Contributions toward a Macroeconomic Geography: A Review

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Geographical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Geographical Review. S-UBJECTIVE description, however delightful to contemplate, no longer continuesto satisfy a small but growing group of scholars in geography. The movement is afoot to pattern geography, particularly economic geography, after those branches of science in which the inductive-deductive investigation of systems has been so fruitful. This approach to economic geography involves-though not necessarily always in this order-the observation of voluminous data in the attempt to discover empirical regularities capable of mathematical statement, the formulation of operational functional concepts, and the testing of working hypotheses, the objective being the development of a theory of economic geography. Admittedly, such a prospect is not appealing to an already wellentrenched school of geography the members of which use such phrases as "a feeling for the area," "the personality of the region," and "man-land relationship." The proponents of purely verbal and descriptive methods in geography offer the extreme complexity of geographic reality as the reason for viewing their own endeavors as art.Interestingly enough, however, many who treat geography thus are consistently "outwritten" by the nonprofessionals who have occasion to write on what are considered to be geographic subjects and who also have journalistic skill coupled with imagination and ingenuity. We have come to expect-though we are often disappointed-that the educated layman will be familiar with the facts and descriptions of geography. Surely it is not too much to ask that the professional geographer offer more than just a more detailed knowledge of these facts. Moreover, artistic presentation is not incompatible with scientific endeavor. Doubly blest is the scientist who is capable of good writing. The type of geography which admits the importance of quantification and the appropriateness of statistical methodology, but always as servants and not as masters, would appear to be the best answer the profession can furnish to the embarrassing questions which have arisen during the current debate in academic circles regarding geography's right to be included in the curricula of institutions of higher learning. ONE SOCIAL SCIENCE Four recent books, two by geographers and two by nongeographers, offer much of

The discipline that came in from the cold: American human geography becomes a Cold War social science

“…. and physical science are but mutually related isomorphic examples of one generalized logic’ (Warntz, 1957: fn. 1, 422).…”

Seeing Spatial Structures: On the Role of Visual Material in the Making of the Early Quantitative Revolution in Geography

“…Stewart (1948) or Georg Zipf (1949) and the emergence of cybernetics, it became intriguing for any geographer trying to make the claim that geography could become a science by connecting it to physics (Barnes and Wilson 2014). Subsequently, there was a wide range of visual material that used depictions of concepts of the law of refraction, patterns of potentials, gravitation flows or the principle of uncertainty (Stewart 1947;Warntz 1957aWarntz , 1957bHaggett 1965). There were also analogies in the patterns and laws.…”

Big Data, social physics, and spatial analysis: The early years

“…Predictably Warntz’s conception of macrogeography was uncompromisingly monistic. Warntz was fond of repeating his own choice phrases, and there was no phrase he repeated more often than “social science … and physical science are but mutually related isomorphic examples of one generalized logic” (Warntz, 1957: 422, fn. 1).…”

“…Warntz thought geography had gone wrong when it turned to what he called microgeography, which was “preoccupied with the unique, the exceptional … and often the obvious” (Warntz, 1959b: 447). It relied on Zipf’s dreaded verbalism, “subjective description,” such as “a feeling for the area,” “the personality of the region,” and “man-land relationship” (Warntz, 1957, 420). Under this regime of verbalism, Warntz said microgeography “has been tried, found wanting, and is justifiably being discarded.” 22…”