ABSTRACT
The end of World War II brought relief throughout Scandinavia, not least among geographers whose intellectual horizons had been so deeply influenced by German precedents. Barriers to spatial movement were lifted and migration flows westwards over Baltic and Atlantic meant brain drain for some and a brain gain for others. Invited to Uppsala by Professor Gerd Enequist for the nationally important symposium on Tätorter och Omland, Kant made his first major performance for Swedish colleagues. This event could be regarded, in fact, as a formal proclamation of a genuinely modernist turn in Swedish geography. Social geography is a field in which the name of Edgar Kant certainly holds a pioneering place. As the fruits of these various projects were being harvested and evaluated in the 1980s, university life regained its dynamism and the values of scientific research were more openly acknowledged. Thanks to the pioneering work of 'time geographers', there was a growing sensitivity to issues of temporality.
