Introduction
The image on the previous page of this book shows a photo of the 1969 installation ReticulĂĄrea (from the Latin reticulum or fine network) by the German-Venezuelan artist and Jewish refugee Gertrud âGegoâ 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. ReticulĂĄrea was one of many geometric artworks that she, who cultivated a dedicated interest in surfaces, structures, and geometry, described as âdrawings without paperâ (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, Gegoâs artistic work was critical, expressing âa growing skepticism toward ideal urban, geometric, and sculptural organizationsâ (Amor 2005, 125) that dominated the practice of urban planning in Venezuela during the 1960s and elsewhere. ReticulĂĄrea can thus âbe understood as a conflictive linear geometric body, whose behavior was a dialogical response to Gegoâs architectural background and the local material conditions in which her work was produced,â an artifact âupsetting the notion of architectural space as a container, and of line as the boundary of bodiesâ (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 ReticulĂĄrea âembraced a logic of displacementâ (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 âhistoryâ 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 âwhat tech calls thinkingâ (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 â at least from a European perspective â some justification for this recentering of the worldâs 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 HĂ€gerstrand (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 âquantitative revolutionâ in geography. Therefore, this book contributes to the ongoing discussions around the geographies and mobilities of knowledge (Jöns et al. 2017), notions of worlding (MĂŒller 2021), linguistic privilege, decolonizing and internationalizing of geographic knowledge (Ferretti 2020, 2021; Schelhaas et al. 2020; Minca 2018; Husseini de AraĂșjo 2018; Jöns 2018; Gyuris 2018). Within the history of geography, the term âquantitative revolutionâ 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 ârevolution.â The first use of the term is often attributed to Ian Burton (Burton 1963), who in 1963 â one year after obtaining his PhD in geography from the University of Chicago and without any reference to a spatial or national context â stated that âin the past decade geography has undergone a radical transformation of spirit and purpose, best described as the âquantitative revolutionââ (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 âquantitative revolutionâ 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 âspatial scienceâ approach to geography. This narrative has proven so capable of âsurvivingâ 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 âthe quantitative revolution,â 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 âquantifiers,â 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 Harveyâs 1972 âRevolutionary and Counter Revolutionary Theory in Geography and the Problem of Ghetto Formationâ (Harvey 1972).
Based on these observations, the aim of this volume is to challenge the simplistic narratives of the âquantitative revolutionâ 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 âcornerstonesâ of a quantitative âturn.â
