ABSTRACT
The 1970s were a time of considerable theoretical debate in urban geography. The once dominant paradigm of spatial analysis came under increasing scrutiny from behavioral, Marxist, and realist perspectives. A decade that had opened with a largely unexamined confidence in the scientific method was to close with an uneasy sense of pluralism. This paper examines the major contours of that debate from an autobiographical perspective. My own academic journey through the 1970s involved an early engagement with the behavioral approach, especially within the contexts of residential mobility, migration, and consumer behavior. 132Toward the end of the decade, however, I was pursuing a more methodological focus. In particular, I had begun to explore the role that structural equation models might play in our understanding of spatial patterns and the processes that both produce them and are constrained by them. These structural equation models ultimately included causal models, path analysis, simultaneous equations, and the use of latent, or unmeasured variables.
