The Error of Developmentalism in Human Geography

Abstract

Geography is about the world. Well … yes, sure, but let’s get on with the newest geography and forget the world. If this reaction is only true of a minority of the last generation of geographers — and I believe it to be much more prevalent than that — then it is a massive betrayal of lost opportunities. Let us re-state, therefore, the basic assertion — geography is about the world. This should be repeated, ad nauseam , every time a new geography emerges out of the intellectual sanctuary of the universities. This antidote may then prevent the current crisis of geography from ever happening again. What is the current crisis? Well, if you haven’t noticed it you have been more hypnotised by new geographies than you dare admit. The crisis of geography is that we live in a world in which global issues are paramount, but where geography has little or nothing to say about them. At the very least it is a crisis of self-respect. We need to put the ‘geo’ back into geography. But before we can do that we need to understand how we came to lose our geo in the first place.

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