Recalibrating the Quantitative Revolution in Geography

Travels, Networks, Translations

Ferenc Gyuris, Boris Michel, Katharina Paulus, Ferenc Gyuris, Boris Michel, Katharina Paulus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367640866
• eBook ISBN: 9781000515619
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography

This book brings together international research on the quantitative revolution in geography. It offers perspectives from a wide range of contexts and national traditions that decenter the Anglo-centric discussions. The mid-20th-century quantitative revolution is frequently regarded as a decisive moment in the history of geography, transforming it into a modern and applied spatial science. This book highlights the different temporalities and spatialities of local geographies laying the ground for a global history of a specific mode of geographical thought. It contributes to the contemporary discussions around the geographies and mobilities of knowledge, notions of worlding, linguistic privilege, decolonizing and internationalizing of geographic knowledge.

This book will be of interest to researchers, postgraduates and advance students in geography and those interested in the spatial sciences.

1 Introduction Recalibrating the quantitative revolution in geography

Ferenc Gyuris, Boris Michel, and Katharina Paulus

DOI: 10.4324/9781003122104-1

Line as human

means to express

the relation between

points, something

that is entirely abstract

in the sense of not

existing materially in nature.

Line as medium

indicates materially

the relation between points in space,

expressing visually

human descriptive thought.

Line as object to play with.

Gertrud “Gego” Goldschmidt, 1960

Introduction

The image on the previous page of this book shows a photo of the 1969 installation Reticulárea (from the Latin reticulum or fine network) by the German-Venezuelan artist and Jewish refugee Gertrud “Gego” Goldschmidt. In a room, a group of people stand between hundreds of interconnected rods of stainless steel and anodized aluminum. Four people, only the faceless silhouettes of whom can be seen, gaze at the structure; they seem lost and disoriented. The metal rods form a web of complex networks and meshes. While there is a remarkable regularity in triangles of different sizes, there is also chaos and distortion. It is not clear whether all the elements form one interconnected structure or whether different structures coexist within this space. The web has neither a center nor any clear boundary, and it appears to be a structure composed of the surface without any content.

Being trained also as an architect, Gego engages in her installations with contemporary spatial thought. Reticulárea was one of many geometric artworks that she, who cultivated a dedicated interest in surfaces, structures, and geometry, described as “drawings without paper” (Gego cited in Held 2010, 9). Many of these structures, such as hexagons, regular spatial patterns, and optimal networks, remind us of a way of seeing and modes of visualizing that began to dominate geography in the 1960s. Geometry, rational planning and order, a focus on structure, connections and lines became important for a new breed of geographers and a new mode of geographic thought in the post-WWII period. However, Gego’s artistic work was critical, expressing “a growing skepticism toward ideal urban, geometric, and sculptural organizations” (Amor 2005, 125) that dominated the practice of urban planning in Venezuela during the 1960s and elsewhere. Reticulárea can thus “be understood as a conflictive linear geometric body, whose behavior was a dialogical response to Gego’s architectural background and the local material conditions in which her work was produced,” an artifact “upsetting the notion of architectural space as a container, and of line as the boundary of bodies” (Amor 2005, 125).

This work of art serves as a starting point to think about the multisided and multisited history of a geography that saw progress and its future in geometry and networks, in universal spatial laws, and in rational spatial planning. However, in the same way as Reticulárea “embraced a logic of displacement” (Amor 2005, 125), this history has more open borders and less clear centers than are acknowledged in most accounts. Thus, this history is a history of many connections of small and large networks of traveling ideas and people and the constant transformation and translation of these ideas and concepts.

Since the early 2000s, research on the history of science has become increasingly interested in the history of the mid-20th century. In particular, the rise of a new form of large-scale research, cold war rationality, and new disciplines and modes of thinking, such as cybernetics, drew an increasing interest of researchers from a wide range of fields (Erickson et al. 2013; Solovey and Cravens 2012; Oreskes and Krige 2014; Rid 2016). The mid-20th century has become “history” and a new and exciting field for academic economies of attention. Moreover, post-WWII science can also be considered a prehistory to present-day sociotechnological figurations of digitalization and datafication and of “what tech calls thinking” (Daub 2020). This history helps us understand our present moment. In addition, the massive optimism about planning and the future, which permeated scientific work in the post-1945 period, attracted considerable interest because it is atypical of or even alien to many mainstream contemporary approaches in social sciences, including geography.

However, the history of mid-20th-century science is told primarily not only as a history of cold war science but also as a history that almost exclusively focuses on the United States while often still implicitly claiming universality. While there is – at least from a European perspective – some justification for this recentering of the world’s history, these narratives provide minimal or no space for Western Europe and the Soviet Bloc, as well as the Global South and the decolonized world, which are more than interesting case studies and peculiar variations in this story.

This narrative has also been true for the emerging research on the history of mid-century geography and the rise of spatial science, quantitative methodologies, and the use of digital computers for spatial analysis. The 1950s can justifiably be regarded as a time when the center of geography shifted from Europe to North America. In addition, related studies acknowledge the pioneering role of some non-US authors (Barnes and Abrahamsson 2017), such as Walter Christaller (1933; Ullman 1941) and Alfred Weber (1909), as well as early quantitative works from Torsten Hägerstrand (1957) and his school in Sweden (e.g., Taylor 1977). However, in spite of these works, a critical historiography for the global history of quantitative geographies, comparable to the historiography that has been elaborated for Anglophone geographical traditions during the last two decades, especially by Trevor Barnes (1998, 2001a, 2001b, 2004, 2008), is still missing.

This volume is aimed at contributing to a more international and decentered view and understanding of what is commonly referred to as the “quantitative revolution” in geography. Therefore, this book contributes to the ongoing discussions around the geographies and mobilities of knowledge (Jöns et al. 2017), notions of worlding (Müller 2021), linguistic privilege, decolonizing and internationalizing of geographic knowledge (Ferretti 2020, 2021; Schelhaas et al. 2020; Minca 2018; Husseini de Araújo 2018; Jöns 2018; Gyuris 2018). Within the history of geography, the term “quantitative revolution” has been utilized over the last couple of decades with regard to different shifts in diverse geographical, social, and academic settings, both by historiographers of geography and geographers who saw themselves as part of this “revolution.” The first use of the term is often attributed to Ian Burton (Burton 1963), who in 1963 – one year after obtaining his PhD in geography from the University of Chicago and without any reference to a spatial or national context – stated that “in the past decade geography has undergone a radical transformation of spirit and purpose, best described as the ‘quantitative revolution’” (Burton 1963, 151).

Given the wide range of spatial, historical, and theoretical contexts for which the term is applied, the concept is rather vague in analytical terms, and its widespread use blurs the remarkable diversity of on-the-spot realities and the complex and often contradictory relations between places and contexts. However, the act of framing these diverse phenomena as a “quantitative revolution” is an essential part of a strong and clear-cut narrative, which may be massively oversimplifying and even misleading, but has been proven to be very efficient over many decades in creating a firm identity for people who either claim themselves or are claimed by others to have been the key actors in introducing a “spatial science” approach to geography. This narrative has proven so capable of “surviving” in the long run that even alternative (e.g., critical and radical) approaches to geography, which emerged later along a conscious criticism of thinking about the discipline as spatial science, often overtook its highly monolithic and homogenizing understanding of “the quantitative revolution,” just replacing the former glorious narrative with a critical interpretation. What was an emancipation from conservative regionalism and a shift toward a theoretical as well as applied geography from the perspective of many “quantifiers,” thus became for the critics a technocratic endeavor without any real-world relevance that had to be overthrown by a revolutionary action (Harvey 2000). Most likely, nowhere was this more forcefully presented than in David Harvey’s 1972 “Revolutionary and Counter Revolutionary Theory in Geography and the Problem of Ghetto Formation” (Harvey 1972).

Based on these observations, the aim of this volume is to challenge the simplistic narratives of the “quantitative revolution” to reveal the multifaceted realities that it hides and the diverse ways it influenced different academic contexts and individual careers. Our goal is to provide a much more pluralistic story with diverse actors in diverse places, with diverse personal and academic backgrounds and motivations, pursuing diverse goals, and thus, becoming involved in different ways in events that are subsequently regularly identified as “cornerstones” of a quantitative “turn.”

Deconstructing clear-cut narratives of the “quantitative revolution”

Clear-cut narratives of the “quantitative revolution” are based on several claims or assumptions, which sometimes are made explicit, and they are regularly present implicitly:

• There was a group of “quantifying” scholars, who at a point in their life consciously and consistently became “quantitative,” even if they did not necessarily start their career as such. The works that they produced from then onward were thus predominantly “quantitative.” This finding is also true for people who later shifted to another approach, such as David Harvey (Harvey 1969) who shifted to Marxist geography (Harvey 1973) or Gunnar Olsson (Olsson 1968) who shifted to a more philosophical approach to geographic and cartographic reason (Olsson 1980). In certain terms, their “quantitative period” is still interpreted as thoroughly quantitative. In contrast to these people, their “Others” were “nonquantifiers,” who did not make any significant contribution to “quantification” – either they did not conduct any research or they only authored some “minor” and “insignifi-cant” works with quantitative tones. Thus, a person was either a “quantifier” or a “nonquantifier” at a specific point in time in his/her career. As revolutions only know revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, it hardly comes into question that someone may have simultaneously contributed to both quantitative and nonquantitative domains of the discipline.
• The “quantitative” in “quantitative revolution” is simultaneously an essential and discursive category. Scholars who were quantitative in terms of the works they produced also identified themselves as “quantifiers” and vice versa. The two sets match each other.
• “Quantifiers,” or at least their most prominent representatives, constituted one academic “group.” They were members of a common scholarly network with similar personal backgrounds (e.g., RAND in the USA), motivations, and goals. They were thus acting like a “vanguard,” which is also reflected often by their nicknames, such as “space cadets” – a name the “quantifiers” at the University of Washington acquired derisively from the UCLA cultural geographer Joe Spencer (Barnes 2004, 572). This dualistic self-identification was also linked to a generational divide in many cases (refer to Forest R. Pitts’ interpretation of “the modernists” vs. “the dinosaurs,” cited by Barnes 2004, 579).
• As a consequence of the previous points, the most important quantitative works were all the products of these “quantifiers.”
• Geography and geographers before the “quantitative revolution” fell short of adequately addressing the key practical issues of the 1950s and 1960s, partly because complex new challenges emerged, which previous geographers had been unfamiliar with, and partly because “prequantitative” geography had a limited capacity even to reflect on controversial topics of its era. As a result, geography lost much of its previous prestige both in academia and societal discourse. For example, US geography a lá Richard Hartshorne, which could not reserve the image of a “competent” discipline during WWII decision-making, induced a sort of internal “fermentation,” especially among a couple of young geographers (refer to Ackerman 1945; Schaefer 1953; Morrill 1984).
• The reason for such a decline in “prequantitative” geography was its claimed descriptive and “idiographic” nature. This discipline was not seeking general spatial regularities, did not create universally valid models, and lacked the kind of “sophisticated” mathematical-statistical methodology that could have enabled these models (Schaefer 1953). In other terms, it was “not modern” and not a science.
• The “quantitative revolution” was a revolution for the totally novel approach that it introduced, and more generally, the radical nature of the change that it initiated. Even if there had been a few “predecessors,” such as Walter Christaller in the 1930s, they were “so much ahead of their time” that their views failed to be integrated into the mindset and academic discourses of their contemporaries in geography (refer to Bunge 1962). In addition, the “quantitative revolution” was considered not a gradual, moderate, and organic change in the history of geography that is repeated but a historically unprecedented shift to a new era. This interpretation was strongly embedded in the modernist and developmentalist thinking of the post-WWII decades, becoming tangible in the works of leading US- and UK-based economists such as Karl Polanyi (1944), Walter Lewis (1954), Simon Kuznets (1955), and Walt Rostow (1960) (Taylor 1993; Gyuris 2014). For all of them, the social changes they hypothesized or described were not a few among many in human history but “The Great Transformation,” “the” turning point in the history of humanki...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Recalibrating the quantitative revolution in geography
• 2 In the footsteps of the quantitative revolution? Performing spatial science in the Netherlands
• 3 Geographies of quantitative geographies in Brazil: two versions of a revolution
• 4 Translation of quantitative geography in the Brazilian journals: the cases of the Boletim Geográfico (1966–1976) and Revista Brasileira de Geografia (1970–1982)
• 5 Digitality: origins, or the stories we tell ourselves
• 6 Multivariate functions: heterogeneous realities of quantitative geography in Hungary
• 7 A social history of quantitative geography in France from the 1970s to the 1990s: an overview of the blossoming of a multifaceted tradition
• 8 How landscape became ecosystem: the nature of the quantitative revolution in German geography
• 9 The urban revolution: how thinking about the city in 1920s German geography prepared the field for thinking about quantification and theory
• 10 A revolution in process: longue Durée and the social history of the increase in numerical data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics and the National Geography Council before the “quantitative revolution” (1938–1960)
• 11 Italian geographers and the origins of a quantitative revolution: from natural science to applied economic geography
• 12 The early years: William Bunge and Theoretical Geography
• 13 Mathematics against technocracy: Peter Gould and Alain Badiou
• 14 Conclusion: a virtual discussion about the quantitative revolution’s legacy for past, present, and future
• Index