‘Pure’ and ‘Applied’ Geography: Comparison | Geography

Learn about the comparison between pure geography and applied geography.

In view of growing economic recession, societal and political problems, a section of geographers concerned with these human problems expressed their disenchantment and disillusion to ‘pure’ and/or ‘academic’ geography, and sought for a new problem-solving geography.

In the words of Kasperson – ‘the shift in the objects of study in geography from supermarkets and highways to poverty and racism has already begun, and we can expect to continue, for the goals of geography are changing. The men see the objective of geography as the same as that for medicine—to postpone death and reduce suffering.’

A similar but somewhat ‘different’ statement was made by W. Zelinsky (1970), reflecting a growing disillusion within geographical circles with past achievements and a wondering about future directions.

Zelinsky developed three basic arguments:

1. That people are inducing for themselves a state of acute frustration and a crisis of survival;

2. That these conditions originate, and can only be solved, in the advanced nations; and

3. That the current ‘growth syndrome’ has profound geographical implications.

Material accumulation can no longer be considered progress, Zelinsky said, because it is unsustainable; efforts are currently misallocated on a massive scale, and there is a major geographical task involved in its sensible reallocation.

Zelinsky (1970) identified three roles which geographers could play in facing the perceived oncoming disasters:

1. The ‘geographer as diagnostician’, applying the geographic stethoscope to a successful demography, mapping what he calls geodemographic load, environmental contamination, crowding and stress;

2. The ‘geographer as prophet’, projecting and forecasting likely futures;

3. The ‘geographer as architect of Utopia’, educating with regard to problems and solutions and providing support for unknown leaders who have the political will to guide society through the coming ‘Great Transition’.

Zelinsky further said – ‘how woefully deficient we are in terms of practitioners, in terms of both quantity and quality, how we are still lacking in relevant techniques, but most of all that we are totally at sea in terms of ideology, theory and proper institutional arrangements’.

These criticisms are not only directed against the geographers, but also against the scientists.

Science, being a twentieth-century religion, has failed to avert the oncoming crisis.

Zelinsky identified five essential axioms as the foundation of science:

1. That the principle of causality is valid for studying all phenomena;

2. That all problems are soluble;

3. That there is final state of perfect knowledge;

4. That findings have universal validity;

5. That total scientific objectivity is possible.

The social sciences have failed to lineup to these for several reasons – their immaturity; their use as a refuge for mediocre personnel; the difficulty of their subject matter concerning interpersonal relationships; their problems of observation and experimentation; and the political and other problems involved in applying their proposed solutions.

Further, and the major cause of their failure, the natural science model is irrelevant to the study of society. The natural science approach adopted by positivist spatial scientists helps to describe the world, but not to understand it.

There are two major components to Zelinsky’s case – geographical research should be relevant to the solution of major societal problems; and positivist-based spatial methodology may be inappropriate for such a task.

House (1973), for example, reviewed the tradition of involvement in public policy by British geographers, and Stoddart (1975) identified the late nineteenth-century views of Recluse and Kroptkin as ‘the origin of a socially relevant geography’—the latter was discovered by the ‘radicals’.

It was claimed that geographical works should be more relevant to major social problems raised queries about the nature of that relevance, and soon became apparent that there was no consensus on what should be done and why traditionally, geographers have advised governments in the role of information-gatherers and ‘masterful synthesisers’ and they had not involved in the final stages of policy-making; they had been delvers and dovetailers, but not deciders. To Chisholm (1971), the challenge to human geography was to define such norms that could make the geographers ‘deciders’. He further said, ‘the danger with empirical science is the absence of guidance at the normative level as to which various options one should take.’

Chisholm had worked for different governments in the role of ‘decider’ which was neither delver nor dovetailed. As a member of independent commissions (the Local Government Boundary Commission in the 1970s and the Local Government Commission in the 1990s), he was involved in advising the British Government on the best way to redraw important components of England’s administrative map. I

t was suggested that the focus of research should be some of the social and spatial inequalities in the society, and the first challenge should be the study of the distribution of power in the society, thereby identifying the mechanism for allocating scarce resources. Research could then isolate the disadvantages of relative powerlessness and provide the basis for policy aimed at redistributing resources.

By 1971, many geographers were frustrated by a sense of failure to deal with major social issues, but although some members were taking notice of the sufferings of the outside world, Smith, in his 1971 report, mentioned that there was a deliberate ignorance by American geographers on conditions of human welfare and social justice, and therefore, American geography was about to undergo another revolution to counter a situation in which geography was once pre-occupied with issues other than societal issues.

To him – ‘the conditions which have helped to spawn radical geography in the United States include the existence of large oppressed radical minorities, inequalities between rich and poor with respect to social justice, a power structure and value system largely unresponsive to the needs of the unprivileged, and an unpopular war with sapping national, economic and moral strength. These conditions do not exist in Britain or exist in a less severe form, and the stimulus for social activism in geography is, thus, considerably less than in America. In 1994, Smith urged to place social justice at the heart of human geography in his book Geography and Social Justice. It is claimed that the British geographers had long been concerned with ‘relevant’ issues, than their American counterparts, with respect to the Third World. It was felt long back that ‘pure’ or ‘academic’ geographers should provide a knowledge-base on which policy could be built, which implied close involvement with the education of future generations of policy-makers. To Blowers (1972, 291), ‘the issue is not how can we cooperate with policy-makers, but whether and in what sense we should do it. It is a question of values’. He argued that the sort of activities that Berry (1972) proposed that ‘just a new fact involving new entrants to the field seeking their turf … the majority of the new revolutionaries … are essentially liberals—quick to lament the supposed ills of the society and to wear their bleeding hearts like emblems or old scholastics—and quicker to avoid the hard work that diagnosis and action demand’, would be strongly supportive of the status quo, and unlikely to produce fundamental social reforms. Research in geography should highlight particular problems, and teaching should place emphases on ‘a man in harmony with nature rather than master of it, on social health rather than efficiency, and on the quality of life rather than on the quantity of goods’.

There was a long debate at the 1974 annual conference of the Institute of British Geographers (IBG) on how should geographers contribute to the solution of societal problems. Coppock in his presidential address (1974) urged upon the geographers to identify that their contributions could make to encourage research relevant to those contributions, and to enter a dialogue with those who advise on and implement public policy.

Analysing the reasons for geography’s inability to be relevant to the domain of public policy­making, Hare (1977, 64) observed – ‘a major reason for a lack of geographical contributions to public policy may be the poverty of their training in recent years, we have swept geography departments into the social science divisions of faculties of arts and sciences where from playing second fiddle to geologists or literary critics, we learned to play second fiddle to environment and sociologists.’

Geographers would have to rebuild their discipline based on the centrality of society- environment interactions, with a new brand of physical geography that leans heavily on biological ideas and concepts. Thus, we must reassert the old, essential truth that geography is the study of the Earth as the habitat of man, and not some small sub-set of that gigantic theme. Regional synthesis should be stressed too.

To Hall (1974, 49) ‘… geography, most clearly of all social sciences, has neither an explicit nor an implicit normative base … spatial efficiency … is rather a description of what men seek to do in actuality … not … an objective to be achieved or to be objective function to be maximized’.

Policy-makers must seek their norms elsewhere; geographers meanwhile must develop a new political geography which will aid them in understanding the essential role of political decisions in structuring spatial systems.

However, at the meeting of the Institute of British Geographers (IBG) in 1974, it was claimed that governments, as pay-masters, already constrained what geographers could do research on, and as a result geographers were being used; their only alternative was political action.

Harvey (1974) in his contribution, entitled, ‘What kind of geography for what kind of public policy?’ argued that individuals wishing to become involved in policy-making were stimulated by motives such as personal ambition, disciplinary imperialism, social necessity and moral obligation – at the level of the whole discipline, on the other hand, geography had been co-opted, through universities, by the growing corporate state, and the geographers had been given some illusion of power within a decision-making process, designed to maintain the status quo. Harvey portrayed the corporate state as a ‘proto-fascist’, a transitional step on the path to the barbarism of Orwell’s 1984. The function of academics, according to him, was to counter such trends to expunge the fascism, ethnocentrism and condescending paternalism from within their own discipline and to build a humanistic subject, thereby assisting all human beings ‘to control and enhance the conditions of our own existence’.

The current mode of analysis in geography offered little for the solution of pressing societal concerns and problems, said Harvey (1973):

‘There is an ecological problem, an urban problem, an international trade problem, and yet we seem incapable of saying anything of depth or profundity about any of them. When we do say anything, it appears trite and rather ludicrous …. It is the emerging objective social conditions and our patent inability to cope with them which essentially explain the necessity for a revolution in geographic thought.’