Nature - autonomous learning

70 the ‘nature’ of geographyincluded location theory and in population geography the ‘gravity law’ ofmigration.Titles of new books – like Bunge’s (1962) Theoretical Geography andScheidegger’s (1961) Theoretical Geomorphology – boldly announced geography’snew emphasis. Finally, during the two decades after the SecondWorld War, those geographers aspiring to be scientific specialists tendedto favour numerical measurement and the use of descriptive and inferentialstatistics in their data collection and analysis. Indeed, one geographer in the1960s felt it no exaggeration to talk about a ‘quantitative revolution’ inthe subject after 1945 (Burton 1963).The shrinking centreWhile geography’s traditional subject matter was being apportionedto one or other ‘side’ of the discipline, other geographers still wished tooccupy the middle ground so beloved of their early twentieth-centuryforebears. Even during the ‘spatial science’ revolution there were manygeographers continuing to work in the regional mould commendedby Hartshorne or pursuing the cultural landscape research advocated bySauer. Some of these geographers came to see regional study as an ‘art’– an exercise in interpretative and imaginative synthesis (e.g. Gilbert 1960).But others, relatively small in number, sought to reinvent the human–environment tradition of research and teaching. Chief among them wasGilbert White at the University of Chicago.White was a student of Barrows.His Human Adjustment to Floods (1945) helped inspire a renewal – by way ofnarrowing their focus – of human–environment studies in geography.This narrowing entailed, first, a concentration on how people adjust(or fail to adjust) their behaviour in relation to extreme physical events(like floods). Second, White was interested in the human side of thisequation: in how peoples’ perceptions of hazard risk affected their choiceof where to live, where to work, and how to reduce their vulnerabilityto geophysical threats (see also Saarinen 1966). White’s work inspiredhis students – Ian Burton and Robert Kates – to undertake applied researchin flood management. This research developed policies sensitive tohow people’s often idiosyncratic perceptions of hazards affected theirdecision-making and hence their actual vulnerability to those hazards.Managing floods, White and his students showed, was not just aboutphysical planning but also about understanding people’s mental maps ofthe world.