ABSTRACT
Social geography must be seen as being more than a loose agglomeration of such sub-divisions as medical geography, religious geography, population geography, linguistic geography, and maybe, electoral geography or the geography of education opportunity. Most of the work on urban social geography has evolved in capitalist societies, where the so-called free play of market forces gives rise to differentially valued areas and the differences in land use related to economic forces. The tacit determinism in much of human geography, which led workers on the subject to search so readily for the influence of the physical environment in patterns of settlement and economic functions of society, held up developments in an urban environment. The social geographer, armed with sociological insight and conscious of the importance of space, can approach the local community with techniques which may provide a most intellectually satisfying analysis.
