Criticism of Quantification in Geography

• The quantitative revolution of the 1950s–60s tried to turn geography from an idiographic study of unique regions into a nomothetic spatial science, built on positivism, statistics and models.
• From the start it drew critics. In the 1970s the criticism widened into a rejection of positivist spatial science, from behavioural, humanistic, radical and later feminist geographers.
• The debate settled two questions: whether quantification is sensible in geography, and whether law-making is possible at all. The present answer is a balance: numbers are tools within a research question, not a philosophy of the whole discipline.

Lines of Criticism

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Early Critics (1950s–60s)

• Ian Burton (1963) sorted the opponents into five groups:
  • those who thought geography was heading in the wrong direction;
  • those who wanted geographers to keep to their proven tool, the map;
  • those who accepted quantification for certain tasks only;
  • those who saw means raised above ends, with methods studied for their own sake;
  • those who objected not to numbers but to the quantifiers’ attitude.
• O. H. K. Spate (“Quantity and Quality in Geography”, 1960) accepted the tools but warned that measurement is a means, not an end. Counting and classifying do not by themselves give understanding.
• L. Dudley Stamp (1966) called the movement a “civil war” and a near-religion whose “golden calf” was the computer.
  • He feared that information which could not be punched on a card would be thrown away, and that ethical and aesthetic values would be ignored.
• Fred Lukermann (1958) attacked the social physicists. Hypotheses built by analogy with physics cannot be falsified, and statistical regularities do not explain anything.
• J. O. M. Broek (1965) noted that mass data on behaviour existed only for rich countries over about a century. Theories built from the “here and now” were then projected onto the whole world.
• R. Minshull (1970) warned that the landscape was becoming a “nuisance” to modellers, whose models fitted only a flat, featureless plain. Ideal generalisations could be mistaken for reality, and modellers might defend a favoured model instead of testing it.

Philosophical Criticism: Positivism and Value-Freedom

• False objectivity. Positivism separates observer from observed, as if the researcher stood outside society. Critics replied that the choice of questions, data and models is itself value-laden.
• No room for values. Excluding beliefs, customs, emotions and normative questions (what ought to be) produced a partial picture of the man–environment relationship.
• Status quo. Models that describe existing behaviour treat current inequalities as given. In that sense they support the status quo.
• Geometry is static. Robert Sack (1972) argued that space, time and matter cannot be separated in explanation. Geometric laws have no time in them, so they can describe patterns but cannot explain the processes that produce them.

Behavioural Criticism: The Unreal Decision-Maker

• The models assumed “economic man” with perfect knowledge on an isotropic plain.
  • Herbert Simon’s “satisficer” chooses a satisfactory option from the few alternatives known.
  • Julian Wolpert (1964) found that Swedish farmers fell well short of the economically optimal output.
• Central place theory and similar models matched actual settlement patterns only loosely. People act on the perceived environment, not the objective one.
• Indian farmers’ choices of crops, for example, weigh risk, subsistence needs, custom and credit, not profit alone.
• This line of criticism kept generalisation but changed its starting point to perception and cognition. It produced behavioural geography.

Humanistic Criticism: Meaning and Experience

• Humanistic geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan, Edward Relph and Anne Buttimer rejected the reduction of people to points, flows and variables.
  • Spatial science could not handle meaning, intention, attachment to place or lived experience.
  • Audrey Kobayashi and Suzanne Mackenzie (1989) observed that the people of spatial science acted “without feeling, emotion, or the consideration of alternatives”.
• They sought understanding (verstehen) of unique people and places, not laws.

Radical Criticism: Space, Capital and Justice

• David Harvey had been the chief methodologist of spatial science (Explanation in Geography, 1969). He turned against it, declaring that the quantitative revolution had “run its course”.
  • In Social Justice and the City (1973) he argued that elegant models had little to say about poverty, racism and urban crisis.
• Radical geographers charged that locational analysis served capitalist efficiency and profit-maximising location without asking who gains and who loses.
• Some went further. Michael Eliot Hurst (1980) called for a “de-definition” of geography, and Marxist critics treated space itself as a “fetish” that hides social relations.
  • In this view there is no spatial theory apart from social theory.

Feminist Criticism: The Universal Male Subject

• Feminist geographers argued that spatial science assumed a universal, disembodied (implicitly male) observer and an equally universal subject.
  • It ignored how gender, race, sexuality, class and age shape access to space, mobility and safety.
  • Gillian Rose (Feminism and Geography, 1993) traced this to a masculinist rationality that valued detachment and abstraction over situated knowledge.
• Inferential statistics treated individuals as interchangeable cases. This hid difference and subjectivity, and rewarded what could be counted over what mattered.

Methodological Criticism: The Limits of the Tools

• Data problems: sophisticated models needed reliable data, which was scarce in developing countries. In India, district and tehsil data often did not match the units a model required.
  • Forecasts frequently failed, and over-generalisation was common.
• Statistical inference misfits geography:
  • Robert J. Bennett (1985) pointed out that geographical data are non-repeatable, and the “sample” is often the whole population.
  • Values at nearby places are alike (spatial autocorrelation), which violates the independence that standard tests assume.
  • Results change with how areas are drawn and grouped. Stan Openshaw (1984) named this the modifiable areal unit problem.
• Western bias: a few models drawn from North America and Western Europe were treated as universal.
  • Brian Berry (1973) himself identified four distinct urban “worlds”: North America and Australia, Western Europe, the Third World and the socialist bloc.
• Divided discipline: spatial science and the reactions against it pulled human geography toward social theory and physical geography toward natural science. Both moves weakened the unity of the subject.

Was the Revolution a Success?

Gains

• Rigour: hypothesis testing, sampling and statistical literacy became permanent parts of geographical method.
• Theory: the shift from describing the unique to seeking the general in the particular was accepted even by sceptics such as Spate. Trevor Barnes (2001) called it a pivotal moment that shaped human geography for decades.
• Scope: all spatial flows and interactions became geography’s concern. Computers and systems thinking prepared the ground for GIS.
• Burton’s verdict: judged by its own aim of building theoretical, model-based geography, the revolution succeeded. Its methods became conventional wisdom within a decade.

Losses

• Space as an empty plane. Space was treated as a pre-social, absolute surface for measurable relationships between things. This took the thinking human being out of human geography until behavioural and humanistic work brought it back.
• Few lasting laws. By the second edition of Peter Haggett’s Locational Analysis in Human Geography (1977), its authors conceded that the stock of models was “unprepossessing”.
  • Attention shifted from building a general spatial science to methods as means.
• Fragmentation. The critiques of the 1970s turned into mutually hostile camps for a time.

Legacy and Balance

• Quantification without positivism. Since the 1990s geographers have separated the tools from the philosophy:
  • Paul Plummer and Eric Sheppard (2001) argued that emancipatory research need not be qualitative;
  • Mei-Po Kwan used feminist GIS to map women’s time-space constraints;
  • A. Stewart Fotheringham (2006) argued that quantitative geography is not inherently positivist.
• Critical GIS: debates following Ground Truth (ed. John Pickles, 1995) made participatory and counter-mapping part of GIS practice.
  • Indian examples include community mapping of forest rights under the Forest Rights Act and slum mapping for planning.
• Uneven use by branch: transport, economic and urban geography, close to engineering and economics, stay strongly quantitative. Cultural, feminist and political geography lean on qualitative methods. Health, hazard and climate-vulnerability mapping combine both.
• Mixed methods are now the norm: numbers for how much and where, interpretation for why and with what meaning. Quantification survives as a tool chosen for the question at hand, not as the definition of geography.