La réflexion théorique en géographie et les méthodes d'analyse
Authors: Claval Paul 
Published: March 2012

The place of theoretical reflection in geography and methods of analysis. — Geography is engaged in a process of great change. By "New Geography" we often refer to everything which supposes the use of modern methods and is based, in particular, on the use of quantitative operations. We wish to show that this is to misunderstand what constitutes the originality of the changes taking place.

The advances that have been recorded during the last twenty years are the result of the progressive refinement of theoretical reflection. Geography at the turn of the century possessed theoretical bases but, as a general rule, gave no detailed critical explanation of them: it sought to give an account of the homogeneous repartitions that its investigations revealed throughout the world and, in order to do this, had recourse to a few logical schemas whose common feature was to reduce Man to the level of an automaton. For the environmentalist, the individual is acted upon by the environment; for many possibilists, he is conditioned by the inertia of the social mass which turns civilisation into a form of determinism. Vulgar economic theory tends to associate in a mechanical way the qualities of the environment and the decision to use them; finally, for the diffusionists, the inability of the mass of mankind to innovate only leaves the slow advance of techniques as a source of change: generally speaking, the possibilities of choice left to each human being are reduced virtually to zero by the opacity of the environment.

If the model of Man supposed by these theories is a simplification, then the model of society they suppose is even more impoverished: no one even asks himself how incompatible individual projects come to be reconciled ! In this field, economic thought provides a very elaborate model. The present-day advance of geography can be explained very largely by the borrowings made from economic theory — or, more precisely, from the spatial theory.

The equilibrium reconstructed in this way supposes both independent economic agents acting rationally and a regulating mechanism — market forces, for example. The work of anthropologists and sociologists shows how unrealistic the first hypothesis is. For the last ten years geographers have been aware that there was a weakness here that needed to be remedied. Present-day research bears on the factors that limit the transparency of the environment, on the exactness of perception and on the rationality of choice. The analytical schema is thus expressed on three levels: that of conditioning, where the emphasis is placed on all the factors that deform Man's knowledge of the environment or confine the individual within the limits of schémas established a priori; that of choice, the results of which vary with motivation; and that of regulation.

If its analysis is to be successful, New Geography needs more precise instruments than those we were content to use thirty years ago; and this explains the place now held by quantitative methods. Yet these are only an instrument; what is profoundly new is the demanding rigour now needed in explanation. (Transl. by B.E. Hastings).