ABSTRACT
In a persuasive paper, the sociologist Alan Dawe (1973) has contrasted concepts which succeed and those which fail to resonate with everyday hum an experience. This, I suspect, is a familiar distinction for humanistic geographers. Around 1970 I rem em ber discovering a short manuscript by Yi-Fu Tuan on 4 “Environm ent” and “W orld” ’ (Tuan 1965). In its allusion to hum an relations, feelings, ‘inwardness’, even spirituality, this fragment unmasked the representations (rather, the repressions) o f hum an agency in the strongly analytic academic currents o f the time. For, in an era o f social unrest and experimentation, analytic spatial models did not speak the language o f the protests against the Vietnam War, the passion o f the civil rights or environmental movements. They failed to engage a reality where the National Guard was marching across the university campus. The lines, o f course, will rarely be as sharply drawn, but the lesson is more enduring. An aspiration o f humanistic perspectives is to speak the language o f human experience, to animate the city and its people, to present popular values as they intersect with the making, remaking and appropriation o f place.
