Geographers, ethics and social concern

Social concern, or relevance, was one of the main themes in human geography during the last three decades of the twentieth century. Preoccupation with the areal differentiation of life on earth, which had dominated the discipline until the 1960s, gave way to an emerging sense of responsibility for improving the human condition. An apparent lack of social concern on the part of the new numerical human geography helped to provoke the ‘radical’ reaction of the 1970s. Inequality and social justice became central issues, as the role of values in geography was explicitly recognised. The 1990s saw a broader ‘moral turn’, involving explorations of the interface between geography and ethics. British geography and geographers played a prominent part in the discipline's orientation towards ethics and social concern. The proliferation of issues of social concern prompted a rethinking of social geography.

Geographers and sexual difference: feminist contributions

Divisions based on the assumption that men and women are different from one another permeate all areas of social life as well as varying across space and between places. In the home and in the family, in the classroom or in the labour market, in politics, and in power relations, men and women are assumed to be different, to have distinct rights and obligations that affect their daily lives and their standard of living. Thirty years ago, there were no courses about gender in British geography departments. This chapter discusses the challenges to geographical knowledge, and to the definition of knowledge more generally, that have arisen from critical debates about the meaning of difference and diversity in feminist scholarship. It examines a number of significant conceptual ideas, namely: the public and the private; sex, gender and body; difference, identity and intersectionality; knowledge; and justice. Finally, it comments on the role of feminism in the academy as a set of political practices as well as epistemological claims.

Geography applied

This chapter discusses the main trends and the most prominent focuses of research regarding geography as an applied discipline. It concentrates on the contributions of geographers in Britain and the applied developments in human geography. The development of physical geography and earth sciences has been particularly influential on the development of applied geography at various stages. The chapter also examines regional planning and policy, town and country planning, land use planning and other specific fields.

The geographical underpinning of society and its radical transition *

Maps and mapping are the manifestation of geography for the great bulk of the population. These play a key role in society and underpin many functions of the state. The situation is particularly marked in Britain, both in war and peace, where the Ordnance Survey (the country's national mapping agency) has been central to national mapping for more than two centuries. It is no exaggeration to say that mapping underpins many of the activities of society, especially in Britain. The collation, visualisation and analysis of geographical information through maps are intimately intertwined. Since British geography and British geographers have been involved in all aspects of mapping and its successor, this chapter covers both academic and non-academic aspects of the subject area. This chapter examines the geographical underpinning of British society and its radical transformation, Geographical Information Systems and information technology and non-trivial cartography.

People and the contemporary environment

Geographical approaches to human-environment relations have been diverse and dynamic over the last century. They have also been heavily influenced not only by academic disciplines outside geography but by popular and policy concerns outside academia. From an initial flurry of activity about how the environment influences society in the early part of the century, British geography then took a detour to other topics even as other disciplines discovered the environment as a topic of interest. This left geographers playing ‘catch-up’ in the late twentieth century, as the discipline sought to reoccupy the ground previously abandoned. This is not over yet: in the 1990s, research into ‘the environment’ and ‘nature’ was scattered across academia. This chapter examines the relationship between humans and the contemporary environment, focusing on environmental protection, environmental management and ecological science, environmental policy and management, environmentalism, and environment and history.

The creation of humanised landscapes

The historical element and human action are implicit in the idea of the landscape. Such combinations, in various guises, often go under the name of historical geography. More latterly, the meaning of ‘history’, in its broadest sense, has been scrutinised closely because of the implicit subjective meaning embedded in any account of the past. Within geography, one of the earliest and most distinctive contributions to humanised landscapes came from the ‘Aberystwyth School’ of historically oriented human geography, which had an emphasis on anthropology and human ecology, and the western parts of Britain. As the l930s wore on, two figures emerged who were to dominate the debate about history in geography — Carl O. Sauer in the United States and H. C. Darby in Britain. There are basically two approaches to understanding past humanised landscapes — the reconstruction of these landscapes from consistent and comprehensive sources, and the mapping of relict features. Increasingly, both approaches combine history, archaeology, palaeobotany, and other disciplines.

The domestication of the earth

The domestication of the earth entails the enfolding of ‘nature’ into human life and society. This chapter focuses on the millennia of the Holocene, when human societies consisted of food collectors and agriculturalists who essentially lived off recently fixed solar energy. In the course of its last 100 years, geography has from time to time taken in, and focused its attention on, diverse approaches to its subject matter. But as a ground bass to these variations, the relation between humans and the environment has persisted, though sometimes virtually at sotto voce level. In part, geography's attention has concentrated on landscapes as visible demonstrations, past and present, of these interrelations, but it has also taken an approach based explicitly on late-twentieth-century ecological theory. This chapter examines humans as hunter-gatherers during prehistoric times, along with the emergence of agriculture in Britain.

Geographers and the fragmented city

By the end of the twentieth century, the focus of geography had narrowed, its content had become less disciplined by spatial concerns, and its subject matter had become fragmented. Geographers were writing about small, personal subjects: about identity and positionality, about statues and monuments. How and why did this come about? Perhaps because both the urban geography of Britain underwent massive change and the way in which British geographers thought about cities was revolutionised. This change in urban geography in Britain during the twentieth century can be attributed in part to the fact that the geography of British towns has changed significantly over the period. This chapter focuses on geographers and the fragmented city, starting with a brief account of the urban change and then moving on to discuss the shifts within the philosophy of geography. It also examines urban social segregation, with emphasis on race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality.

The geography of disease distributions

Over the course of the last century, the confused landscape that lies on the marchland of two very ancient subjects — geography and medicine — has been explored from several directions. Occasionally, scientists and practitioners from the hugely powerful medical state have travelled confidently into geographical terrain. Less often and less confidently, a scholar or two from the smaller neighbour has wandered into medical country. This chapter describes some of the terrain explored, the body of knowledge that has grown up around these contacts, and the extraordinary growth of research activity that has occurred in the last couple of decades. The chapter is confined to the twentieth century and is constrained geographically to ‘British’ research. In concentrating on the geography of disease distributions, this chapter surveys only some small part of the wider field of overlap between geography and medicine. It also discusses epidemiology and epidemiological modelling in Britain, cancer mapping, tropical diseases, atlases and the emergence of medical geography.

The passion of place

Place has long been a key element in geographical thought and writing. Along with ‘region’, it has been a core conceptual focus of what geography, or certainly human geography, has been thought to be about. In some ways, indeed, it is hard to separate region from place or place from region. ‘Places’ as objects of conceptualisation and of research raise some crucial issues that have long been the concern of geographers: the issue of spatial variation, the conceptualisation of space, and the passivity or influence of the spatial realm; the ‘problem’ of specificity and uniqueness, of the significance of these and of how (indeed whether) they can be ‘scientifically’ analysed; issues around the conceptualisation of ‘identity’; and the problems and possibilities of geography's supposed character as a synthesising discipline. This chapter recounts a history of the role of place in British geography.