The Dictionary of Human Geography (13 page)

behavioural geography
A sub discipline emphasizing the psychological underpinnings of individual spatial behaviour; in particular, the cognitive and decision making processes that intervene between a complex environment and human action. In its earliest expression this work was more humanistic, exemplified in the historical musings of J.K. Wright in the 1940s (Keighren, 2005), and the influential essays of Lowenthal (1961) and Brookfield (1969) on environmentaL experience and perception. While this tradition led into humanistic geography, behavioural geography was typi cally more formal and analytic, drawn into the positivist paradigm of locational analy sis. Its characteristic question was: Given the assumption of rational behaviour, why did an actual location or pattern of spatial behaviour depart from an optimal form? (See location theory.) The answer was seen to be a product of decision making, and notably the human tendency to have only incomplete information, to make imperfect choices, and to be satisfied with sub optimal options. Applications in cluded Wolpert?s (1964) study of Swedish farmers and Pred?s (1967) analysis of indus trial location. In each instance, behaviour was seen to be satisficing rather than optimizing as predicted, for decision makers were not only incapable but even unwilling to com promise other values in order to maximize their utility functions. Similar work examined the journey to shop, and showed again how, both in terms of retail location and shopping behaviour, cognitive variables intervened to complicate geographically rational behaviour (see retailing). A particular emphasis was upon preference structures in spatial behav iour, modelling such topics as place utility and residential search. The most celebrated work was conducted by Peter Gould and his students who examined the mental maps, or preference surfaces, within different countries held, usually by students, and which might permit the prediction of subsequent migra tion (Gould and White, 1993 [1974]). (NEW PARAGRAPH) One of the most interesting and applied aspects of behavioural geography was work examining human perception of environmen taL hazards. Typically, this research ad dressed itself to a seemingly anachronistic location decision. Why did people or industry locate in unpredictable sites such as flood plains or areas of earthquake or avalanche hazard? How was such irrational behaviour to be explained? The pioneering work by Robert Kates and Gilbert White on floodplain hazards inspired many subsequent studies, which included increasing methodological sophisti cation. For example, Saarinen?s (1966) innovative study of the perception of drought hazard by farmers on the Great Plains postu lated the existence of a distinctive personality disposition, which he explored using the thematic apperception test, a personality assessment measure. A range of related per sonality assessments, such as personal con struct theory and the semantic differential, were employed, and in this work geography and psychology became close neighbours (Ait ken, 1991; Kitchin, Blades and Golledge, 1997). During the 1970s, in particular, this productive interdisciplinary relationship was developed through the annual meetings of the Environmental Design Research Associ ation and in the pages of the new journal, Environment and Behavior (see environmen tal psychology). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Since that period, behavioural geography has continued to diversify, even if its position has been less elevated than in the 1960s and 1970s when many disciplinary leaders worked in this sub discipline. More recent research has included analysis of environmental learning, spatial search, developmental issues in spatial cognition and cartography and Golledge?s (1993) important work with the disabled and sight impaired (see disability). But some of the lustre has left the field. In part, this may be related to the methodological sensibilities of post positivist human geography. In part, it is due to the growing conviction of the inherently socialized nature of geographical knowledge, which challenges the individualism of psycho logical models. In part, it emanates from a suspicion of the adequacy of an epistemology of observation and measurement that may leave unexamined non observable and non measurable contexts and ideological forma tions. Nonetheless, behavioural geography has a continuing legacy, comprehensively itemized and integrated in the massive compilation of Golledge and Stimson (1997). dl (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gold (1980); Golledge and Stimson (1997); Walmsley and Lewis (1993). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Berkeley School
American cultural geo graphy was dominated until the 1980s by Carl Sauer, his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley and their students. While this type of cultural geography is no longer important in Berkeley, it remains a re search tradition carried on by former Berkeley students and their students scattered through out the world. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Arguably, no geographer had more influ ence on American geography in the twentieth century than Carl Ortwin Sauer (1889 1975). He received his PhD in 1915 from the Univer sity of Chicago, where he came under the influence of the environmental determinism of Ellen Churchill Semple. In 1923 he moved to Berkeley, and under the influence of the anthropologists A.L. Kroeber and R.H. Lowie was exposed to a concept of culture that was to replace his earlier environmentalist ideas. In 1925 Sauer wrote what is perhaps his best known essay, ?The morphology of land scape?, which strongly denounced environ mental determinism and suggested a method by which cultural geographers should conduct their fieldwork (Sauer, 1963b [1925]). Shortly after arriving at Berkeley, Sauer developed what was to become a life long interest in latin america, and there remains a strong connection with the region in the work of subsequent generations of his students. Cultural geography, for Sauer, was the study of the relationship between humans and the land (see also cultural landscape). During the latter part of his career, he pursued two broad, rather specu lative historical themes. The first focused on such questions as early humans? use of fire and the seashore as a primeval habitat, while the second explored the condition of America when Europeans first encountered it. (NEW PARAGRAPH) While giving Sauer his due, it must be remembered that most of the ideas that he introduced into the field historical recon struction, cultural hearth and diffusion amongst them were current at the time in German geography (see anthropogeography) and American cultural anthropology. His intellectual debt to Friedrich Ratzel, Otto Schluter, Eduard Hahn and A.L. Kroeber was immense. Sauer and his students placed a greater emphasis upon human relationships with the physical environment than did the anthropologists, whose interests not only included human environment relations but whose focus was on human behaviour more generally. Wagner and Mikesell (1962) iden tify three principal themes that define the work of the Berkeley School. The first is the diffu sion of culture traits, such as plants, animals and house types. The second is the identifica tion and evolution of culture regions through material and non material traits (cf. sequent occupance). The third is cultural ecology, usually also studied in historical perspective. Sauer?s persistent insistence on the import ance of an historical perspective ensured that many American geographers referred to a dis tinctively hybrid cultural historical geography. (NEW PARAGRAPH) It has been argued that the Berkeley School adopted a reified ?superorganic? conception of culture from the anthropologist A.L. Kroeber (Duncan, 1980). After the 1980s, the Berkeley School served as a counterpoint for New (NEW PARAGRAPH) Cultural Geographers of a more theoretical bent. In the past decade, however, some cul tural geographers who feel that New Cultural Geography had been too discursive and human in its focus, paying insufficient atten tion to nature, have come to a new appreci ation of some of the more environmentally focused contributions of the Berkeley School (Price and Lewis, 1993). jsd (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Leighly (1963); Wagner and Mikesell (1962). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
bid-rent curve
A plot of the rent that people are prepared to pay against distance from some point, usually the city centre. Rent bids generally decrease with increasing distance from a city or its centre where land values are highest, so a bid rent curve slopes down in a diagram with rent on the vertical axis and distance displayed horizontally (see aLonso modeL; distance decay). The curve is sometimes shown as convex to the graph?s origin, to reflect sharp decreases in rent with short distances from the city (centre), levelling off with increasing distance. Bid rent curves are an important element in models of both.. urban and agricultural land use (cf. von thu nen modeL). dms (NEW PARAGRAPH)
biodiversity
A term defined in the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) as ?the variability among living organ isms from all sources including inter alia ter restrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems? (Article 2). The stated objectives of the Convention are ?the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its compon ents and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources? (Article 1). (NEW PARAGRAPH) As Jeffries (1997) points out in his account of the rise of biodiversity as a matter of scien tific and policy concern, the term was barely used in scientific or policy communities before the 1980s. He tracks its rise to the develop ment of a scientific infrastructure associated with the new field of conservation biology, including a learned society (the Society for Conservation Biology), a scientific journal (Conservation Biology) and an undergraduate teaching programme (at the University of California, Berkeley), all established in 1985. This body of work focused on recording and accounting for the observed and hypothesized decline in the variety of living organisms in any number of contexts a decline represented as a human driven process of extinction. Defined by its sense of urgency, biodiversity conserva tion readily took on the mantle of a global environmental crisis in both scientific and popular imaginations through such totemic (and telegenic) spaces as the Amazonian rain forest. The rapid uptake of this new scientific agenda in the world of international environ mental policy making, centred on the United Nations, is attributed by Takacs (1996) to the influential efforts of some of its leading scien tific sponsors whom he collectively labels the ?rainforest mafia?, notably the eminent US biologist E.O. Wilson. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Efforts to reduce the rate of decline in bio logical diversity associated with global and local management practices fostered under the CBD, such as Biodiversity Action Plans, are bound up with the rather different agendas of those concerned with exploiting biodiversity as a new form of natural resource (Bowker, 2000; see also genetic geographies). Among a number of problematic tensions inherent in these management regimes, two have drawn significant and persistent political fire. First, the CBD regime sets biological diversity apart from, and at odds with, human society and activity. This is contradicted by the historical record of co evolution between humans, plants and animaLs, which has left its mark, through processes such as domesticatioN, on the genetic and phenotypic diversity of our biological heritage today. Second, the CBD regime has generated some highly contested management arrangements, such as those permitting the slaughter of animals belonging to mammal species threatened with extinction in order to generate income to invest in the protection of the remaining species population. sw (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bowker (2000); Jeffries (1997); Takacs (1996); United Nations Environment Programme (1992). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
biogeography
One of the oldest sub fields of the discipline, concerned with describing and explaining the spatial patterns of the dis tribution of living organisms: where they are, where they are not and why. While this field of concern has now become tightly bound up with the rise of scientific and policy effort to manage species extinctions and conserve bio logical diversity (see biodiversity), the study of biogeography represents an important and generative common ground between human and physical geographers, both historically and today (see Spencer and Whatmore, (NEW PARAGRAPH) 2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, biogeography was a focus of analy sis across disciplines such as geography, an thropology and archaeology, both for those concerned with the development of human societies and for those concerned with the distribution and viability of animal or plant populations. Cultural geographers such as Carl Sauer, for example, framed their ac counts of societal development in terms of the ecological fabric of a region or landscape in which it was situated (see Berkeley school). While these concerns fell from fa vour in cultural geography as divisions be tween natural and social science perspectives and practices became more entrenched (see environmental determinism), they have gained new impetus from the popular science writing of sociobiologists such as Jared Dia mond, in his account of the connections be tween the social and ecological collapse in the historical demise of any number of civiliza tions (Diamond and LeCroy, 1979). As a result, for much of the late twentieth century biogeography became, in effect, a sub specialty within physical geography, as represented by the leading academic publi cation, the Journal of Biogeography. This sub discipline has fared unevenly in the research agendas and teaching curricula of the discip line in different parts of the world. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In its twenty first century incarnation, biogeography has regained its status as a gen erative common ground that takes life as its central concern, inspired by two currents (see Thrift, 2005a). The first of these is the rise of the life sciences and their potency in reworking the genetic fabric of living kinds, including humankind. The second is a renewed interest in the resources of biophilosophy that in forms academic and popular concerns about the social and ecological implications of the biotechnologies that are proliferating at the interface between life and computer sciences (see Greenhough and Roe, 2006). Between the policy investment in biodiversity and the intellectual re investment in the question of life, biogeography has become an important focus of transdisciplinary work between social and natural scientists. sw (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Diamond (1979); Greenhough and Roe (2006); Quamen (1996); Spencer and Whatmore (2001); Thrift (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)