Spatial science

From Geography

Spatial Science is an approach in the human geography, starting in the 1950’s. Geographers in North America and Britain were convinced that geography could be treated as any other science. Their aim was to specify the laws of spatial organization, by looking at the spatial patterns in landscapes and the human activity in these landscapes.

With the use of gravity models equivalent to Newtons ‘laws of gravitational attraction’, spatial scientists tried to explain and predict patterns of human interaction (migration flows, traffic flows, information flows) between settlements of different sizes and distances from one another (Cloke, P., Philo, C. & Sadler, D.,1991, p.66).

But critical notes came up, even from within the spatial scientist circle. Unease quickly emerged about the fact that ‘laws’ and ‘models’, that were made by spatial scientist, could never completely correspond to situations in real life. To overcome the discrepancy between reality and theory, some of them said it was needed to take a more probabilistic or stochastic approach. In this way, they reckoned that chance or random factors play a significant role in ‘distorting’ ideal patterns of interaction.

There is also another way to overcome the discrepancy between reality and theory. According to other spatial scientists the only solution was to design some sort of model which engaged the thoughts and actions of those people who did not act in the way you should expect by looking at older models.

Eventually, spatial science took human attributes of human decision-making seriously, which lead to towards a form of behavioural location theory (Cloke, P., Philo, C. & Sadler, D., 1991, p.66-67).

Cloke, P., Philo, C. & Sadler, D. (1991). Approaching Human Geography: An Introduction to Contemporary and Theoretical Debates. New York: Guilfort Press.

Edited by Malou van Woerkum & Robert Wursten