Radical Geography

Radical geography began as an explicitly termed area of study in Anglophone geography during the late 1960s amid a context of crisis. Cold war militarism[Page 402] and imperialism had a heavy human cost in Vietnam, extreme race and class stratification of American cities had been accompanied by massive unrest, and the global economy was limping along under inflation, stagnant productivity gains, and a looming international debt crisis. At the same time, some ecologists issued dire warnings of impending doom that accompanied soaring populations. What, some began to ask, did geography have to offer—not just to understanding these deep problems but also to solving them?

The answer for some was a turn to Marxist theory and a radical politics. The formal emergence of the radical turn came with the publication of the first issue of the journal Antipode in 1969. Antipode billed itself explicitly as a radical journal of geography. It intended to serve as a forum for publishing research with a radical political commitment that its initial founders cast, almost by definition, as one oriented around not only challenging dominant geographic thinking but also—and more important—addressing deep social problems. Early work published in the journal focused on issues such as the connection between inner-city poverty and race, the geographies of imperialism and underdevelopment, and protest politics.

Radical geography interrogated virtually everything about the then-existing dynamics of disciplinary scholarship—everything from the research questions geographers asked to the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological tools they used to answer these questions. In many ways, the radical turn was a turn away from the positivism of the quantitative revolution that had dominated geography during the post–World War II period. For a new generation of geographers, the dominant orientation of the discipline reflected a profound technocratic conservatism, with its practitioners entirely unaware of the degree to which their work perpetuated commonsense understandings of the world that served to naturalize and reinforce existing inequalities. In response, radical geography was shaped by a perspective on scholarship that set it radically apart from positivism. First, for radical geographers, social problems were not technical problems in need of technical solutions; instead, they reflected deep contradictions in the nature of capitalist development. Second, and following, in the same way there could be no value-free technical solutions, there also could be no value-free science. Geography itself was part of the problem to the degree that geographers blindly believed in their own neutrality, which simply had the effect of re-creating the normative worldview that caused the problem in the first place.

Among the more influential of the radical geographers was David Harvey, whose book Social Justice and the City, published in 1973, announced his turn away from positivism to historical materialism with breathtaking analytical power and political commitment. The book was an ambitious attempt to take the basic theoretical insights of Karl Marx on the dynamics of capitalism and to recast them as fundamentally spatial dynamics. Marx, for example, discussed the tendency for capitalism toward crisis. Harvey argued that capital circulated not only through time but also through space. The decimation of traditional large-scale manufacturing in the U.S. Northeast was fundamentally tied to a rapid industrialization of places such as East Asia.

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