Quantitative revolution

Lore & Background

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, geography faced a crisis: the regional tradition dominated, but many university departments closed—most notably Harvard's in 1948 due to internal university politics and disciplinary shifts—and the discipline was seen as overly descriptive, unscientific, and not a university subject. Debates raged over whether geography was science, art, or social science, while nomothetic sciences gained prominence after World War II. Geographers began seeking new methods to counter this critique.

The revolution responded to the regional geography paradigm, with early critics like Ackerman suggesting systematization. The Schaefer vs. Hartshorne debate in 1953 was a key illustration: Schaefer rejected Hartshorne's exceptionalist focus on the region, advocating for morphological laws through scientific inquiry, while Hartshorne defended description and classification but admitted room for laws of generic relationships. Institutionalization followed at the University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and University of Washington, where Harold McCarty, Arthur H. Robinson, Edward Ullman, and William Garrison pioneered systematic geography. Graduate students like William Bunge, Artur Getis, and Waldo R. Tobler expanded this work, with Bunge's Theoretical Geography described as 'perhaps the seminal text of the spatial-quantitative revolution.'

The revolution introduced technique-based practices: descriptive and inferential statistics, mathematical models (e.g., gravity model), stochastic models (e.g., spatial diffusion), and deterministic models (e.g., Von Thünen's location models). David Harvey's 1969 book Explanation in Geography provided a theoretical foundation, laying out inductive and deductive methodologies, with preference for the latter. The paradigm shift had strongest repercussions in economic and urban geography, though some geographers expressed dissatisfaction with quantification or debated the feasibility of law-making.

Reader's Guide

The quantitative revolution was one of the four major turning points of modern geography, alongside environmental determinism, regional geography, and critical geography. It transformed geography from a descriptive, region-focused discipline into a nomothetic spatial science, emphasizing empirical laws, mathematical techniques, and computerized statistics. This shift allowed geographers to explain general spatial dynamics rather than merely describe areal differentiation, and it led to the development of quantitative geography, including geographic information science, geoinformatics, and spatial analysis. The revolution occurred earlier in economics and psychology and contemporaneously in political science and other social sciences. By the mid-1960s, it had successfully displaced regional geography from its dominant position, as evidenced by myriad publications in academic journals and textbooks. However, the revolution was not without criticism: some geographers questioned the feasibility of law-making, and models were criticized as conjectural or failing to accurately depict reality. The epistemological underpinnings included both positivist verification and critical rationalist falsification, both aiming to produce scientific laws and theories. The revolution's legacy endures in the technical geography branch of the discipline.

Did You Know?

• The quantitative revolution occurred during the 1950s and 1960s.
• It was a response to the inadequacy of regional geography to explain general spatial dynamics.
• The abolition of the geography program at Harvard University in 1948 is typically attributed to internal university politics and disciplinary shifts.
• David Harvey's 1969 book Explanation in Geography provided a legitimate theoretical and philosophical foundation for the revolution.