Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 77A nature-free human geography?One of the problems with the theories and models put forward by‘scientific’ human geographers was that they offered highly approximatedescriptions and explanations of migration patterns, industrial location,commuting behaviour and the like.Among other reasons, this was becausethey made simplistic assumptions about how human actors make decisionsin real-world contexts. In effect, 1960s human geography was ‘in-human’:it failed to understand the complexities of real people living and acting inconcrete situations. Instead, there was a preference for analysing large datasets about the number and destination of migrants; about the number, type,and location of industries; about the volume and distance-decay characteristicsof commuting; and so on. In short,‘spatial scientists’ on the humanside of geography studied people ‘at a distance’.This paved the way for what became known as behavioural geography.Among its precursors was the hazard-perception work of White,Saarinen and others. Formally inaugurated with Cox and Golledge’s (1969)Behavioural Problems in Geography, this approach ‘promised the constructionof more realistic and human-centred models of the world’ by ‘focusing onthe complex ways that people obtain sensory information from, makesense of, and remember their surroundings’ (Hubbard et al. 2002: 36).Ontologically, behaviourists argued that people are not the same as rocksor atoms (echoing Dilthey’s late-nineteenth-century arguments). If there’san order and regularity to human decision-making and human actionit is, they argued, a ‘fuzzy’ one. On the basis of this belief, behaviouralgeographers examined how different people process information fromtheir surroundings, mould it into definite thoughts, beliefs and attitudes,and then undertake actions on this basis. Such an approach took it asaxiomatic that if human decision-making could be described in law-liketerms then these terms would be stochastic and probabilistic not rigidlydeterministic. The theories and models used came from psychology,landscape-planning and micro-sociology. In methodological terms,behavioural geographers measured people’s perceptions, understandingsand attitudes using psychometric tests, questionnaires, rating scales and thedrawing of mental maps. Overall, behavioural geography challengedthe universal rationality postulate of the spatial scientists. If people had a‘nature’ at all, the behaviourists argued, it was their special capacity to thinkand act in context-specific ways.