Yi Fu Tuan

From Geography

Yi Fu Tuan (5 december 1930)

Yi Fu Tuan was an American (originally Chinese) professor in geography at the university of Wisconsin-Madison till 1998. Tuan had revolutionary and innovative ideas about human geography. For instance nowadays there are lots of thoughts about the relationship between human geography and philosophy, psychology and religion. But in the 1960’s and 1970’s Tuan could be considered as a pioneer at that area. He was one of the first geographers which considered that there was a strong relationship between those different types of movements/sciences and (human) geography (Rosenberg, 2009).

Tuan was highly interested in the way people feel and think of place and space. But also in the way people are attached to for instance their home, neighbourhood or town/city/country. Further more Tuan thought about how the feelings of people about space and time were influenced by the sense of time. A well know quote of Tuan about place and space is: ‘’Place is security and space is freedom: we are attached to the one and are longing for the other.’’ (Yi Fu Tuan, 2001) This quote shows how complex the whole process and science along human geography is and can be. Tuan makes clear that there are possible paradoxes in the scientific field of human Georgraphy.

References

- Matt Rosenberg, (2009), ‘’Geographer Yi Fu Tuan - A Biography of the Famous Chinese-American Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’’ URL= http://geography.about.com/od/historyofgeography/a/yifutuan.htm

- Yi Fu Tuan, (2001), ‘’Space and Place – The perspective of experience’’ University of Minnesota press.

Contributors

--MaikVanDeVeen 20:06, 30 December 2012 (CET)