Diagramming the social: exploring the legacy of Torsten Hägerstrand’s diagrammatic landscapes

Abstract

Torsten Hägerstrand’s work was influential to the emergence of human geography as a theoretically sophisticated social science. Focusing on the materiality of everyday life, and the complex ecological webs through which human society is made, his writings offered an original set of tools to think about the how and where of communal life. Nonetheless, in much of the North American and British academy, Hägerstrand’s work has been relegated to a disciplinary footnote; a writer whose work has been overtaken by more recent developments in social theory. This article re-evaluates the contemporary relevance of Hägerstrand’s thought. Drawing on examples, it explores how the social time-space diagramming developed by Hägerstrand might be productively reinterpreted and reconfigured. Rather than thinking of Hägerstrand’s work as being made redundant by subsequent theoretical advances, this paper demonstrates how his work still offers social scientists useful tools to describe the worlds they study.

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