FINALLY.... my summary of the first seven chapters!

Hello all: I struggled with the length of this summary and honestly....novelists always struggle with length. I took a machete and chopped and hacked it down, so hopefully I didn't go too much over the 250 word limit. This summary covers the first seven chapters and probably does not do them justice, but.....I have Toby's [my dog] seal of approval, plus he's begging to go out, so have at 'er

Torsten Hagerstrand’s 1957 book, Diffusion as Spatial Process was characterized as a pioneering work, but it was written in Swedish and wasn’t translated into English for 14 years, which for English speaking scholars, placed him squarely after the likes of William Bunge’s book published in 1962, and Peter Haggett’s in 1965.

It’s hard to say if Hagerstrand’s work was pivotal to either of Bunge’s or Haggett’s work, but what was apparent is that geography in the 1960s was experiencing raging debates about how to, as Bunge put it , ”… establish its credentials as a science.” David Harvey’s book titled Explanation in Geography continued the focus on theory, model, hypothesis and law, which was becoming common in geography research as researchers worked to produce knowledge that was cumulative.

Peter Haggett’s 1965 book titled Locational Analysis in Human Geography deals with models and origins of hypotheses in human geography as well as statistical methods. Haggett wrote that, “…the quality of geography for this century will be evaluated less on its techniques and details and more on its logical reasoning.” In Kevin Cox’s 1973 book titled Conflict, Power and the Politics in the City, we see a continued focus on empiricism through three important goals: the advancement of rigorous accounts that would explain urban problems, the publication of policy implications of urban analysis and the discussion of the necessary governmental actions required to address these problems.

Toward the mid 1970s, Edward Relph’s book, titled Place and Placelessness arrived on the scene along with Yi-Fu Tuan’s book, titled Space and Place. In their review of Relph’s book, David Seamon and Jacob Sowers state his most original contribution was his description of insideness and outsideness. Relph also preserved the concept of space and place as being one, while Tuan in Space and Place, creates a division between space and time. Tuan writes,” place can be understood as a pause in time as well as space.” Creswell writes that, “Geographies of space, 30 years on from Tuan’s book, share his concern for meaning, belonging and experience...”