Society and space – changing concepts in human geography
The way human geography conceptualizes space has played an important role in the evolution of the subject. In the 1960s and early 1970s a dominant approach in geography was that of spatial science. Growing out of spatial sociology and urban ecology, this was a largely quantitative endeavour based on the idea that the approach of the natural sciences (positivism) could be applied to the social sciences. By using sophisticated statistical measures of the distribution of phenomena it was believed that we could derive spatial laws that would explain and predict human activity. Space, then, could be read as a map of society. This approach gave precedence to the concept of absolute space. The paradigm was largely unsuccessful, partly because the techniques employed failed to capture the complexity of society and the importance of alternative concepts of space, although it is making something of a come-back now as new GIS technologies allow more sophisticated quantitative spatial analysis.