ABSTRACT
At Columbus, Ohio, where the Association of American Geographers met in 1965, there was obviously something new in the air. Eminent geographers and psychologists charmed a packed auditorium with ideas about environmental behaviour and perception. This new frontier was to welcome not only interdisciplinary research, but it was also to offer a common focus of curiosity to geographers of both ‘man-land’ and ‘spatial’ traditions. Why, even the age-old impasse between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ orientations could be transcended.1 Some 17 years later in San Antonio, Texas, the same Association hosted sessions on environmental perception. One caught a glimpse of the volume and variety of research which the intervening years had produced and, even more, one noted the drama of a selective migration of ideas back and forth across the Atlantic: Marxist, positivist, phenomenological, and structuralist approaches were juxtaposed, not always too harmoniously.2
