Critical geography

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As a critical geography flows are within the summary geography , made up, critical to the context of social developments and the geographical area to deal with. It emerged as a critique of geodeterminism and spatial science ("spatial approach"), the two previously paradigmatic approaches in geography . While critical geography forms the academic mainstream in English-speaking human geography , it is largely a marginal phenomenon in physical geography and generally in the German-speaking area.

term

The term critical geography appeared around the end of the 1980s as a self-denotation for representatives of the left - emancipatory , politically committed approaches in Anglo-American geography (primarily human geography ). “Criticism” is basically understood in the sense of critical theory as social criticism and thus as the basis for value judgments , but explicit references to representatives of the Frankfurt School are rare.

While a translation is commonly used as critical geography , the term radical geography , which has already emerged in the German-speaking world, is left in the original, since "radical" has more connotations with the external attribution of radicalism than with the self- attribution of radicalism (especially since it is comparable to radical geography Movement had not taken place). The relationship between the two currents is controversial, with the most widespread view that critical geography is ultimately a continuation of the approaches based on radical geography , expanded to include postmodernist and poststructuralist influences . Nonetheless, the term radical geography is also used as a conscious opposition to critical geography, which sees itself as mainstream .

history

precursor

Traditional geography, which was practiced well into the 20th century, was largely shaped by the notion that the natural environment of a human society determines its culture . Although Élisée Reclus and Pjotr ​​Kropotkin were two important geographers anarchists , this had little influence on the socio-political self-image of geographical research. One as a country and landscape customer understood geography largely ignored the capitalist valorization of natural resources by industrial production and its attendant social changes. Social theory was only practiced to the extent that, in the sense of geopolitics , claims to national rule and expansion could be derived from it as quasi-natural. Only a few critical voices such as the sinologist Karl August Wittfogel in 1929 or some Japanese geographers tried to expose the lack of theoretical foundations of geopolitics.

After the Second World War , and increasingly from the end of the 1950s, representatives of the so-called “ quantitative revolution ”, especially in the United States, gave the relevance of the subject a new interpretation by using new, mathematical methods to develop geographical space as an explanatory factor for socio-political problems . At the same time, however, there was initially no stronger socio-theoretical foundation.

Radical Geography

With the social upheavals in many Western countries from the end of the 1960s, however, the social, especially economic, origins of spatial differences became the focus of interest in geography. While some protagonists of this recent paradigm shift, such as David Harvey, completely broke with the quantitative reorientation that the subject had only recently experienced, others such as William Bunge and James Morris Blaut combined these approaches in the course of cartographic representations. Under the editor Richard Peet , the magazine Antipode, founded in 1969, developed into the mouthpiece of this movement called "Radical Geography".

Even if its broad impact is not comparable to that of the US American Radical Geography , a predominantly Marxist- oriented criticism of previous geographic research developed in many other countries, especially in the Mediterranean and Latin America . In addition to the Brazilian Milton Santos and the Italian Lucio Gambi , Yves Lacoste should be mentioned here, for example, who demonstrated the entanglement of geography in military operations. In any case, important professional representatives in France had previously been supporters of Marxist ideas, but without this having had any great influence on the theoretical basis of the subject. In addition, in countries of the Eastern Bloc such as the Soviet Union and the GDR, a predominantly economic-geographic interpretation of Marxism emerged.

Critical geography

But Radical Geography was initially only one of several tendencies towards emancipatory movements that emerged in the Anglo-American region at that time. Welfare Geography and Humanistic Geography dealt more with the distribution than the production side of the capitalist economy and with the living conditions of disadvantaged social groups. Feminist geography also emerged at this time, and cultural factors such as racism , which Radical Geography had meanwhile neglected, moved into research interest.

Thus, in the course of the 1980s, a broader critical geography developed, the social-theoretical core of which, however, remained Marxism and its further developments. In addition, several of its representatives, especially Harvey, gained importance beyond the subject in the social sciences . To cope with this development, new journals such as Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (1983) were founded, while the Antipode has been published by a commercial publisher since 1986.

Not least in response to the emergence of neoliberal economic policy ( Thatcherism , Reaganomics ), a second generation of Marxist-oriented geographers was formed around Neil Smith , Erik Swyngedouw , and a little later Don Mitchell and Jamie Peck , who in particular deepened two main research areas: First, the question To what extent certain levels of scale are actually produced by political power in an area, and secondly, the question of the role of employees in unequal spatial developments.

In 1997 the International Critical Geography Group was founded to promote international exchange in critical geography, which is largely dominated by Anglophone. New journals were also re-established: ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 2002 and Human Geography: A New Journal of Radical Geography 2008, the latter in turn edited by Richard Peet.

German-speaking area

In the German-speaking region, critical geography did not achieve the same quasi-hegemonic status as in the Anglo-American region, but remained limited to individual works and student initiatives. A (politically) “committed geography” was ultimately understood to mean research focused on the issues of spatial planning and planning , and the originally neo-Marxist approach of regulation theory was largely relieved of its political connotations. Since the 2000s, however, there has been a certain turn to critical issues by representatives such as Bernd Belina , Georg Glasze and Michael Janoschka .

Subject areas

The basic approach of a socially theoretically founded, i.e. ideology-free, geographical research is to consider the geographical area in relation to the respective social conditions. Her subject is thus the social production of space in the sense of the sociologist Henri Lefebvre , which results in (spatially) unequal developments according to Neil Smith . In this respect, critical geography deals with the socially determined emergence of spaces of all scales, be it states (critical geopolitics), regions or cities. But also supposedly natural levels such as the landscape or the human body belong to the research subjects. In the German-speaking area in particular, a critical criminal geography based on critical criminology has emerged.

Political ecology , too , was primarily founded by representatives of critical geography. She deals with the valorization of natural space in the context of capitalist production. However, an explicitly critical physical geography does not yet exist or is in the process of being developed.

criticism

While in the Anglo-American context critical geography is so broadly defined that it remains questionable what the term covers and what does not, in the German-speaking context the question arises, conversely, whether geography is at all suitable for ultimately processing political-economic issues. Another point of criticism is the failure to meet the socio-political goals originally announced. In the course of the academic establishment, marginalized social groups were still left out.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Bernd Belina: Critical Geography: Forms gangs! Introduction to the special issue . In: ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies . tape 7 , no. 3 , 2008, p. 335–349 ( as a PDF file ).
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Linda Peake, Eric Sheppard: The Emergence of Radical / Critical Geography within North America . In: ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies . tape 13 , no. 2 , 2014, p. 305–327 ( as a PDF file ).
  3. ↑ Important exception: Derek Gregory: Ideology, science, and human geography . Hutchinson, London 1978, ISBN 0-09-133121-8 .
  4. ↑ a b c Bernd Belina, Ulrich Best, Matthias Naumann: Critical geography in Germany: from exclusion to inclusion via internationalization . In: Social Geography . tape 4 , 2009, p. 47-58 , doi : 10.5194 / sg-4-47-2009 .
  5. ^ A b c d e f Neil Smith: Marxism and Geography in the Anglophone World . In: Geographical Review . tape 3 , no. 2 , 2001, p. 5–21 ( as a PDF file ).
  6. ↑ a b Ulrich Eisel: Landscape as "Materialistic Theology". An attempt at the contemporary historiography of geography . In: Gerhard Bahrenberg, Gerhard Hard (Hrsg.): Geography of the people: Dietrich Bartels for commemoration (=  Bremen contributions to geography and spatial planning ). tape 7 . Bremen 1987, ISBN 3-88722-168-0 , p. 89-109 .
  7. ↑ a b c d Bernd Belina: Geographical Ideology Production - Critique of Geography as Geography . In: ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies . tape 7 , no. 3 , 2008, p. 510-537 ( as a PDF file ).
  8. ^ Karl-August Wittfogel: Geopolitics, Geographical Materialism and Marxism . In: Under the banner of Marxism . tape 3 , 1929, pp. 7-51, 485-522, 898-935 .
  9. ↑ Fujio Mizuoka, Toshio Mizuuchi, Tetsuya Hisatake, Kenji Tsutsumi, Tetsushi Fujita: The critical heritage of Japanese geography: its tortured trajectory for eight decades . In: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space . tape 23 , no. 3 , 2005, p. 453-473 , doi : 10.1068 / d2204r .
  10. ^ Vincent RH Berdoulay: Geography in France: Context, Practice, and Text . In: Gary S. Dunbar (Ed.): Geography: Discipline, Profession and Subject since 1870 (=  The GeoJournal Library ). tape 62 . Springer, 2001, ISBN 978-94-017-1683-3 , pp. 45-78 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-94-017-1683-3_3 .
  11. ^ Gerhard Schmidt-Renner: Elementary theory of economic geography: together with an outline of the historical economic geography . Verl. Die Wirtschaft, Berlin 1961.
  12. ↑ Kevin R. Cox: Making human geography . The Guilford Press, New York 2014, ISBN 978-1-4625-1283-6 .
  13. ↑ for an overview see Markus Wissen , Bernd Röttger, Susanne Heeg (eds.): Politics of Scale: Spaces of Globalization and Perspectives of Emancipatory Work . Westphalian steam boat, Münster 2008, ISBN 978-3-89691-669-3 .
  14. ↑ for an overview see Wolfgang Krumbein, Hans-Dieter von Frieling, Uwe Kröcher, Detlev Sträter (eds.): Critical regional science: society, politics, space - theories and concepts at a glance . Westphalian steam boat, Münster 2008, ISBN 978-3-89691-738-6 .
  15. ↑ for an overview see Bernd Belina, Matthias Naumann, Anke Strüver (Hrsg.): Handbuch Kritische Stadtgeographie . Westphalian steam boat, Münster 2014, ISBN 978-3-89691-955-7 .
  16. ↑ Olaf Kühne : Distinction, Power, Landscape: on the social definition of landscape . VS, Verl. Für Sozialwiss., Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-16213-3 .
  17. ↑ Anke Strüver: Does body make space for knowledge? Approaches for a geography of differences (=  contributions to population and social geography . Volume 9 ). Institutsverlag, Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-900830-55-X .
  18. ↑ Georg Glasze, Robert Pütz, Manfred Rolfes (eds.): Discourse - City - Crime: Urban (in) security from the perspective of urban research and critical criminal geography . transcript, Bielefeld 2005, ISBN 978-3-89942-408-9 .
  19. ^ Rebecca Lave et al .: Intervention: Critical physical geography . In: The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien . tape 58 , no. 1 , 2014, p. 1-10 , doi : 10.1111 / cag.12061 .
  20. ↑ Nicholas Blomley: uncritical critical geography? In: Progress in Human Geography . tape 30 , no. 1 , 2006, p. 87-94 , doi : 10.1191 / 0309132506ph593pr .
  21. ^ Neil Smith: Neo-Critical Geography, Or, The Flat Pluralist World of Business Class . In: Antipode . tape 37 , no. 5 , 2005, p. 887-899 , doi : 10.1111 / j.0066-4812.2005.00538.x .
  22. ↑ Noel Castree: Professionalisation, activism, and the university: whither 'critical geography'? In: Environment and Planning A . tape 32 , no. 6 , 2000, pp. 955-970 , doi : 10.1068 / a3263 .
  23. ↑ Vera Chouinard, Ali Grant: On Being Not Even Anywhere Near 'The Project': Ways Of Putting Ourselves In The Picture . In: Antipode . tape 27 , no. 2 , 1995, p. 137-166 , doi : 10.1111 / j.1467-8330.1995.tb00270.x .

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