Spatial Turn

In the late 20th century, human geography underwent a profound conceptual and methodological renaissance that transformed it into one of the most dynamic, innovative, and influential of the social sciences. The discipline, which had long suffered from a negative popular reputation as a trivial, purely empirical field with little analytical substance, moved from being an importer of ideas from other fields to an exporter, and geographers are increasingly being read by scholars in the humanities and other social sciences. As a result of the rebirth in scholarship in geography, other disciplines have increasingly come to regard space as an important dimension of their own areas of inquiry, in what is widely called the spatial turn. Denis Cosgrove (1999), for example, argues that

Recent works in the fields of literary and cultural studies, sociology, political science, anthropology, history, and art history have become increasingly spatial in their orientation.

In some ways, this transformation is expressed in simple semantic terms, that is, in the rising popularity of words such as space, place, location, positionality, and mapping in denoting a geographic dimension. In other ways, however, the spatial turn is much more substantive, involving a reworking of the very notion and significance of spatiality to offer a perspective in which space is every bit as important as time in the unfolding of human affairs, a view in which geography is not relegated to an afterthought of social relations but is intimately involved in their construction. Geography matters, not for the simplistic and overly used reason that everything happens in space but because where things happen is critical to knowing how andwhy they happen.

With space and place at the center of the analytical agenda, geographical thought has arguably played a major role in helping facilitate interdisciplinary inquiry that offers a richer, more contextualized understanding of human experience, social relations, and the production of culture. As different disciplines have taken up geography in their own way, they bring to bear their respective assumptions, languages, paradigms, applications, and examples on the meaning of the spatial. Thus, as the spatial turn has unfolded across the social sciences and humanities, it has come to embrace an ever-larger set of uses and implications.