regional planning and deevelopment

Planning has been defined as the process of thinking through and implementing a set of appropriate actions to achieve some goals

Concept of Rural Growth Centre
Growth centre may be defined as service centre (rural or urban) which has a
potential for further development and hence need to be supported by further public
and private sector investment1. It has been conceived as points of attraction for the
people who otherwise would go to large congested urban areas. Rural Growth Centre
is a centre which provides goods and services to its own population as well as its
surroundings population creating balanced socio-economic development of an area. It
is a powerful strategy for microlevel planning for rural as well as for urban areas.
Mostly it is seen that urban areas have large number of facilities and amenities for the
betterment of the people while rural population have to travel large distance to avail
these socio-economic facilities. Therefore, there is a need to identify existing rural
growth centres in rural areas and accordingly propose new growth centres so that the
rural areas become self-sufficient in its basic socio-economic facilities and amenities.
For the developing country like India where nearly 70 per cent of the population lives
in the rural areas, therefore it is necessary to revitalize the tempo of economic
activities. Thus the growth centre strategies have been adopted in the present analysis
to reduce the regional inequalities and usher balanced development of the region.
Some of the models pertaining to rural growth centres has been discussed in sequent
manner.

Use models as below for rural growth
growth pole
central place theory
Market as focus
               Marketing is the pivot of economic development in rural areas. It is an essential component in income and employment generation in farm and non-farm sectors. Village economy can not be developed without effective and efficient rural marketing. Very little attention has been paid in the planning era towards the development of rural marketing. Some of the market facilities provided by the government for the rural population have been discussed one by one.
                                     1.Public Distribution Shop or Fair Price Shop
                                      2.Local Market or Haat
                                                      Marketing has a crucial role in development of rural non-farm sector and rural haats are an integral part of the rural market system. Rural Haat enables small farmers /rural artisans / producers / traders to sell their agri-produces, handicrafts and other products. Haat encourages face to face contact between sellers and buyers, there by eliminating the middleman




                                                            Growth Pole Model
The main theoretical base of the growth centre concept is the ‘growth pole’ model.
The model originates from the work of Francois Perroux who started from the view that economic growth does not occur everywhere all at once, but starts at a few specific growth poles and spreads through various channels at varying intensities and with varying effects.
Perroux’s original conception had little to do with geographical space.
Rather, he conceived of an abstract economic space in which a growth pole is a large, leading or innovative, industrial firm which, through backward and forward linkages, is capable of spreading development impulses to other organizations

Use
During 1960s, practical strategies based on the growth pole concepts, named "growth pole strategies", had been intensely considered and implemented in developed and developing countries.

By the late 1970’s, the growth pole strategies had been "implemented, provided for, or seriously discussed" in at least 28 developed and developing countries. They were Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, France, Ghana, Great Britain, India, Ireland, Italy,
Kenya, Libya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Tanzania, the United States, Venezuela, and Yugoslavia.

FAilure of growth pole
The growth pole theory was largely abandoned in the 1980’s due to growing dissatisfaction with the perceived lack of coherence between traditional notions of growth poles and empirical reality.
Many growth pole policies were shown to fail in their intended objectives of inducing new economic growth in lagging regions It has been observed that inspite creating balanced regional development
growth poles had created regional inequalities.
Stohr and Todtling (1977) synthesised the case studies and found that growth pole strategies could not bring development to the hinter land. They concluded that the growth pole strategies may have been successful in reducing inter-regional disparities, but as local spread effects were weak, moreover, they had at the same time caused intra-regional, in particular rural-urban,
disparities.
For the development of rural areas in the developing country like India, bottom-up approach should be adopted. But growth pole model emphasized on topdown approach by establishing industries in urban areas. Therefore, through this model rural development could not be achieved.

Alternative
For balanced  socio-economicdevelopment of any region (rural or urban) Christaller’s Central Place Theory has been proved much satisfactory than the growth pole model which has been discussed
below




 spatial Planning has been reemphasized. Spatial approach to economic problems provides frame work for complimentarity between micro/local level and macro level planning; allow concrete conceptualization of economic problems in broader perspective and helps addressing non economic variables with equal importance.

Integrated area development programme postulated during this period refers to functional & spatial integration. Functional integration envisages integration of all economic and social activities that influence the society. If spatial relationships among existing activities are observed, it will be noticed that there is a definite pattern in the dispersal or concentration of activities in space. The central place theory advanced by Christaller (1933), and modified by Losch (1954) and Skinner (1965) attempted to provide explanation of phenomenological environment and bringing out orderliness in spatial structure. Prior to this, it was Von Thunen who attempted to formulate certain basic principles to explain spatial distribution of landuse way back in 1826. Dendritic central place system described by Johnson (1970) traces linkage for rural retail market at the bottom to the urban primate center at the top. The basic elements of central place theory are functional centralization, hierarchy, regional complementarity and economic distance.

It was felt that the spatial planning will be accomplished through the growth center development. However, the desired results could not be achieved. One of the major problems is lack of appropriate evaluation of space in development theory. In one hand, social relations are not investigated in depth while dealing with formation of relative space; and on the other hand, sectoral bias in planning process deters " spatialising" in most of the cases. Further, as Souza(1998) quoted Kevin Linch "it is a very common prejudice to assume that the materiality of space is relevant when seen from the viewpoint of the quality of life at the level of scale of home, workplace, even neighborhood, but irrelevant at the larger scale levels like the town or region"

Problems of Application of Growth Center & Spatial Planning

The problems of application & Spatial Planning and growth centre theories have cropped up both at the philosophical/conceptual level and in the application front. When the concept of spatial planning got entrenched in planning, specially in view of providing scientific base to the planning the discussion mostly centered around high level decision making of land allocation, and the social needs were considered localized. This very idea results in postulation of planned space an objective & pure and hence neutral in character like mathematics. As the developed planning addresses the question of societal welfare, the space cannot be isolated from people.

It is not merely a scientific object removed from ideology or politics. Space has been shaped and moulded from historical and natural elements through a political process (Lefebvre, 1975). The political economy operating in a given space has not been given due recognition in growth centre planning or spatial planning. According to Misra (1976) the target groups of needy people require careful attention and when they cluster together in space the focus can be on carefully defined target areas but always the focus should be on people.

Issues that have cropped up in implementation of growth centre pilot project and for other area development programme are briefly presented here.

1. The growth centre project had not addressed the fundamental problem of development administration, which was perhaps beyond its scope. In fact, various planning exercises taken up from time to time have not taken up administrative and institutional issues at any level. There was hardly any focus on skill of project valuation and grass root planning in the real sense of the term.

2. A viable planning unit has hardly been demarcated. The issues like, what is the optimum spatial coverage, What is the lowest unit and at what level the aggregation is viable have not been given due consideration. There was little attempt to use geographical / natural region as planning unit.

3. Inter and intra settlement variabilities are not fully considered as the socio- economic processes that cause societal undulations are rarely captured before spelling out the planning actions. Here, again the conceptual problem of absolute space and relative space crops up.

4. The concept of integrated approach is well accepted in the planning parlance, however, in practice it is found to be very difficult to use. One of the issues that emerges more often than not is how to integrate socio-economic aspects with bio-physical foundation of an area.

5. Data and other information used for the planning are not adequate. There is also lack of quality data while the venture is for spatial planning at the micro level, spatial data at the microlevel are rarely used due to non availability. The result was microlevel spatial planning with macrolevel data. This has severely restricted the scope of planning. Even the ILO had identified the lacunae in data use for planning purposes.

6. Another major issue was related to distribution of execution power down the level. The lower order centres like villages/panchayats were not given sufficient execution power to effectively act in planning process.

7. With all these attempts to plan for the rural area, the people for whom the plan are supposed to be are kept out of the process. This has not only restricted the use of traditional skill but also hindered adoption of plans.

8. Growth centre approach has not spelt out the requirement of industrialization at the rural level.

The various rural development programmes introduced from time to time suffer from certain inadequacies during course of their implementation. These are 1) problems of coordination and integration, 2) problems of organization and 3) problems related to planning techniques & planning machinery.

Guidelines for Block Level Planning". Three sequential steps have been identified for preparation of a Block plan. These are 

i) working out a general service center plan 

ii) Preparation of sectoral plan and 

iii) preparation of an integrated area development plan.

Squatter

SQUATTER

"Slums" are highly congested urban areas marked by deteriorated, unsanitary buildings, poverty, and social disorganization.

"Squatters" settle on land, especially public or unoccupied land, without right or title. Squatters include those who settles on public land under regulation by the government, in order to get title to it.

Simply out, slums refer to the environmental aspects of the area where a community resides, while squatters refer to the legality of the land ownership and other infrastructure provision.

.Definition of a Squatter Settlement:

A squatter settlement therefore, can be defined as a residential area which has developed without legal claims to the land and/or permission from the concerned authorities to build; as a result of their illegal or semi-legal status, infrastructure and services are usually inadequate. There are essentially three defining characteristics that helps us understand squatter settlement: the Physical, the Social and the legal with the reasons behind them being interrelated.

Physical Characteristics:

A squatter settlement, due to its inherent "non-legal" status, has services and infrastructure below the "adequate" or minimum levels. Such services are both network and social infrastructure, like water supply, sanitation, electricity, roads and drainage; schools, health centres, market places etc. Water supply, for example, to individual households may be absent, or a few public or community stand pipes may have been provided, using either the city networks, or a hand pump itself. Informal networks for the supply of water may also be in place. Similar arrangements may be made for electricity, drainage, toilet facilities etc. with little dependence on public authorities or formal channels.

Social Characteristics:

Most squatter settlement households belong to the lower income group, either working as wage labour or in various informal sector enterprises. On an average, most earn wages at or near the minimum wage level. But household income levels can also be high due to may income earners and part-time jobs. Squatters are predominantly migrants, either rural-urban or urban-urban. But many are also second or third generation squatters.

Legal Characteristics:

The key characteristic that delineates a squatter settlement is its lack of ownership of the land parcel on which they have built their house. These could be vacant government or public land, or marginal land parcels like railway setbacks or "undesirable" marshy land. Thus when the land is not under "productive" use by the owner, it is appropriated by a squatter for building a house. It has to be noted here that in many parts of Asia, a land owner may "rent" out his land for a nominal fee to a family or families, with an informal or quasi-legal arrangement, which is not however valid under law.

Other names

Bastee, Juggi-johmpri = India

Informal settlements ,Low-income settlements, Semi-permanent settlements, Shanty towns, Spontaneous settlements, Unauthorized settlements, Unplanned settlements , Uncontrolled settlements

The Development Process of a Squatter Settlement

The key question to be asked here is why do people squat? There are two reasons for this: one is internal to the squatter, and the other is external. Internal reasons include, lack of collateral assets; lack of savings and other financial assets; daily wage/low-income jobs (which in many cases are semi-permanent or temporary). External reasons include, high cost of land and other housing services; apathy and anti-pathy on the part of the government to assist them; high "acceptable" building standards and rules and regulations; lopsided planning and zoning legislation.

Future Role of Squatter Settlements in Urban Housing.

Squatter settlements in urban areas are an inevitable phenomena. As long as urban areas offer economies of scale and agglomeration economies, large cities will always continue to grow attracting migrants from rural and smaller urban areas, leading to more squatting. There is no universal "quick-fix" solution that can solve all the problems of squatting in all parts of the developing world. Considering the inevitability of squatting, the need is primarily for a change in attitude towards squatting, squatters and squatter settlements. One such approach that has been receiving considerable attention from various government and public authorities has been the "enabling" approach, where instead of taking a confrontationist attitude, governments have strived to create an enabling environment, under which people, using and generating their own resources, could find unique local solutions for their housing and shelter problems.

Ghetto

 

GHETTOS

                

A ghetto is a part of a city in which members of a minority group live, especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure.^[1] The term was originally used in Venice to describe the part of the city to which Jews were restricted and segregated.

Indian example 1- Uprooted from Mumbai after the 1992-93 riots, thousands of Muslim families found safety in Mumbra on the city’s outskirts. The Bombay riots of December 1992, which overwhelmingly killed Bombay Muslims, and the retaliatory bomb blasts in January 1993 by the Muslim underworld, reconfigured the social geography of the city. Bombay Muslims from riot-hit areas sought safety in numbers and found it in Mumbra, where Muslims from the Konkani coast had a long-standing presence. Through a combination of the desire for safety among Muslims, the relatively cheaper price of apartments, and continued rural-urban migration, Mumbra’s population grew 20 times from about 45,000 before the 1992 riots to more than 9,00,000 in the 2011 Census — possibly one of the fastest expansions of an urban area in India.

Indian example 2- This is one of the very few mixed neighbourhoods left in communally divided Ahmedabad, with more ghettos coming up over the last decade. Muslims from many areas who used to be scattered across the city are now flocking together in ghettos like Vatwa, a disorganised, industrial suburb.

Features

·         Power and water supply was feeble. There was little public infrastructure. The crisis provided a business opportunity for Mumbra builders; they set out to build illegal and substandard apartment blocks, which were (and still are) a lot cheaper by Mumbai standard

·         The poor building quality exacted a terrible cost in 2013 when a building collapse killed more than 70 people

·         Desire for upward mobility

The impatience with the status quo and the desire for upward mobility screams from roadside billboards advertising the achievements of Mumbra boys and girls in coaching classes and private schools.

·         Neglect and discrimination

Along with the strivings, a sense of neglect and discrimination pervades Mumbra, which does not have a single public hospital

·         Mumbra also lives with a hostile relationship with the police

hierarchial pattern of indian cities

Hierarchical Patterns of Indian Towns – Explained

Like the functional pattern, a hierarchical pattern of towns can also be identified. The towns at different levels are so distributed that smaller towns are more numerous and closely placed.

The hierarchy may be identified either structurally or within each function.

Structural Hierarchy:

An important aspect of urbanisation all over the world is the uneven pattern of development of small towns and big cities within the system. Every urban system is characterised by the presence of a few large cities and a large number of small towns. The large cities account for a larger share of the total urban population, while the small towns, despite their numbers, account for a smaller share. This is true of the Indian urban system.

The million plus cities form the apex of the Indian urban system and account for over one- third of India’s urban population (see table 19.4). They are followed closely by the one-lakh cities (class I towns) and the medium towns (classes II and III towns), each of which accounts for over a quarter of the urban population.

Together, these three categories add up to more than 80 per cent of the total urban population. The small towns, which account for 48 per cent of the total number of towns and include classes IV and V towns, constitute only 10.5 per cent of the total urban population. The distribution patterns of the major classes of towns and cities in different states of India show remarkable unevenness.

Functional Hierarchy:

Each major function (as discussed above) has its own hierarchy. For instance, if we take administration, the revenue village is at the lowest level. The level above this is the panchayat union or block and above that tehsil or taluk under a tehaildar. Above this is the district headquarters under a district collector.

Government departments like education, health, irrigation etc. are located in the district headquarters. Above a district headquarters is the state capital which has the governor, the state legislature, the secretariat and the high court. At the top is the national capital New Delhi which has the president, the parliament, the central secretariat and the Supreme Court.

Similarly other activities like trade, health and educational services, manufacturing etc. have their own hierarchy where the lower level functions are located in smaller towns and higher levels in larger towns. Each level requires a threshold population to support that particular function. For instance, a primary health centre is recommended for a population of 30,000 (20,000 for tribal and hilly areas), while an upgraded community centre is recommended for a population of 1,00,000.

Sustainable city

Sustainable city 

•Maintain population, particularly economically active people. Develop human resources.

•Economic growth.

•Infrastructure and urban services.

•Quality of life.

•Environmental impact. Ecological footprint.

•Circular metabolism.

•Green design and architecture.

•Energy efficiencies. Carbon neutral city. (Masdar)

urban sphere of influence

Urban sphere of influence


SOURCE 1

Urban spheres of influence reflect centre-to-hinterland relationship, compared with the non-central
region, the centre assumes more complex economic functions, and provides more economic activities. Famous theoretical contributions to this research field are the Central Place Theory (Christaller, 1933), the extension to the Central Place Theory (Losch, 1940), the modification to the Central Place Theory (Isard, 1956), and An Economic Theory of Central Places (Eaton et al.,1982). After verification and conceptual refinement of these classical literatures, it can be found that any study on delineating sphere of urban influence has been guided by either of two research approaches: the empirical research and model research.

Empirical method determines sphere of urban influence according to data features and regional characteristics. As for example, sphere of urban influence in America is described in terms of the extent of the regional delivery system (Huff, 1973). Models are developed to capture the interaction between or spaces using theoretical understanding, the intensity and pattern of contact among cities, and thus those models help to determine the sphere of urban influence.

In modeling, the sphere of urban influence, Huff (1973) and Lutz (1995) made a great contribution by using a model namely “Sphere of Urban Influence and Urban System” to delineate the urban sphere of influence of United States of America, Ireland and Ghana. Now-a-days in Western countries, the study of sphere urban of influence is diminishing in general. By virtue of their high degree of economic and social development, most of the developed countries have accessed post-industrial society, where node-to-node interactions have become, as compared to the node-to-hinterland relationships. But, for the developing countries, they are still pursuing industrial development and hence, develop the industries; the node-to-hinterland relationships are distinctly dominant. Recently the studies of spheres urban of influence of industrial cities are assuming international academic interest (Wang et al., 2001 & Liang, 2008). The present study is a humble attempt to analyze the socio-economic facilities by total population and composite functional score, and to delineate the sphere of urban influence.

source 2

Urban Spheres of Influence on Population

The urban sphere of influence can be defined as the geographical region which surrounds a city and maintains inflow-outflow relationship with the city.

Every urban centre, irrespective of the size of population and the nature of function, has a region of influence. Generally speaking, as the size of the population increases, the multiplicity of functions increases. As a result, the influence zone is larger and vice versa.

The term sphere of influence area was first used by Northam and supported by Canter. Other terms to express a similar entity, which have got recognised, include umland and city region. Umland is a German word which means the area around. The term was first used by the Allies in the Second World War.

The term city-region was first used by Dickinson. It is used to describe a similar situation on a much larger scale. Some other terms which have become popular include urban field, tributary area and catchment area. The term sphere of influence is preferred by political geographers.

Delineating the Sphere of Influence Area:

Several methods have been worked out by geographers and sociologists, but no single method seems to be perfect.

The pre-First World War geographers depended primarily on empirical methods (through questionnaires and field surveys) taking into account all those relevant functions which are performed by cities and the surroundings of the city. The influence zone of each function is first delineated. It brings out the multiplicity of boundaries of spheres of influence area.

Harris has suggested that a common boundary is to be drawn from within those boundaries which are very close to each other. Harris himself drew a sphere of influence area for the Salt Lake City of Utah State in USA. He used 12 important services for this purpose which included retail trade, wholesale grocery and drug sale, radio broadcasting, newspaper circulation, telephone services, banking distribution etc.

Harris scheme shows greater dependence upon the services of the cities. He practically ignored the services rendered by rural areas. Geographers like Carter, Dickinson and Green studied the sphere of influence area and their empirical methods gave due weightage to the rural services.

The post-Second World War geographers began to use statistical methods. This made the inferences more precise, logical and scientific. This method, however, has the disadvantage of being rigid. Still, it is a popular method throughout the world.

The conclusion of the method brings the delineated influence area closer to Christaller’s observations, who suggested that every urbane settlement (service centre) is supposed to have a hexagonal influence region. It solves the problem of existence of shadow zone which normally appears in the case of spherical delineation of the influence region.

The statistical method is based on the principle of gravitation. Reilly propounded the Law of Retail Gravitation to delineate the market zone of urban centres. Since marketing is a principal function, this method is used by geographers to delineate the zone of influence area.

This method states that:

P= MA x MB / d2

where MA = Mass of centre A measured by population size, such that MA > MB

MB = Mass of centre B

d = distance between two cities.

The result will mark the distance of the sphere of influence area from Mass (city) A; the remaining distance will mark the influence area of Mass (city) B. Modern urban geographers give importance to this method as they consider this cut-off as an important factor for development of respective influence areas.

Some development authorities have begun to use the sphere of influence area as the basis of regional planning. They use detailed questionnaires to understand the nature of influence. They consider factors such as daily commuting, functional structure of village, household types of villages, milk supply, vegetable supply, newspaper circulation etc. This approach seems to have some practical utility.

It gives due weightage to natural hindrances. Factors like rivers, mountains, forests, marshy lands etc. are bound to modify the influence area and in that case, the statistical method is not of much relevance. Information collected through questionnaires is, however, properly processed through different statistical methods and a composite index, indicating a common boundary, is worked out. This common boundary gives the limit of the sphere of influence area.

Thus, it becomes clear that the sphere of influence area is highly relevant in socio-economic patterns of a city and its surroundings. In India, the regional planners have given due recognition to the role of city regions or spheres of influence areas in the ‘Growth Pole’ strategy adopted by the Planning Commission of India in the Sixth Five- Year-Plan.

SOURCE 3

Sphere of influence

“The sphere of influence is the area surrounding a settlement that is affected by the settlement's activities.”

The sphere of influence of a shop is how far people will be prepared to go to make use of that shop. For example if people decide to travel a long distances for a shop that shop will have a big sphere of influence. But if a people didn’t feel it was necessary to travel long distances to go there shop has a small sphere of influence

What is a settlement hierarchy?

A settlement hierarchy is the arrangement of settlements in an order of importance.

What is the settlement hierarchy based upon?

The order of settlements within the settlement hierarchy is usually based 

on one of the following:

 the size of the settlement in terms of its area and population

Is it easy to organise a hierarchy by population size?

NO!

The population figures for each type of settlement are really just a guide, as it is difficult to give a cut-off figure for when a hamlet becomes a village, or a village becomes a town.

In some countries, so-called villages can be very big.  For example, some villages in India may be as large as a British town. 

BUT it is true that the largerthe settlement, the fewer of them there are – look again at the pyramid! There are many isolated buildings but very few conurbations.

 the range and number of services/functions within each settlement

The number of shops and services in a settlement depends upon the threshold population, which is the minimumnumber of people required by a shop/service to make a profit. Shops and services are classified according to their threshold population:

 the relative sphere of influence of each settlement

Sphere of influence is the area served by a particular settlement. 

Range is the maximum distance that a customer is prepared to travel.

URBANISATION AND INDIA

URBANISATION AND INDIA

Urban definition in indian terms?CLasification
Criticism of Criteria for towns And possible solution ie reasonable criteria?
Terms like megacities, metrocities, Conurbation,Megapolis,Cosmopolitan?
Classify cities based on sizes?

humanism

Humanistic geography. The approach of the humanistic geographer is to give
center stage to human awareness, human inventiveness, and individual percep-
tion of place. Humanistic geography is somewhat connected with early French
human geography, but it has a closer tie with contemporary social geography.
Humanistic geography emerged in the 1970s as a reaction against the mech-
anistic approaches of the Quantitative Revolution. A key question asked by
humanistic geographers is “why do people act as they do?” Implicit in this ques-
tion is a searching for attitudes, perceptions, and awareness in humans that
help to explain how they behave, individually and collectively, in the spatial
context. An important reversal of emphasis occurred in humanistic geography
from the notion of the “spatial confinement of people and societies” to “ones
concerned with the human and social construction of space”
Yi-Fu Tuan, an early advocate of humanistic geography, suggested that
achieving a more thorough understanding of humans was the main goal of the
discipline. Tuan also compared the scientific approach to the study of humans,
which paid little attention to the role of human awareness, and the approach of
the humanistic geographer, which emphasizes human awareness and links it to
spatial activities. Tuan, originally from China, was a longtime geography pro-
fessor at the University of Minnesota and is now retired.
Humanistic geographical approaches were radically different from that of
the accepted geographies of the 1970s. Physical geographers especially were
critical of the new forms of explanation offered by humanistic geographers. In
the new approach, empirically based hypotheses supported by analysis and ob-
jectivity were replaced by subjective conclusions and methodologies that were
seen as intellectually suspect.
Humanistic geographers address the role of evaluating human awareness of
the environment and consequent activities within it. Most important, humanistic geography emphasizes the importance of the subjective view and the mer-
its of the individual human being existing within spatial bounds.



HUMANISTIC GEOGRAPHY
Humanism is a term that encompasses a variety
of philosophical positions that go back to the
Renaissance, when scholars such as Erasmus and
Petrarch offered views of the social world that put
people in the center, in contrast to the prevailing
religious interpretations. Closely associated with
humanism is hermeneutics (from Hermes, the Greek
messenger of the gods), which is essentially the study
of meanings. Originating from medieval attempts to
find the one “true” meaning of the Bible, hermeneutics
became extended to include the multiplicity of
meanings inherent within all literary texts and social
actions.
Two closely related approaches to humanistic
thought have characterized it over time: phenomenology
and existentialism. Both are concerned with the shape
of human experience—the nature of subjectivity—and
there is considerable overlap. Whereas phenomenology
tends to emphasize the nature of human experience
and meaning, existentialism is more often
concerned with the ethical conduct of life.
Several giants in the history of philosophy invoked
these lines of thought. Danish Christian existentialist
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) offered a Romantic
critique of the Enlightenment, claiming that objectivity
is a myth and that all people faced an agonizing choice
between faith and reason, between the sacred and the
profane, between ethics and pleasure. Edmund Husserl
(1859–1939) formed a transcendental phenomenology,
noting that the view of science as an objective map of
the outer world reduced the human observer to a passive
receptor. He argued that objects do not have meanings
in and of themselves; rather, meanings are
constructed by the human mind. Husserl called for a
science of phenomenology that would strip away the
biases that the mind creates in its perceptions of the
world in order to see essences—the reality of things in
themselves. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) asked the apparently simple question, “What does it mean to be?”
and offered a very complex answer. His view rested on
the notion of the hermeneutics of being (Dasein), the
understanding of which meant an escape from abstract
theorizing. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) attempted a
merger of existentialism and Marxism, noting that in
contemporary capitalism the human condition is depersonalized
and alienated.
Essentially, all of these views maintain that objectivity
is a hurdle to effective understanding and that
there is no privileged conceptual vantage point; every
view is a view from somewhere and is inescapably
laden with biases. We cannot know the world except
for the meanings that people give to it. Thus, human
subjectivity is not a barrier to understanding the world
but rather the only route to knowing it. Meanings are
essentially arbitrary phenomena, and logic cannot
inform our moral choices. Despite this predicament,
as Sartre noted, humans are “condemned to freedom”;
that is, they must make choices even if there are no
firm grounds for doing so.
Thus, the project of a humanistic social science
was to put people back in the center of social analysis,
that is, to reveal the things that make people human
(i.e., consciousness). Social science has long had a
poor conception of the human subject—a flaw that
humanism attempts to overcome. It is consciousness
that makes us subjects rather than objects, that is,
allows us to be actors in the world with will and volition.
Mapping human consciousness allows us to
move past the sterile models of human behavior such
as Homo economicus to recover the sensuous nature
of experience—the ways in which the self, the environment,
and others are framed symbolically. This
task involves some understanding of intentionality—
our deeply human desires and motivations, anticipations
and expectations.
Uncovering the multiple dimensions of human consciousness,
however, is no simple task. It is essential
to avoid simplistic and biologically reductionist notions
of “human nature.” In the broadest sense, consciousness
is what makes us human. In some respects, human
consciousness differs qualitatively from animal consciousness
(e.g., in humans’ sense of self, time, humor,
and death), although with many primates this difference
is a matter of degree. Constructing a humanistic understanding
of consciousness has also invoked various
psychological understandings of sensation, perception,
and cognition, leading to intersections with behavioral
approaches. Consciousness includes our emotions and
memories, pleasures and fears, sexuality, hopes for the
future, and more—both rational and irrational. This
view sees humans as active creative actors and stresses
their constructive role in making the world. Social reality
does not simply happen to individuals “behind their
backs” or “above their heads”; individuals make the
world that makes them. Thus, humanistic social science
is unapologetically anthropocentric, antinaturalist (it
objects to using the same means to understand the natural
world and the social world), and antideterminist,
noting that people’s actions render social structures
ever changing and contingent.
Humanistic thought emphasizes the central role of
language as a set of signs that we use to negotiate the
world and share meanings. Language is how we bring
the world into consciousness, and thought is always
linguistically structured. As linguists and philosophers
such as Wittgenstein have demonstrated, language is
an opaque medium of understanding with a structure
of its own. There is no language-free theory, and language
limits and constrains the ways in which meanings
are constructed, at times letting them escape their
authors. The intersections of humanistic thought and
literature in the form of textual deconstruction
allowed every system of signs (e.g., a text, a landscape)
to be pulled apart.
Like positivism and empiricism, the humanistic
approach begins with the individual and experience in
the construction of knowledge. The task of social
science is to enter into another’s taken-for-granted
world, to see reality through the other’s eyes, and to
acknowledge the other’s view as a valid source. Truth
is found in the subjective meanings that people assign
to their worlds, and explanation is the recovery of
their intentions. Thus, humanism advocated a selfconsciously
empathetic social science that did not
strive for the holy grail of objectivity but rather confronted
its own inevitable assumptions and biases.
This approach forces researchers to acknowledge both
the subjectivity of the observer and the subjectivity of
the observed—to question their own assumptions and
biases—rendering the old subject/object dichotomy
false and inserting the researcher into the research
process. In so doing, humanism confronted social
science with the need to clarify the ethics and morals
of the observer, making clear his or her positionality
in the research process. It also legitimated the use of
qualitative research methods, such as participant
observation and case studies, that sought to uncover
the views of subjects Humanistic thought has a long history in the discipline
of geography. During the early 20th century,
French cultural geography owed much to Paul Vidal
de la Blache, who studied the unity of culture and
landscape in terms of the lifestyles (genres de vie) in
small rural areas called pays, uniting land and life
through an understanding of how consciousness and
the earth are deeply intertwined. During the 1960s and
1970s, several authors made major contributions to
the American literature on humanistic geography.
Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness was concerned
with the cultural impacts of mass production
and consumption, the homogenization of capitalist
landscapes, and resulting alienation. Ann Buttimer
introduced the notion of lifeworlds, a phenomenological
recovery of genres de vie that took as its point of
departure the multiple ways in which consciousness
was preconsciously sutured to locales in the intimate
rhythms of everyday life. David Lowenthal wrote on
landscape tastes and perceptions and on the relationship
between history and cultural heritage. David Ley
offered richly detailed urban ethnographies of the
inner city and social geographies of Canadian cities.
Yi-Fu Tuan, who coined the term humanistic geography,
held pride of place in this pantheon. Tuan’s
contributions included the widely popular notion of
“sense of place”, that is, the highly subjective set of
feelings and impressions that individuals attach to
specific locales. In this reading, places are intangible
webs of meaning, not simply physical points. Sense of
place, for example, makes a house into a home, makes
a church into a building with deeply religious meanings,
or defines a gang’s turf. Tuan applied this set of
notions, broadly grouped under the label topophilia,
to studies of nature versus wilderness, spaces of pain
and torture, sacred places, patriotism, pets, and more.
This line of thought also differentiated between
space and place. In part, the difference is a matter of
scale; space generally concerns broader domains than
the individual experiences on a daily basis. However,
space in the Western tradition often is used in a highly
abstract sense such as a Cartesian plane or isotropic
plains used in mathematical models. In contrast, place
tends to be smaller, localized, more intimately experienced,
intangible depositories of experience. The shift
from space to place—one of the major contributions
of humanistic geography—saw a transition from the
abstract disembodied space to the embodied, erotic, personal,
pungent places of individual worlds. Such a move
exhibited a concern with particularity and specificity
rather than with generality and made little effort to
search for “general laws.” Humanistic geographers
were interested in what makes places unique, how
they enter human consciousness, and how that consciousness
in turn constructs places through interpretation.
In so doing, they opened to geography linkages
to hitherto closed domains such as landscape architecture,
cultural anthropology, the sociology of the self,
and the arts and humanities.
Another topic legitimized through humanistic
geography was the geography of identity and the
body. Whereas classical theories of the human subject
portrayed identities as unitary and stable, phenomenologists
argued that identity is a multiplicity of
unstable, context-dependent traits—sometimes contradictory—
that change over time and space. Identities
are both space forming and space formed, that is, inextricably
intertwined with geographies in complex
and contingent ways. Likewise, human geographers
explored the multiple ways in which identity, subjectivity,
the body, and place are sutured together. The
interface between body and mind is an ancient topic
of philosophical consideration; the fact that we both
have bodies and are bodies confronts us with the nebulous
intersections of mind and matter. The body is
where the mind resides, the locus of consciousness,
tangible and corporeal evidence of its existence,
giving existential and phenomenological depth to
lived experience. Although bodies typically appear as
“natural,” they are in fact social constructions deeply
inscribed with multiple meanings—“embodiments”
of class, gender, ethnic, and other relations. The body
is the primary vehicle through which prevailing economic
and political institutions inscribe the self, producing
a bundle of signs that encodes, reproduces, and
contests hegemonic notions of identity, order and discipline,
morality and ethics, sensuality and sexuality.
In insisting on the primacy of the intentional subject,
humanistic scholars were adamant that geographies and
landscapes always are authored, that is, created by
people who give meaning to them. This position was
very much at odds with rival perspectives, including the
impersonal geometries of positivism. Humanists challenged
behavioral geographers to explore not only the
actions of people but also their intentions, avoiding
simplistic black-box models such as Homo economicus.
Finally, humanist thought mounted a serious challenge
to Marxism, pointing out its flawed conception of
human subjectivity and questioning its economic determinism
and teleological view of history and geography, where people are represented as finders of a world
already made. Instead, humanists argued that the social
world was open-ended and contingent, forever in the
process of becoming.
Humanistic thought, however, also had its critics.
Marxists and others pointed out that it offered no
account of social relations—of class, power, and production.
Moreover, humanism’s notion of the subject,
however rich, was a largely asocial undersocialized
account of individuals in purely personal—not interpersonal—
terms. For example, a dwelling is not just a site
of caring and memories but also a locus of social reproduction,
family relations, patriarchy, and power.
Moreover, by being silent about social relations, humanistic
thought lapsed into an uncritical view of the world
as simply structured by choice, a mythologized vision of
“free will” devoid of social constraints. Methodologically,
humanism’s critics argued that the approach
was deeply flawed; for example, it offered no means of
validating, confirming, or disproving its claims. Some
even held that humanistic thought was opposed to
science. These problems led Entrikin to conclude that humanism sufficed as a critique of other positions, a way
of unmasking presuppositions, but not as an alternative.
Humanistic thought made great contributions to the
discipline, helping to revive cultural geography and
forcing researchers to take seriously the complex question
of human consciousness. It jettisoned the myth of
objective research and made explicit discussion of values
and biases an integral part of the process. In the
end, humanistic geography, faced with serious critiques
of its own, was largely integrated into other paradigms
such as structuration theory and various poststructuralist
perspectives that arose during the 1980s and 1990s.