ABSTRACT
Contributions to this and other recent volumes indicate that some quantitative geographers have shifted their attention from the modelling of large-scale aggregates to studies of group and individual behavior. As a result, the earlier stress on the geometric outcome of the spatial game has lessened in favor of analyses of the rules which govern the moves of the actors who populate the gaming table. Thus, the new studies aim at a better understanding of those cause and effect relationships which are relevant to the decision makers themselves, i.e. to those whose actions eventually will determine the success of various planning programs. With such pragmatic planning ideas in mind, the behaviorists wish to complement the traditional work in quantitative geography by establishing explicit linkages between individual behavior and spatial patterns. Restated and simplified, the behavioral approach suggests a different solution to the geographical inference problem of form and process; while the spatial analyst attempts to infer individual behavior from knowledge of a given spatial pattern, the behaviorist argues for reasoning the other way around.
