THE NATURE, UNITY AND VALUE OF GEOGRAPHY

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4 <strong>THE</strong> PR<strong>OF</strong>ESSIONAL GEOGRAPHER and business people in these meetings, and the use of our successful professional alumni iii the private and public sectors in our courses and seminars can also be val u ab le. The second problem of eclecticism and disunity can also be approached locally. Most departments need to review their courses carefully for titles and descriptions to determine that they, relate to key geographic concepts and also offer some fairly clear and useful knowledge or training for ourselves and others. I may well be wrong, but it is perhaps courses with titles like economic or social or political geography which lead to the charge of parasitism, whereas we are on distinctive ground if we emphasize geographic concepts like region, spatial organization, urban or rural, transportation, migration, spatial distribution, landscape and the like. Difficult as it may be, we need also to hammer out, formally if necessary, a complementary divi- sion of labor with competing programs. The object here is to create sequences of geography courses that come to be viewed as necessary and integral parts of such interdisciplinary areas as planning, transportation, population, and environmental, urban or area studies. Finally we should proudly and explicitly offer a core course or courses sum- marizing geographic theory and methodological issues, preferably as an advanced survey rather than as a history of geographic thought. Concepts like spatial organization and interaction, spatial or territorial behavior, regional development and change, evolution of landscape, regions and regionalization, graphic representation, efficiency and equity in location and in resource distribution and utilization should be emphasized, because only dimensional rather than phenomenological charac- teristics can unify physical and human, regional and topical, cultural-humanist and quantitative-locational geographies. Put more simply, a core course or courses should get across the message that location matters, that there are reasons why areas and places are different physically and culturally, that knowledge of how territory is organized and changes is a key problem in science and society. With respect to quality, there should be no mystery. It is a matter, at all levels in all activities,, of maintaining more rigorous standards, and of exercising greater self- discipline in meetings and journals. With respect to the placement of professional geographers, we are at the stage where we have to risk fights by aggressively competing for relevant planning and analytical positions in the private and public sectors. This may mean putting rela- tively more emphasis on masters programs, on internships, and on the real world involvement that is necessary to generate those internships and jobs. Too, the di- versity which was noted as a possible strength is also manifest as a weakness in the structure of many of our departmental programs. There is an understandable desire for broad coverage of the discipline, but with small staffs, this means a lack of depth and an inability to insure the quality specialized training that students need and employers deserve and which will gain the respect of other disciplines. We should not be discouraged by a review of the above problems. Geography has come a long way in the last twenty-five years. Despite the precipitous decline in our historic service role to education, despite the severe competition from regional science, urban and regional planning, and area and environmental studies, both the status and funding of geography have vastly improved. If we can maintain the momentum of recent years, we will be able to achieve as well as to deserve the centrality and occupational recognition we desire. Discussing problems of a discipline is difficult enough. Now I will take a greater risk and tackle the question of the nature of the discipline, since most of the above problems trace back to the nebulous image of geography. The question legitimately can be asked: if we cannot clearly, and with reasonable agreement, express the nature of the discipline, can and do we deserve recognition?
VOL. 35, NUMBER 1, FEBRUARY, 1983 5 What is Geography? What is special or unique about geography is simply that its object of analysis is the earth’s surface, and that its purpose is to understand how that surface is structured or differentiated. This purpose is best expressed through a small set of basic questions. (1) What is the structure or organization of the landscape and of flows that results from physical processes; how do these transform the landscape? (2) What is the territorial structure or organization and the flows that result from social and economic processes? How do these transform the landscape? (3) What is the relation between these physical processes and human settlement, behavior and development? (4) How do the facts of spatial separation and of differential physical endowment condition the operation of social and economic processes and the character of places and regions? (5) How can spatial process and structure best be analyzed and displayed? But scholars in other disciplines often ask such questions about the phenomena or processes they study, the skeptic will reply. According to the above questions, geography is certainly both a physical and a social science. What keeps the subject under meaningful limits? The justification for geography as a distinct discipline is two-fold. First, at a theoretical level, modern geography is demonstrating that fundamental principles of human-environmental interaction and spatial organization hold across broad classes of physical and human processes. The special contribution of geography is not only that our theories, models and analytical techniques enrich and improve the theory and practice of other disciplines, but also that spatial processes, behavior, and dif- ferentiation are fundamental phenomena of central scientific importance and com- prise the core of the discipline of geography. Yes, other disciplines do and have to ask these territorial questions. But it is only geography which realizes that the fact of space is not just an awkward inconvenience in our theories (economics, epidemiology, etc.) but a basic organizing principle of existence, that the landscape manifests an incredible structure of both general pat- tern and unique character that requires interdisciplinary comparison and integration to understand. Second, at a pedagogical level, geography can make a distinctive contribution in its capacity to describe and analyze how diverse physical and human processes do interact to produce particular regional landscapes, cultures and places. At an elementary level, this is often the only geography our critics remember (from the fourth grade) but at a university level, such integration can be an immensely creative and valuable contribution to international understanding and policy formation. Key Geographic Concepts The motto of the geographer might be that “location matters”: that physical and human processes are conditioned by the fact that all phenomena take up space and that the quality of locations differs inevitably and predictably; that humans must continually evaluate both the opportunities and the constraints that the characteris- tics of the surrounding environment and the separation of its elements present us. If this is a reductionist statement, and appears to exclude any who feel they are geographers, I need to know so that I can work on my powers of expression. To convince the skeptic that this argument is more than rhetoric, a few examples may be useful. For convenience, 1’11 use my own work, but the geography reader can substitute others.
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