ABSTRACT
Geographical engagement with the ‘quality of life’ and related concepts dates back to the late 1960s. This is not to say that human geography was entirely oblivious to qualitative aspects of life before then, simply that the traditional preoccupation with natural resources, production and population characteristics tended to dominate any concern with consumption in its broadest sense. That different ‘ways of life’ existed in different places was central to the geographer’s view of the world, but explicit qualitative comparisons tended to be avoided. What was new about the self-styled geography of social concern (or ‘radical geography’) which began to take shape in the latter part of the 1960s was consideration of such hitherto neglected topics as poverty, health, hunger, crime and environmental pollution, and their contribution to the general quality of people’s lives as a spatially variable condition (Smith 1973).
