The 1970s schools and post-modernism

Detail

Background: why new schools arose in the 1970s

• Quantitative revolution (late 1950s to late 1960s): geographers used statistics, mathematical models and computers to find general laws of spatial organisation (how people and activities are arranged over space).
• The problem: by the 1970s many geographers were unhappy with its "dehumanised manner of doing geography".
• People were treated as numbers and dots on a map.
• Feelings, values, poverty and power were left out.

• The models could not explain real social problems.

• The result: three new schools arose. They made human geography relevant to social and political reality: 1. Welfare or humanistic school 2. Radical school 3. Behavioural school

• Wider academic context: many geographers took up Marxist ideas because of world events in the 1960s and 1970s. They called this "radical geography". A broader critical geography later grew out of it. It looks for the spatial problems of today's societies and suggests solutions based on social justice and ethical practice [4].

Welfare or humanistic school

• Definition: the humanistic school puts human beings, their well-being and their experience at the centre of geography. It does not treat them as statistical units.
• NCERT focus: social well-being.
• It looks at housing, health and education. It asks who gets these services and who does not.

• Geographers introduced "Geography of Social Well-being" as a postgraduate paper.

• Wider meaning (Beyond NCERT):

• It also studies human awareness, values and sense of place. Sense of place means the feelings and meanings people attach to a place.
• Yi-Fu Tuan wrote Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes and Values (1974) [5].
  • Topophilia means "love of place". It is an emotional attachment to one's surroundings. It can give short moments of happiness or a lasting feeling of belonging to a place [5].
  • Tuan is counted among the phenomenological geographers, who study how places are experienced from the inside. Studies of place attachment (people's emotional bond with a place) began with these geographers [5].
• Anne Buttimer also wrote on humanistic geography.

• David M. Smith developed welfare geography. It asks "who gets what, where, and how?"

• Indian example: gaps in housing, health and schools between states, or between villages and cities, are studied as questions of well-being and fairness, not just as distances or densities.

Radical school

• Definition: the radical school uses Marxian theory to explain human geography. Marxian theory is Karl Marx's idea that society is shaped by who owns land, factories and capital, and by the conflict between social classes.
• NCERT focus:
• It explains the root causes of poverty, deprivation and social inequality.

• It links today's social problems to the development of capitalism.

• How the argument runs:

• Cause: capital, such as money, land and industry, is owned by a few people.
• Process: investment goes where profits are highest, so some regions and city areas grow while others are left behind.

• Result: slums, regional imbalance and uneven access to services appear as spatial patterns of inequality.

• Key thinkers and works (Beyond NCERT):

• David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (1973). From the 1970s this book and other Marxist-influenced work greatly changed how geographers understood the role of cities [2][3].
• Harvey led the geographers who took up Marxist thinking. They studied how the economy works across space. They also studied class conflict and the unequal distribution of power [4].
• The journal Antipode (1969) was an important outlet for radical geography.
• Richard Peet also helped shape radical geography.

Behavioural school

• Definition: the behavioural school studies how people perceive space, meaning how they see and understand it in their minds, and how they make decisions about it. It draws on psychology.
• NCERT focus:
• It stresses lived experience.

• It looks at how space is perceived by social categories based on ethnicity, race and religion.

• Key idea: people act on the world as they see it, not as it is in an objective map.

• Two groups can live in the same city but see "safe" and "unsafe" areas very differently.

• Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (1960):

• He introduced mental maps. A mental map is the picture of a place that a person carries in their memory.
• He named five elements that people use to build their mental image of a city [6]:

Element	Type	Example
Paths	Line	Streets, canals, transit lines along which people move
Edges	Line	Rivers, walls or fences that mark boundaries
Districts	Area	Neighbourhoods with a common character
Nodes	Point	Squares and junctions where people gather or change direction
Landmarks	Point	Statues, towers or other clear reference points

• A city that is easy to picture in the mind is called "legible" or "imageable". Legibility helps people find their way and gives a sense of place [6].

• Julian Wolpert studied how people make decisions, for example about where to migrate. He showed that people do not always choose the "best" place in the way a perfect model would expect.

Comparing the three 1970s schools

Feature	Welfare / Humanistic	Radical	Behavioural
Main question	Are people's well-being and values being met?	Why do poverty and inequality exist?	How do people perceive space and decide?
Core concepts	Social well-being, sense of place, topophilia	Class, capital, inequality, social justice	Perception, mental maps, lived experience
Borrowed from	Philosophy (phenomenology), welfare economics	Marxian theory	Psychology
Key names	Yi-Fu Tuan (1974), Anne Buttimer, David M. Smith	David Harvey (1973), Antipode (1969), Richard Peet	Kevin Lynch (1960), Julian Wolpert
NCERT keywords	Housing, health, education	Poverty, deprivation, capitalism	Ethnicity, race, religion

Post-modernism in geography (1990s)

• Definition: post-modernism in geography doubts grand generalisations and universal theories that claim to explain the human condition everywhere.
• NCERT focus: each local context should be understood in its own right.
• The reasoning:
• Cause: single big theories, whether quantitative laws or Marxism, did not fit every society.
• Process: geographers began to listen to many voices: women, colonised peoples, minorities and local communities.

• Result: more attention to difference, identity and local meaning.

• Beyond NCERT:

• Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies (1989). Its subtitle is The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. It argued that space is central to understanding society.
• It is linked to:
  • Feminist geography, which looks at how space is experienced differently by men and women.
  • Post-colonial geography, which questions knowledge shaped by colonial powers.
  • The "cultural turn", a shift towards studying culture, meaning and identity in geography.

The full timeline: each stage reacted to the one before

Period	Approach	Main feature	Key thinkers / works
19th century	Environmental determinism	Nature controls human life	Ratzel, Semple
Early colonial period	Exploration and description	Recording new lands for imperial and trade interests	Explorers, travellers
Later colonial period	Regional analysis	Studying each region in detail; the region seen as a whole	Regional geographers
Inter-war period (1930s)	Areal differentiation	Why one region differs from another	Hartshorne
Late 1950s to late 1960s	Spatial organisation (quantitative revolution)	Statistics, models, general laws	Quantitative geographers
1970s	Humanistic, radical and behavioural schools	People, inequality and perception	Tuan (1974), Harvey (1973), Lynch (1960)
1990s	Post-modernism	Doubts grand theory; each local context matters	Soja (1989)

• Possibilism (Vidal de la Blache: people choose among the options nature gives) and neo-determinism (Griffith Taylor's "stop-and-go determinism": people can act, but only within nature's limits) sit between determinism and the later schools.
• Exam logic: why each shift happened:
• Description → explanation: listing facts about places was not enough, so geographers began asking why.
• Uniqueness → general laws: treating every region as unique blocked science, so the quantitative revolution looked for universal laws.
• Abstract laws → people: laws left out humans, so the 1970s schools brought back welfare, power and perception.
• Grand theory → local context: big theories ignored difference, so post-modernism stressed local and plural meanings.

Prelims Hooks

• The three schools of the 1970s were the welfare/humanistic, radical and behavioural schools. Post-modernism came in the 1990s, not the 1970s.
• Topophilia ("love of place") → Yi-Fu Tuan, 1974 → humanistic school, not behavioural.
• Mental maps and paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks → Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, 1960 → behavioural school.
• Social Justice and the City (1973) → David Harvey → radical (Marxian) school.
• The journal Antipode (1969) is linked to radical geography.
• Postmodern Geographies (1989) → Edward Soja.
• "Geography of Social Well-being" became a postgraduate paper → welfare/humanistic school.
• Perception of space by ethnicity, race and religion → behavioural school. Root causes of poverty linked to capitalism → radical school.
• Chronological order: exploration and description → regional analysis → areal differentiation (1930s) → spatial organisation (1950s–60s) → humanistic, radical and behavioural (1970s) → post-modernism (1990s).
• Trap: the quantitative revolution was criticised as "dehumanised". That criticism produced the 1970s schools. It was not a criticism of determinism.

Mains Points

• Each approach reacts to the one before it. Description gave way to explanation, uniqueness to general laws, abstract laws to people, and grand theory to local context. This shows that geography's methods change with social needs. It is a ready framework for GS-I questions on the "nature and scope of human geography".
• The 1970s schools give tools for Indian problems.
• The welfare approach maps gaps in housing, health and education between regions.
• The radical approach explains regional imbalance and urban slums through uneven investment and the concentration of capital.

• The behavioural approach explains choices about migration and where people live.

• Post-modern, feminist and post-colonial views support planning for each local context, such as plans for tribal areas or women's safety in cities, instead of one-size-fits-all models.

• Critique: the humanistic and behavioural schools can be subjective and hard to generalise. The radical school can be too focused on the economy. Post-modernism can break into many local stories with no policy direction. A balanced answer combines quantitative tools like GIS with people-centred understanding.