Quantitative Revolution - The 1950s Crisis in Geography

The 1950s Crisis in Geography

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the crisis occurred for several reasons:

• The closing of many geography departments and courses in universities, e.g., the abolition of the geography program at Harvard University (a highly prestigious institution) in 1948.
• Continuing division between human and physical geography - general talk of human geography becoming an autonomous subject.
• Geography was seen (fairly or not) as overly descriptive and unscientific- there was, it was claimed, no explanation of why processes or phenomena occurred.
• Geography was seen as exclusively educational - there were few if any applications of contemporary geography.
• Continuing question of what geography is - Science, Art, Humanity or Social Science?
• After World War II, technology became increasingly important in society, and as a result, nomothetic-based sciences gained popularity and prominence.

Debate raged predominantly (although not exclusively) in the U.S., where regional geography was the major philosophical school (European geography had never been uncomfortable with analytical methods).

All of these events presented a great threat to geography's position as an academic subject, and thus geographers began seeking new methods to counter critique. Under the (somewhat misleading) banner of the scientific method, the quantitative revolution began.