Environment and Planning A 2000, volume 32, pages 951 ^ 953

DOI:10.1068/a32202

Commentary

Celebrating thirty years of radical geography

Thirty years ago, a small group of geographers, radicalized by opposition to the
Vietnam War, began discussing the transformation of their discipline. The radical
movement in geography became apparent at the Boston meeting of the Association
of American Geographers in 1971. The articles in this issue and the next derive from
presentations given during eleven sessions organized under the rubric ``Radical Geog-
raphyöThirty Years On'' held at the Association of American Geographers meeting in
Boston, Massachusetts in 1998. All the papers have been refereed and rewritten under
the standards of publication worthiness usual to this journal. Hopefully, they retain the
enthusiasm marking what was only apparently a retrospective experience. Far more,
the Boston sessions expressed renewed commitments to a radical geography more
varied than previously in terms of philosophical style and range of political commit-
ments. The past has various relations to the future, part base, part portent, never
determinant. And the future is always available to those with the determination for
seizing it.
Thirty years seems a long time when viewed in anticipation. Thirty years pass in an
instance when viewed in retrospect. Memory collapses time so that it appears as a
series of quick flashes, each marked by some particular burst of insight, or period of
intense activity, often separated by long stretches of relative silence. Some of the flashes
might be arranged in the following history. During its first stage, in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, radical geography tried to transform the scope of a conventional discipline
criticized as irrelevant to the great issues of the time öcivil rights, the Vietnam War,
and environmental pollution were missing in geography. Somehow conventional geog-
raphy's focus on region and space precluded consideration of topics like these. Replete
with tensions, space itself did not exercise an exclusionary power. Rather it was the
prevailing system of academic representation, space as regional catalogue of curious
facts, or distance deliberately voided of social and political character. These representa-
tional styles could be seen as final culminations of a process of narrowing, an almost
fatal specialization set in motion by the definition of disciplinary contents in the late
19th century. Such a narrowing occurred as part of a conservative shift in Enlighten-
ment thinking: thus spatial science was progressive and optimistic in the mechanical
sense of social engineering rather than the organic sense of social transformation. In
response, radical geography focused on diffusing a new set of academic values in the
form of a different system of disciplinary topics, such as poverty, social justice, and
underdevelopment, rather than the grave consequences of the gravity model, like central
place theory and the discovery of profit-optimal locations. The main means of expres-
sion was Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography `published' (mimeographed, really)
at Clark University, starting in 1969, by a committed band of graduate students and
faculty. Early radical geography was anarchic and exuberant, naive yet nuanced.
The second stage in radical geography, spread across the years of the middle and
late 1970s, saw a series of increasingly sophisticated critiques of the positivist basis of
the `quantitative revolution in geography', and a number of proposals for a new
theoretical basis in the now more relevant radical geography, fast developing in terms
of interest and adherence. It should be remembered that radical geographers considered
themselves to be revolutionaries in more than a disciplinary sense. Popular culture has,
952 Commentary

necessarily, rendered the term `revolution' virtually meaningless in the intervening

years. But then for many, and even now for a few, the label carries the connotation
of transforming everything that existsöbeginning, usually, with the economy. This
political ideal was often, but not always, encapsulated within a Marxist frame of
thought, derived from the European Enlightenment, but with a lot of differences, like
a dialectical version of materialism, and a deeper revolutionary commitment. At its
best, Marxism is a democratic form of rationality, one that believes not in the logical
purity of eternal Reason but in the logical potential of democratic reasoning. Marxism
demands discipline from its followers, all the more so because of its social constructed-
ness. So this stage was marked by a collective process of dedicated exegesis of the
Marxists classics, and a series of applications mainly into urban and regional develop-
ment, a project coordinated by solidarity emanating from commitment rather than
orders from centers of command. It was the breakdown of political discipline that
marked the transition to the third phase in radical geography in the late 1970s and
early 1980s.
Until then, humanistic geography, deriving from an alternative, existential, and
phenomenological stream of post-Enlightenment thinking, had nonetheless coexisted
in much the same political space as Marxist radical geography. After that time, with its
series of critiques, the two separated, the one virtually disappearing into poststructur-
alism, the other moving through structuralism, structuration, and realism, to emerge in
far more diverse forms, such as regulation theory and the new industrial geography. At
the same time, feminist geography, which had also adhered to the radical (Marxist)
movement, split off, far less rancorously, to become a separate but related field of
radical thought and action. With the easy wisdom of hindsight, the third stage of the
1980s can be seen as a period of critique and countercritique within a movement that
had achieved not hegemony, for much of geography continued little different than
before, but intellectual leadership for a new generation of scholars. The period was
marked by reversal of structural excess and an expansion of interest away from the
previous fixation on the economic öits finest products were, probably, the locality
studies conducted in the middle 1980s and the beginnings of a geography of gender.
The fourth stage saw the entry of poststructural and postmodern philosophies,
together with a far more deeply theorized feminism, into a radical geography that
became increasingly eclectic. In one stream of thought Marxist geographers appro-
priated and synthesized the new ideas. In another, postmodern notions entered more
directlyöand more critically. The tragedy of the time, from a personal view, was the
antagonism that developed among the different schools of thought. Clearing space for
new styles of thinking seems almost automatically to engage intellectual violence.
Looking back on this time, it might be recognized that the criticisms were too personal,
the remarks too severe, the atmosphere seemingly devoid of respect, and the actions
taken in unnecessarily cruel ways. A pity considering that the level of philosophical
insight and the quality of empirical work were gaining new presence inside and outside
the discipline. At the Boston sessions in 1998 there were signs that this antagonism is
now behind radical geography. Can it really be that we stand before a new phase, not in
the usual sense of millennial optimism, where a year with a number attached achieves
magical significance, but in terms of the optimism that comes when squabbles are
finally finished, and issues demand confrontation?
What might this fifth phase consist of ? Some hints are contained in the papers
carried by these issues of this journal. But rather than trying to produce coherence
from what was intended as a series of personal statements, let us say what the new
phase should not consist of. It should not be too trendy in the sense of obscure topics
dressed in weird philosophical clothing. It should not mainly consist in finding still
Commentary 953

more French authors to quote. It should not be excessively abstract, so much that
papers can only be read to bemused audiences longing for the return of the spoken,
meant word coming straight from the still-thinking mind. Instead there is a need for
reconciliation and mutual respect that might be achieved through philosophical
hybrids and comparative studies. There is a need for recommitment to a revived set
of radical political values. And most importantly, there is an almost desperate need for
a new round of social relevancy. We have to get over the blockage to action formed by a
reluctance to speak for others. For the questions that radical geography was founded
to confront are present still in mutated, far more powerful and dangerous, social and
cultural formsöthe terrible injuries visited still on the world's most vulnerable peoples,
the formation of global structures far beyond human control, the transformation of
material into virtual reality, and the consequence of all these and more in the massive
destruction of nature. The theories used to confront such issues have to be both
realistic, in the original sense of rooted in the material, and even more radically
profound, in the new sense of confronting cultural technologies capable of incorporat-
ing almost any resistance, usually as a new consumption frontier. Fifth-stage radical
geography, in a simple phrase, should theoretically and practically reengage with the
great social and cultural issues of our time. Through such confrontation we earn our
right to exist. Not as living remnants of a radicalism long past, but as engaged
intellectuals, people who believe that the structures of contemporary existence need
transforming, and that satisfaction derives from personal commitment to a collective
process of radical social change.
Richard Peet