Spatial science and behavioural geography

From Geography

Spatial Science Spatial science ushered a brand new approach to from the beginning of the 1950's and onwards. Scientists who emphasized this new approach were initially to be found in North Amercia, and later on also in Great Britain. These scientists were convinced that in geography, to make progression, oppertunities lay in 'casting geograpghy as a fully fledged science of spatial patterns and relationships: as a science as any other science, the only difference that the purpose of geography was not to seek out laws of atomic motion, chemical reactions and so on, but to specify the fundamental laws of spatial organisation present in both natural landscapes and human activities in these landscapes' (Coke et. al. 1991. p. 66). An important difference between early geographists such as Woolridge, who strongly rooted in chatholicism an humanism in geographic views, and this 'new' movement called spatial science, was that spatical science looked upon geography with a 'newtonic' view. This means that their view on human geography was built upon a handful of foundational spatial laws, equal to to Newton's 'law of gravitational attraction'. Some key authors in spatial science are Christaller, Von Thunen an Weber.

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page created (20-09-2012): Kamiel Nuyens

Spatial science (work in progress): Kamiel Nuyens