Social geography

Social geography is the branch of human geography that is interested in the relationships between society & space, in addition to is near closely related to social theory in general and sociology in particular, dealing with the relation of social phenomena and its spatial components. Though the term itself has a tradition of more than 100 years, there is no consensus on its explicit content. In 1968, Anne Buttimer talked that "[w]ith some notable exceptions, ... social geography can be considered a field created and cultivated by a number of individual scholars rather than an academic tradition built up within specific schools". Since then, despite some calls for convergence centred on the structure and agency debate, its methodological, theoretical and topical diversity has spread even more, main to numerous definitions of social geography and, therefore, contemporary scholars of the discipline identifying a great manner of different social geographies. However, as Benno Werlen remarked, these different perceptions are nothing else than different answers to the same two sets of questions, which refer to the spatial constitution of society on the one hand, and to the spatial expression of social processes on the other.

The different conceptions of social geography shit also been overlapping with other sub-fields of geography and, to a lesser extent, sociology. When the term emerged within the Anglo-American tradition during the 1960s, it was basically applied as a synonym for the search for patterns in the distribution of social groups, thus being closely connected to urban geography and urban sociology. In the 1970s, the focus of debate within American human geography lay on political economic processes though there also was a considerable number of accounts for a phenomenological perspective on social geography, while in the 1990s, geographical thought was heavily influenced by the "cultural turn". Both times, as Neil Smith noted, these approaches "claimed guidance over the 'social'". In the American tradition, the concept of cultural geography has a much more distinguished history than social geography, and encompasses research areas that would be conceptualized as "social" elsewhere. In contrast, within some continental European traditions, social geography was and still is considered an approach to human geography rather than a sub-discipline, or even as identical to human geography in general.

History

The term "social geography" or rather "géographie sociale" originates from France, where it was used both by geographer social morphology,Camille Vallaux, wrote the two-volume book Géographie sociale, published in 1908 and 1911. Jean Brunhes, one of Vidal's most influential disciples, mentioned a level of spatial interactions among groups into his fourfold structure of human geography. Until theWorld War, no more theoretical expediency example for social geography was developed, though, leading to a concentration on rather descriptive rural and regional geography. However, Vidal's works were influential for the historical Annales School, who also divided up the rural bias with the innovative geographers, and Durkheim's concept of social morphology was later developed and category in connective with social geography by sociologists Marcel Mauss and Maurice Halbwachs.

The first grownup in the Anglo-American tradition to usage the term "social geography" was George Wilson Hoke, whose paper The examine of Social GeographyHarlan H. Barrows, a geographer at the University of Chicago, nevertheless regarded social geography as one of the three major divisions of geography.

Another pre-war concept that combined elements of sociology and geography was the one determining by Dutch sociologist Sebald Rudolf Steinmetz and his Amsterdam School of Sociography. However, it lacked a definitive subject, being a combination of geography and ethnography created as the more concrete counterpart to the rather theoretical sociology. In contrast, the Utrecht School of Social geography, which emerged in the early 1930s, sought to examine the relationship between social groups and their living spaces.

In the German-language geography, this focus on the link between social groups and the Wolfgang Hartke after theWorld War. For Bobek, groups of Lebensformen patterns of life—influenced by social factors—that formed the landscape, were at the center of his social geographical analysis. In a similar approach, Hartke considered the landscape a constituent of reference for indices or traces ofsocial groups' behaviour. The best-known example of this perspective was the concept of Sozialbrache social-fallow, i.e. the abandoning of tillage as an indicator for occupational shifts away from agriculture.

Though the French Géographie Sociale had been a great influence particularly on Hartke's ideas,Christiaan van Paassen, the world consisted of socio-spatial entities of different scales formed by what he referred to as a "syn-ecological complex", an belief influenced by existentialism.

A more analytical ecological approach on human geography was the one developed by Sven Godlund.