AAG: Geography at the Turn of the Century

Geography today is far different from its popular—but very outdated—image as a discipline concerned primarily with remembering the largest cities, the tallest mountains, the principal waterways, and major products. This factual information (now called the discipline’s “declarative knowledge base”) is still important and is summarized quite well in today’s atlases, gazetteers, and geo-referenced data files. But, for the last forty years in particular, geography has grown from a descriptive to an analytic science. Once called “the Queen of the Social Sciences” by noted economist Baumol, geography is now being touted as “the best integrative science today” by representatives from government, business, and academia.

Geography’s rich tradition of knowledge arises in part from its goal of spanning physical and human science, and, in particular, in focusing on how these two knowledge areas fit together. This makes it different from other human and physical sciences that tend to emphasize one side or the other of this global equation.

For about forty years, geographers have been slowly but surely building a structure of theories, models, methods, and technologies that are anchored in a technical vocabulary. The result is a discipline more easily identified and justified than before. This has given geography not just a “core” but also a defensible substance that helps one understand what today’s geography is all about and why today’s geographers are using the tools they do to solve the problems they believe are relevant and important.

In a paper presented at the recent annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers, internationally acknowledged GIS expert and pioneer of G.I.Science, Mike Goodchild, outlined some unique contributions made to qualitative and quantitative science by today’s geography practitioners. Loosely interpreted and modified somewhat, these include:

1. The integrative nature of geographic science, linking human and physical dimensions by seeking to understand human-environment relations.
2. The development over four decades of Spatial Analysis—the set of spatially based analytical tools that explicitly focus on comprehending the spatial component of geo-referenced data.
3. The use and comprehension of spatial representations, whether prepared in paper and ink and hardcopy (e.g., cartographic maps), as on-screen visualizations (e.g., images and graphics), or in digital remotely sensed imagery (e.g., satellite data and air photos). This unique way of representing data has influenced the way geographers reason and infer patterns, distribution, and relationships in spatial data, and was the prime factor in the invention of GIS.
4. Geography now has spatially explicit theory to complement the economic, social, political, cultural, biotic, meteorological, hydrological, geomorphological, and other theories that it borrowed from adjacent disciplines during the first sixty years of the 20th Century. Whether in human science or physical science domains, spatially explicit theory has added much to general understanding of the world around us.
5. Geographers, without exception, use place-based reasoning in their scientific endeavors, because, whether identified in absolute (e.g., global co-ordinate) or relative (proximal or local relational) ways, the place-specific nature of all things in real, imagined, or virtual worlds is paramount. Today’s geographers—more than ever before—relish this factor and make a search for understanding place-specificity their driving objective.
6. In a digital world where zooming comes at the click of a mouse button, the implications of scale change for theory, practice, and policy has reached critical levels. Geography has been important in making people aware of this, and in graphically illustrating how changing scale can subtly (and not so subtly) change the world as we view it. New scale dependent relationships are brought to view with every new GIS application. And finding scale independent relations is the first step to developing robust theory.

Geography in the 21st Century benefits from these and other distinguishing features, and, in so doing, has created a vigorous and up-to-date integrative science that is well along the way to justifying Baumol’s assessment. If we look at what geographers today are doing, we easily see examples of this dramatically changed emphasis.

1. Geographer Will Graf (Arizona State) has been examining the effect that damming the nation’s rivers and streams has had on downstream riparian ecology. He is also estimating what would happen to the riparian environment if many of the dams were removed.
2. Geographer Roger Downs (Pennsylvania State University) is examining how to teach people (from pre-school on) to “think spatially.” This interfaces work in cognitive psychology, education, and geography. In a Globalizing World and a Digital Earth, thinking spatially must be a fundamental skill needed to successfully integrate into the workforce.
3. Geographer Susan Hanson (Clark University) has recently completed a set of educational modules on “Global Change in Local Places.” These modules examine effects such as global warming trends on local agricultural bases or local epidemiology.
4. Geographers Michael Goodchild and Luc Auselin have established a new Center for Integrating Spatial Analysis into Social Science. This reflects the growing acknowledgement by human sciences that spatially referenced data must be analyzed by spatially aware professionals.
5. Geographers, surveyors, planners, and photogrammetrists are arguing over how GIS users should be certified and who is going to do it. This is a tribute to the growing importance of GIS in global and local science, and reflects on the rôle that geography today can play in helping decision makers at many levels to solve key problems.

In future columns, I will discuss other innovative activities of geography as it is now practiced. I hope this helps to clarify and supplement your image of our discipline. It has changed, and you need to be aware of it.

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