morphogenesishas con-

tinued in both European and American

geography. There has been a long-standing

interest in the historical evolution of rural

landscapes (e.g. Helmfrid, 1961) and urban

landscapes (e.g. Conzen, 1960: see White-

hand, 2001). Much of the early work was

qualitative and descriptive, but in recent

years, and in conjunction with parallel studies

in archaeology, there have been considerable

advances in the quantitative measurement of

landscape forms (metrological analysis), includ-

ing the integration of space syntax with GIS

(Bin Jiang and Claramunt, 2002; Lilley,

Lloyd, Trick and Graham, 2005).Urban mor-

phogenesisremains a vital area of geographical

enquiry (Vance, 1990). The International Sem-

inar on Urban Form (http://odur.let.rug.nl/

ekoster/isuf2/index.html) was established in

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MORPHOGENESIS