Radical Geography

Origins of Radical Geography

Three developments were critical in ushering in this new geographical perspective: (1) the establishment of the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute in 1968, (2) the founding of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography (1969), and (3) the publication of David Harvey's Social Justice and the City (1973). The Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI), created by the geographer William Bunge and local community activists, sought to expand both the accessibility of geographic knowledge and the process of knowledge production to poor, largely minority communities in Detroit. It incorporated these communities in all parts of the knowledge production: the identification of the research problem, fieldwork, the analysis, and its dissemination. Consequently, it broke down traditional barriers between researcher/researched and expert/activist. Antipode was established in 1969 to provide a forum for scholars and activists to publish materials addressing spatial and social injustices, scholarship frequently rejected from other geographical journals. Early work in Antipode commonly documented racial and economic inequalities, examined economic development and natural resources, and analyzed the role of colonialism and imperialism within the world political-economic system. All these issues were at the forefront of the social movement activism across the globe but received relatively little attention in many Anglo-American geography departments and mainstream journals at the time. While early Antipode articles drew attention to the uneven development occurring at all spatial scales, it was Harvey's work that shifted the focus from simply describing these processes to explaining them. Social Justice in the City chronicles Harvey's intellectual shift from positivist, empirical, quantitative research to his engagement with Marxist political economy. Central to Harvey's contribution was moving geography beyond describing areal differentiation, or modeling locations to maximize efficiency for a diverse set of industries, to a radical geography that examines the spaces produced by the capitalist economic system while interrogating the internal dynamics and contradictions within that system that make social and spatial unevenness necessary. With the work of Harvey, radical geography of the 1970s and 1980s took on a resolutely Marxist identity.

Radical geography rooted in Marxist political economy provided a number of significant contributions to the discipline during this time. In 1982, Harvey's Limits to Capital was published. In it, Harvey spatializes Marx's historical materialism and demonstrates how capital accumulation relies on the appropriation of space through a series of “spatial fixes.” In understanding [Page 2351]capitalism, Harvey offers historical-geographical materialism as a stronger method for both tracing the origins of contemporary capitalist relations and suggesting its possible futures. Harvey's theorizing was crucial to the development of many subsequent works that expanded his theory and method to other spaces and social relations. In 1984, Neil Smith published a widely influential volume, Uneven Development. In it, Smith uses a historical-geographical materialist approach to trace the production of “nature,” what he refers to as second nature. In addition, he outlines the creation of surplus value within urban land markets. Smith's examination of nature is significant as one of the first efforts at theorizing nature within radical geography. Doreen Massey also used Harvey's work in her book Spatial Divisions of Labor: Social Structures and the Geography of Production (1984), which provided a framework for examining the concentration of particular industries and labor in specific locales. These works and others further solidified the linkages between radical geography and Marxist political economy.

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