ABSTRACT

This book brings together international research on the quantitative revolution in geography. It offers perspectives from a wide range of contexts and national traditions that decenter the Anglo-centric discussions. The mid-20th-century quantitative revolution is frequently regarded as a decisive moment in the history of geography, transforming it into a modern and applied spatial science. This book highlights the different temporalities and spatialities of local geographies laying the ground for a global history of a specific mode of geographical thought. It contributes to the contemporary discussions around the geographies and mobilities of knowledge, notions of worlding, linguistic privilege, decolonizing and internationalizing of geographic knowledge.

This book will be of interest to researchers, postgraduates and advance students in geography and those interested in the spatial sciences.

chapter 1|11 pages

Introduction

Recalibrating the quantitative revolution in geography

chapter 2|18 pages

In the footsteps of the quantitative revolution?

Performing spatial science in the Netherlands

chapter 3|15 pages

Geographies of quantitative geographies in Brazil

Two versions of a revolution

chapter 4|20 pages

Translation of quantitative geography in the Brazilian journals

The cases of the Boletim Geográfico (1966–1976) and Revista Brasileira de Geografia (1970–1982)

chapter 5|15 pages

Digitality

Origins, or the stories we tell ourselves 1

chapter 6|22 pages

Multivariate functions

Heterogeneous realities of quantitative geography in Hungary

chapter 7|16 pages

A social history of quantitative geography in France from the 1970s to the 1990s

An overview of the blossoming of a multifaceted tradition

chapter 8|16 pages

How landscape became ecosystem

The nature of the quantitative revolution in German geography

chapter 9|11 pages

The urban revolution

How thinking about the city in 1920s German geography prepared the field for thinking about quantification and theory

chapter 10|20 pages

A revolution in process

Longue Durée and the social history of the increase in numerical data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics and the National Geography Council before the “quantitative revolution” (1938–1960)

chapter 11|15 pages

Italian geographers and the origins of a quantitative revolution

From natural science to applied economic geography

chapter 12|14 pages

The early years

William Bunge and Theoretical Geography

chapter 13|13 pages

Mathematics against technocracy

Peter Gould and Alain Badiou

chapter 14|20 pages

Conclusion

A virtual discussion about the quantitative revolution's legacy for past, present, and future