ABSTRACT

The pervasive view that Nature is external and primordial is unconsciously confirmed by our placement as intellectuals in a spatially organized society in which "intellectual work" and "intellectual life" are urban. Set aside the conception of nature as external, as primordial, as historically prior to the development of humans and human society. Cultural geography addressed Nature but eschewed formal theory, working with metaphor and narrative at the uncomfortable margins of proper science, flirting with anthropology and, like anthropology, retreating from the increasing complexities of the capitalist core. Urban economic geography constituted itself as a positivist science in a way that those concerned with human environment relations did not. Positivist urban geography constructed for itself all of the modern disciplinary structures and forms, and its critical inheritors have made use of these, which are well fitted to the structures of discipline of the academic world.