Introduction

Geography has long been fascinated with the specificity of place. Originally, regional specificity was conceived as arising directly from the local natural environment, with the frictions of space preserving naturally derived ways of life. Then location theory became the new focus of geographic interest in the late 1950s, replacing the study of regions. By comparison with natural determination, location theory explained regional differences in terms of the social allocation of activities in space. The years of the late 1950s also marked the transition from geography as qualitative description, to geography as quantititative analysis, explicitly based in neoclassical economic theory. This transition, or as some phrased it ‘quantitative revolution’, was marked by intense intellectual excitement and a sense of discovery. Geography was regaining its status as a social science which it had lost with the decline of environmental determinism in the 1920s. But as Schoenberger, Smith, and Lovering point out in Part III, shades of disillusionment began to close over the prospect of unlimited theoretical development. Why? The true test of theory is its ability to explain reality. Yet the world began to change dramatically in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in ways opaque to the standard, increasingly conventional, neoclassical location theories. Sharp and discountinuous shifts occurred in global space opposed to neoclassical theory’s equilibrium view of the world. The direction taken by regional development varied greatly from that predicted by location theories emphasizing transport cost minimization. Location theory was profoundly unable to structure the analytical mind in correspondence with these, the historical and geographical dynamics of international capitalism. The result was the extensive critiques of the 1970s (e.g. Massey 1973) and subsequent attempts at theoretical replacement in the later 1970s and 1980s.