Radical Approach in Geography (Radicalism)

• Radical geography is the approach that explains spatial inequality, poverty and environmental damage as products of the social relations of capitalism, and asks geographers to help change those relations rather than merely map their results.
  • It arose in the late 1960s in the United States as part of the critical revolution against value-neutral spatial science.
• It began as a broad “relevance” movement with a liberal wing and a radical wing. From about 1972 the radical wing found its theoretical base in Marxism, so that radical geography and Marxist geography came to mean much the same thing.
• Its lasting legacy is the political economy perspective, now one of the central frameworks of human geography.

Emergence of Radical Geography

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The Social and Political Setting

• Economic slowdown: after two decades of post-war growth, the American economy slowed in the late 1960s. Many citizens felt that the prosperity of the post-1945 years had not reached all sections of society.
• Civil rights and the urban crisis: grievances over poverty and racial discrimination fed the Civil Rights Movement and the riots that swept American cities in the late 1960s.
  • Black ghettos in the inner cities, with poor housing and services, exposed the failure of growth-first, profit-led policies to deliver social justice.
• The Vietnam War: large sections of society, especially students and youth, saw the war as imperialist aggression. Campus protest spread from the United States to Europe and peaked in 1968, the year of the Paris student and worker uprising.
• Environmental crisis: pollution and resource depletion were traced to an unrestricted growth ethic and profit maximisation.
• Political radicalism revived: mass demonstrations against policy at home and abroad, a revival of socialist parties and radical movements in almost every field.

The Relevance Movement in Geography

• These pressures forced every science to ask what its research was for. In geography the shift was from the location of supermarkets and highways to poverty, race and the quality of life.
  • David M. Smith (1971) called it a “radical revolution”; Hugh Prince (1971) a “social relevance revolution”.
• Critique of the quantitative phase: during the quantitative revolution, research topics had often been chosen because a technique or computer program was available.
  • Method had inverted the logic of research: theory and real problems should define the data, not the other way round.
• Wilbur Zelinsky’s paper “Beyond the Exponentials: The Role of Geography in the Great Transition” (1970) warned of the dangers of the growth syndrome in rich countries. He gave the geographer three roles:
  • Diagnostician: mapping population pressure on resources, pollution, crowding and stress.
  • Prophet: forecasting likely futures.
  • Architect: drawing blueprints for preferred futures to guide policy-makers.
• Earlier groundwork: social themes had been building through the 1960s. Multivariate methods were applied to regional “economic health” (Thompson and associates, 1962), medical geography was growing, and level-of-living indices were proposed for regionalisation.
• Institutional response: the Association of American Geographers held a special session on geography and public policy in 1970 and set up a standing committee on it. The Institute of British Geographers took public policy as its conference theme in 1974.

Liberal and Radical Streams

• The relevance movement split into two streams that differed on whether the system could be repaired.
  • The liberal stream accepted democratic capitalism but sought state action to reduce territorial inequality in well-being. It grew into welfare geography, mapping social indicators and asking “who gets what, where and how”.
  • The radical stream held that nothing short of structural, socialist change could create a just society.

Phases of Development

• Liberal phase (late 1960s): in Richard Peet’s account, early “radical” work was really left-liberal. It applied the existing techniques of spatial analysis to poverty and race, and treated only the surface symptoms of inequality.
• Critique phase: geographers began to question the ideology built into existing models and theories.
• Marxist turn (from 1972): David Harvey’s paper “Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary Theory in Geography and the Problem of Ghetto Formation” (Antipode, 1972) argued that ghettos could be tackled only at their source, the land market.
  • From then on the aim shifted from socially relevant research to building a radical theoretical base, increasingly found in Marx.
  • Steen Folke (1972), replying to Harvey, pressed the case for a Marxist alternative to the liberal perspective, which he saw as serving the values of the ruling class.
  • By about 1974, liberals and radicals had parted ways. Radicals dismissed liberal remedies as defending the status quo, since they treated immediate causes and never questioned the system.
• Maturity (1980s): the movement became more sober and academic.
  • Marxism itself had been critically revised, and the 1979–83 recession and closer knowledge of actually existing socialism made revolutionary politics less attractive.
  • By the end of the decade, political economy had become a mainstream perspective in human geography rather than a dissident one.

The Political Economy Perspective

• Political economy goes back to the classical economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo. It joins two questions: how a surplus is produced and accumulated, and how it is distributed among classes. Distribution is a political act.
  • Karl Marx fused production and distribution into a theory of revolutionary change, and insisted that such concepts are historical, not eternal.
• The term fell out of use after the late 19th century and revived in the 1960s. Its geographical version is mostly Marxian, but Richard Peet and Nigel Thrift (New Models in Geography, 1989) stressed that it was never confined to Marxism.
• They traced a long critical thread in the discipline:
  • Environmental determinism and its critics: determinism had justified Euro-American imperial expansion. Karl Wittfogel (1929) answered that human labour, organised in different societies, moulds the environment.
  • Areal differentiation and its critique: the chorological retreat into unique regions avoided theory, and post-war anti-communism muted deeper criticism.
  • Spatial science and the radical movement: the inadequacy of spatial science for a socially useful geography produced the radical break.
• Core premise: production may look economic, but the distribution of surplus is shaped by power. Politics and economy are inseparable, and the state plays a key role, which is why political geography also revived from the late 1970s.

Strands, Institutions and Thinkers

Anarchist Roots

• Early radical geographers rediscovered two 19th-century anarchist geographers:
  • Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), author of “What Geography Ought to Be” (1885) and Mutual Aid (1902). He held that co-operation, not competition, is the lasting basis of social life, and that capitalism’s competition widens disparities.
  • Élisée Reclus (1830–1905), whose L’Homme et la Terre (1905–08) joined social criticism to world geography.
• Anarchism seeks to replace the state with voluntary associations that keep social order without external authority.
• Anarchist vision of space:
  • Integrated labour instead of an extreme division of labour.
  • Decentralised, largely self-sufficient regions working as “integrated cells” that exchange ideas and products on equal terms.
  • Grassroots decisions on production, based on local needs and resources.
  • Workplaces close to living places.
  • Richard Peet argued that redistribution through taxation would not end poverty. Central bureaucracies had to give way to community control.

Marxist Geography

• Marxist geography works within historical materialism. It asks how the production of space, place and landscape helps reproduce particular social formations.
• Dialectics: change comes through the resolution of contradictions (rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped), and each resolution produces new contradictions.
• Materialism: in Marx’s view, material life shapes consciousness, not the reverse. The mode of production shapes the man–environment relationship, and that relationship changes as the mode of production changes.
• Laws are historical, not eternal: economic “laws” appear and disappear with particular societies. This directly contradicts positivism’s search for universal spatial laws.
• Man and nature: humans meet nature through labour. Under capitalism, competition forces endless accumulation, which drives up demand for raw materials and produces environmental crisis.
• Three levels of structuralist analysis:
  • Appearance (superstructure): the visible pattern, such as a ghetto or a backward region.
  • Processes (infrastructure): the economic processes that produce it, such as the land and labour markets.
  • Imperatives (deep structure): the logic of capital accumulation and class relations.
• Ideology and fragmentation: Peet argued that science had become the ideological protector of a system owned by a ruling minority. Its fragmentation left geography a politically safe discipline that looked for “causes” in spatial patterns that were really the results of deeper social causes.
• Understanding versus change: for Harvey, positivism seeks only to understand the world, while Marxism seeks to change it.
• Charges against spatial science:
  • It treated social patterns as merely spatial, mapping segregation by class and race without asking what produced it.
  • It served capital by seeking efficient locations for factories and supermarkets.
  • Its universal spatial laws ignored the fact that different societies produce different spaces.
• The radical programme had four parts:
  • a critique of positivist spatial science, behavioural geography and humanistic geography;
  • general theoretical frameworks for empirical work;
  • study of how individuals act within structural imperatives;
  • detailed empirical work within the structuralist framework.

Antipode, Expeditions and Organisation

• Antipode: founded in 1969 by graduate students and junior faculty at Clark University, Worcester (Massachusetts), as a “radical journal of geography”.
  • Ben Wisner was its first editor. Richard Peet edited it through the 1970s, when it turned to Marxist political economy.
  • It carried papers on urban poverty, racial discrimination, women, crime, minorities, urban renewal that displaced the poor, and underdevelopment in the Third World.
  • It adopted peer review in 1980 and moved to a commercial publisher in 1985.
• Geographical expeditions: William Bunge (1928–2013), author of Theoretical Geography (1962), began the Detroit Geographical Expedition in 1968 with the young Black activist Gwendolyn Warren, under his Society for Human Exploration.
  • Geographers were to live and work in the poorest neighbourhoods, gather first-hand knowledge and plan with the people, not for them.
  • Bunge’s Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution (1971) studied a Detroit neighbourhood in detail. A Toronto expedition followed from 1973.
  • The expeditions drew academic interest but could not expand, partly because of the establishment’s hostility to socialist ideas.
• Union of Socialist Geographers: formed in Toronto in May 1974. It held sessions at AAG and IBG meetings and lasted until 1981.

Key Geographers

David Harvey

• David Harvey (b. 1935) had written the leading positivist text, Explanation in Geography (1969). His conversion from liberalism to Marxism is traced in Social Justice and the City (1973).
• Ghettos and the land market: he argued that the market mechanism regulating land use is biased against the poor, especially Black residents of American cities, so the problem must be attacked at its source.
• Who controls whom? Harvey rejected the view that science develops independently of material conditions. If social science aims to control human activity, one must ask who controls whom, in whose interest, and who defines the “public interest”.
• Marxism as a lens: Marxian theory explains capitalist production “from the position of those not in control of the means of production”. A geographer who adopts it can no longer be a detached observer.
• Later work extended this into a full theory of the circuits of capital, the built environment and, in The New Imperialism (2003), accumulation by dispossession.

Geography and Imperialism

• Imperialism is an unequal territorial relationship of domination and subordination. It need not involve formal colonial rule.
  • Radicals drew on J. A. Hobson (1902) and V. I. Lenin, who linked imperialism to monopoly capital and the rivalry that leads to war.
  • They read the Vietnam War as imperialism, and published widely on underdevelopment and centre–periphery relations.
• James M. Blaut (1927–2000) defined imperialism as the “white exploitation of the non-white world”, underpinned by a Western ethnoscience.
  • Eurocentric diffusionism pictures one centre (Europe) that makes history and a passive periphery that receives progress.
  • Blaut proposed a multicentric world in which many regions were developing at similar levels before 1492. colonial plunder of the Americas, Africa and Asia, not inner superiority, explains Europe’s later lead.
  • He developed the argument fully in The Colonizer’s Model of the World (1993).

Women, Race and Space

• Radicals held that women are oppressed in both rich and poor countries. Alison Hayford (1974) argued that capitalism moved women “from centrality to periphery” by separating the household from paid work.
  • This opened the way to feminist geography.
• They condemned racism and apartheid, the policy of spatially separating races, for the gross inequality in levels of living it produced.

Concerns, Objectives and Contributions

Main Concerns and Objectives

• Expose inequality, deprivation, discrimination, crime, ill-health and environmental damage in capitalist societies.
• Reveal the limits of positivism and of geography as a value-free spatial science.
• Reduce regional inequality, both inter-regional and intra-regional.
• Oppose concentration of economic and political power, multinational dominance, imperialism, nationalism, racism and claims of Western superiority.
• Take the side of the oppressed, those without control of land, labour and capital.
• Explain what is happening and prescribe change towards a just, egalitarian and peaceful society.
• Make geography part of a holistic social science, removing artificial barriers between disciplines.

Contributions to Geography

• New subject matter: poverty, hunger, health, crime, housing, gender, migrant labour and Third World underdevelopment entered human geography.
• From pattern to process: it insisted that spatial patterns be explained by social processes, giving human geography a theory of uneven development.
• Space as socially produced: space is no longer a neutral container. This idea underlies the socio-spatial dialectic.
• Participatory fieldwork: respondents took part in surveys and planning, a forerunner of today’s participatory and community mapping.
• Values made explicit: it showed that no research is value-free and that geographers carry social responsibility.
• Lasting fields: political economy, critical urban studies, political ecology, development geography and feminist geography all grew from it.

Indian Context

• Radical concepts are widely used to read India’s uneven development between states and between core and peripheral regions.
• Special Economic Zones under the SEZ Act (2005) and the land conflicts at Singur and Nandigram (2006–07) are often analysed as accumulation by dispossession, the transfer of land from farmers to capital.
• Slum evictions and urban redevelopment in Mumbai and Delhi, and the displacement of Adivasi communities by mining and dams, are studied as conflicts over who controls space.

Criticism and Evaluation

Criticism

• Weak theoretical base: radical geographers, trained mainly in fieldwork traditions, borrowed theory from sociology, economics and political science. Even Social Justice and the City was more sociological than geographical.
• Radical in topics, not in method: its themes and politics were radical, but its techniques broke little new ground.
• Over-reliance on Marxism: Marxism alone cannot account for every spatial variation.
  • Structural determinism reduced people to passive “bearers” of structures and evicted human agency. Humanistic geographers attacked this.
  • Classical Marxism privileged time over space. Critics replied that space is as much a part of social life as history.
• Marxist objections: Soviet geographers dismissed it as an American enterprise that distorted Marxism-Leninism. They noted that it ignored workers’ share in wealth and management, and never advocated revolution in practice.
• Positivist objections: its claims lacked empirical, testable support.
• “Who will guard the guardians?” Socialist states had not ended oppression or inequality. The collapse of the USSR and Eastern Europe (1989–91) made the alternative look discredited, and locational and market-oriented approaches regained ground.
• Gaps in theory: it produced no satisfactory model of population and resources, nor a complete theory of uneven development in its early years.
• Limited practical impact: radicals acted at best as a pressure group. Capitalist society was not transformed.

Evaluation and Legacy

• Radical geography did not fade away in the 1980s. It matured into political economy and critical geography, which absorbed humanistic and later postmodern ideas.
  • Its core questions about who gains and who loses from the organisation of space now run through urban, economic, development and environmental geography.
• Recent directions: Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession, planetary urbanisation, political ecology of climate and resource conflict, critical GIS, and decolonial and Southern geographies.
  • Antipode is now run by the Antipode Foundation (registered 2011) and marked its half-century with Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50 (2019).
• David M. Smith warned early that Marx could become a fashion like quantification: Marx dissected capitalist economy and society, but he does not hold the key to every modern problem in plural societies.
• Its record is mixed. It did not deliver its revolutionary aims, but it changed the questions geography asks and placed justice and inequality at the centre of the subject.