ABSTRACT
Twentieth-century social scientists have for the most part preferred to re-present the world in vertical, aspatial, and sequential terms, in terms of historical depth and duration, rather than in terms of horizontality, proximity, and simultaneity, rather than in terms of geographical configuration and extent. The conduct of human-geographical inquiry, the execution of social analysis, and the reformulation of social theory must be completely torn down in order to better understand human and societal phenomena. The scope for human agency is enabled and constrained both by already existing power relations and their associated social logics, rules of behavior, and modes of regulation and by the full array and relative location of features humanly built into given geographical areas, by spatial patterns of transformed nature. Power relations, while abstract and intangible, are always some-how associated with the concrete conduct of social life in place, always in some way involved with "the capacity to organize and control people, materials, and territories."
