Berkeley School

Origins

The Berkeley School began in 1923 when Carl Sauer moved from the University of Michigan to UC Berkeley. Prior to Sauer's arrival, geography at Berkeley was an independent department but was housed with geology; most of its courses were technical in nature and focused on physiography and geomorphology. William Morris Davis and his ideas of the cycle of erosion dominated the department at the time. When Sauer arrived, he sought to restructure the curriculum with the help of John Leighly, a student from Michigan, and separated the various types of study within geography. “Physical Geography” became the first course students took, but it was followed by a new course in cultural geography, which later became the main component of the Berkeley School of thought. Cultural geography as it was studied at Berkeley was regional in focus and was concerned with the density and development of populations, the character of the world's peoples, economic systems, specific regional cultures, and how people shape their physical environment. As cultural geography developed at Berkeley, it later became more concerned with the past and was aligned with the university's history and anthropology departments.

Characteristics of Study

Those studying in the Berkeley School used Sauer's dimension of time to study places, people, and their interactions with the landscape. In studying these things, however, Berkeley scholars did not rely on the opinions of city planners and politicians but instead conducted their own extensive fieldwork, which frequently involved long-term observations of people in their day-to-day lives. In addition to fieldwork, Berkeley scholars also examined cultural history and humanized landscapes with archival research. The regions and cultures studied in the Berkeley School were often outside the United States and other English-speaking areas and much of the research to come out of the school was focused on, though not limited to, Latin American studies.

Another important characteristic of the Berkeley School was its location. Because it was on the West Coast and located far from the concentration of geography departments in the Midwest, it was relatively isolated from other universities studying geography. This isolation allowed the school to develop and reinforce its own set of ideas and characteristics of study that significantly differed from those of other universities—most important the “practical” aspects of education prevalent in the Midwest. The theoretical ideas important in the Berkeley School were then reinforced through generations of students as the school's isolation allowed Sauer to hire many of his former students to work in the department on receiving their degrees.

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