hypothesis of geography

THEORIES AND MODELS IN GEOGRAPHY: Geographical Thought & Political Geography

THEORIES AND MODELS IN GEOGRAPHY: Geographical Thought & Political Geography

Part 6 Geographical Thought & Political Geography Theories & Models in Geography 

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Geographical Thought & Political Geography MODELS AND THEORIES FOR UGC NET EXAM,  THEORIES AND MODELS IN GEOGRAPHY NOTES, MODEL IN GEOGRAPHY STUDY MATERIAL, THEORIES AND MODELS PYQS, 

Theories and Models in Geography

Part 1- Geomorphology –   Uniformitarianism, Isostasy, Continental Drift Theory, Cavern Formation Theory

Part 2- Climatology –  Rainfall Formation Theories, Climatic Classification of Koeppen’s & Thronthwaite’s

Part 2- Oceanography –  Theories of Coral Formation, Theories of Origin of Tides

Part 3- Agricultural Geography-  Von Thunen’s Model of Land Use, Whittlesey Classification

Part 3- Economic Geography-  Industrial Location Theory by Alfred Weber

Part 3- Regional Planning & Development –  Economic Growth Model of Rostow, Gunnar Myrdal, O Hirschman, John Friedman, Francois Perroux, Planning Process of MacKaye, Planning Regions of V. Nath, Bhat & Rao, Sen Gupta & Chandrasekhara

Part 4- Population Geography –  Population Resource Regions – Ackerman, Theories of Population Growth- Malthusian Theory of Population, Demographic Transition Theory, Theory of Migration- Ravenstein’s Laws, Zelinsky, Push & Pull Theory

Part 5- Settlement and Urban Geography-   CENTRAL PLACE THEORY, Economic Location Theory of August Losch, Theories of Urban Urban Morphology- E.W. Burgess, Homer Hoyt, C.D Harris & E.L Ullman

Part 6- Political Geography-   Heartland Theory, Rimland Theory

Part 6- Geographical Thought-   Philosophical Approaches -Positivism, Pragmatism, Idealism, Realism, New or Critical Realism, Phenomenology, Radicalism, Behaviouralism, Welfare Approach

Political Geography

Heartland Theory by Halford Gohn Mackinder (1904)

This theory based on Land Power (Continental Power)

His theory is a spatial analysis of the geopolitics in terms of location, accessibility & natural resource base.

Mackinder divided world into 3 geo-strategic regions

• The heartland
• Inner crescent
• Outer Crescent
• Heartland/Pivot Area –
• It is surrounded by mountains on three sides i.e. Urals in West, Central Asian Highlands in South & East Siberian Highlands in east, and by ice-bound Arctic on the north
• It consisted of the whole Siberia & centrals part of Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan)
• It is a natural fortress, from three sides and region of enormous resources.
• The most inaccessible part of the world.
• This is the area of low population and difficult accessibility

• Inner/Marginal Crescent –
• This Inner/Marginal crescent considered as whole of Eurasia outside the heartland. 
• It has land and sea mobility and accessibility.
• It consisted of the Greek & Roman Civilization, Nile Civilization, Mesopotamia Civilization, Indus valley Civilization, East Asian Civilization, South East Asian Civilization.
• Together Heartland & Inner crescent is described as world island
• World Island – The World-Island, comprising the interlinked continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa (Afro-Eurasia). This was the largest, most populous, and richest of all possible land combinations.
• Outer/Insular Crescent –
• It consisted of North America, South America, Africa (South of Sahara), Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand & Japan. These could be accessible through sea.

  “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;

who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;

who rules the World-Island commands the world.”

— Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality

In 1919 he included the whole of Africa in ‘World Island’

In 1943 describe about Midland Basin – North Atlantic, Eastern US & Western Europe

Book & Writings

Geographical Pivot of History (1904)

The democratic ideals and reality (In 1919, Mackinder renamed his ‘Pivot Area’ as Heartland in famous book)

The Round World and the Winning of the Peace

• Mackinder oversimplified history in a deterministic fashion as a struggle between land and sea power, which is far from truth. History is influenced by physical, socio – economic and cultural factors not just geographical factors.
• He overlooked the fact that Heartland was a region of permanent difficulties because of interior location and owing to the extremes of climate.
• Heartland is not resourceful as it is made to be and greater part of Heartland is a wasteland and incapable of supporting a large population.
• He ignored the technological advancements.
• Ignored the locational climatic factors.
• He Ignored the modern advancements in Military and defense like missiles etc.
• The real world was not flat but spherical, and he used Mercator projection map, which create false picture unlimited expanse of arctic ice separating North America from Eurasia. 

Rimland Theory by Spykman (1942)

• Propounded in 1942
• This theory was Published in his book ‘The Geography of Peace’- 1944
• This theory emphasis on maritime mobility or on Sea Power
•  “Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world”. Nicholas John Spykman

Geographical Thought

Philosophical Approaches

• Positivism – August Comte
• Idealism – Harris & Guelke
• Realism –  Gibson
• New or Critical Realism – T.P Nunn
• Phenomenology – Relph
• Radicalism – R. Peet
• Behaviouralism – Kirk & Wolpert
• Welfare Approach- David Smith

Positivism –

• Positivism precisely described as a Philosophical movement that emphasized on science and scientific method as the only source of knowledge and which stood in sharp contrast to religion and metaphysics.
• Its main purpose is to distinguish science from religion and metaphysics.
• We also can say that Positivism is a philosophical thought, where assertions are validated by the use of logic, science, maths, facts, etc.
• Origin:  The origin of Positivism go back to 19th Century French Social Philosopher August Comte in 1820s.

According to Comte – Social development took place in three stages

• Theological
• Metaphysical

Idealism –  

• This is a view that reality is mental or mind-depended.
• Guelke is the most celebrated advocate of idealism in geography
• This idealistic Approach to Humanistic geography was advocated by Harris and Guelke (1971).
• It regards reality as residing in or constituted by the mind.
• Idealism is a humanstic philosophy based upon the belief that the world is constructed through the human mind instead of matter.

Realism –  

• Realism is the view that reality exist in depended of the mind, it is not mind-in depended.
• Gibson suggests realism as a viable alternative to idealism.
• The basic philosophy of realism is that facts for themselves and explanation is logical and inductive (Empirical).
• It is very close to the objective philosophy of positivism but has different methodology of explanation.
• The concept of “New or Critical Realism” propounded by T.P Nunn.

Phenomenology-

• Phenomenology was designed to disclose the world as it shows itself before scientific inquiry, as that which is pre-given and presupposed by the sciences.
• Phenomenology is an important source. People never observe the world in an objective way.
• We observe how the world appears to us as a phenomenon, so the world is always observed subjectively.
• The appearance of the world depends on our intentions and ons how it appears. How it appears affects what we want to do.
• The first to introduce the phenomenology approach in Human Geography was Relph (1970)

Radicalism –

• This approach advocated by R.Peet.
• Peet presented a separate book titled “Radical Geography” that is why many geographers call him “Father of Radical Geography”
• He developed a comprehensive concept of radicalism in geography
• The emergence of radical geography principally took place in the USA
• The Radical Approach in geography came in 1970s as a reaction to quantitive revolution and positivism.
• Radical Approach in Geography concentrated mainly the issues of greater social relevance like inequality, sexism, racism, crime, discrimination against blacks and non-whites, juvenile exploitation etc.

Behaviouralism –

The behavioral approach in geography was introduced in 1960s. It was developed as the opposition of quantitative and positivism approaches. As positivism and Quantitative approaches believed that:

• Space is isotropic surface
• Men is an economic rational person
• Use of statistical technique
• And non-relevance of human values, beliefs, culture in human decision making.

Kirk-  propounded first behavioral models in 1951. He asserted that in space and time, the same information would have different meaning for people of different socio – economic, ethnic, cultural backgrounds living in a similar geographical environment. 

Wolpert-  showed that farmers are not Economic Men or farmers were not optimizers but Simon’s term satisfies.

The Basic Philosophy of Behaviourlism Approach :

The behavioural geographer recognizes that man shapes as well as responds to his environment & man and environment dynamically interrelated.

Space (Environment) have a dual character-

(i) Objective Environment –

The world of actuality, which can be gauged by some direct means (Senses)

(ii) Behavioural Environment –

The world of mind (Mental Map) – Which can be studied only by indirect means.

(Mental Map Concept Developed by P. Gould, R. White  and Lynch also associated with mental map concept)

The objectives of behavioural approach were:

• To develop models for a human phenomenon which would provide an alternative to the spatial location theories developed under the influence of positivism.
• To define the cognitive (subjective) environment that determines the decision-making process of humans;
• To come up with psychological and social theories of human decision-making and behaviour in a spatial framework;
• To search for methods other than those popular during the quantitative revolution that could uncover the latent structure in data and decision-making;
• To generate primary data about human behaviour and not to rely heavily on the

published data; and

• To adopt an interdisciplinary approach for theory-building and problem-solving

Welfare Approach

• David Smith had adopted the Welfare approach while discussing the problems and prospects of human geography.
• The welfare approach deals with the issues related to inequality and injustice.
• In 1970s there was a major redirection of Human Geography towards social problems like poverty, Hungary, crime, racial discrimination, access to health, education etc.
• The basic emphasis of welfare geography is on who gets what, where & how.

Who –  Population

What –  Facilities

Where –  Different Areas/Places.

How –  Reflects the process by which the observed differences arise.

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Geographies and Theories of Geography: An Introduction

• Open Access
• First Online: 31 May 2022

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• Peter Jakobsen 3 ,
• Erik Jönsson 3 &
• Henrik Gutzon Larsen 4  

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Approaching Nordic human geography as an evolving community of practice with strong historical-geographical legacies, this chapter introduces the two overarching themes of the book. On the one hand, we foreground how geography has been, and is, theorised in Nordic human geography, particularly (but not exclusively) as socio-spatial theory. On the other hand, if often intersecting with the former, we seek to highlight the importance of historical-geographical context in geographical theorising and research. Following from this, and acknowledging that the balancing of these themes differs between the individual contributions, the chapter outlines the approach of the book.

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Geoethics and Disaster a Geographical Approach

Geography and geographers: re-revisited—again

Geography’s “world view”: the ontological issues of geography, introduction.

This book is the latest instalment in a longer history of anthologies on Nordic geography and geographers. Initially published in a mix of Scandinavian languages and English, and more recently in English alone, these collections address the field of (human) geography in general (Hägerstrand & Buttimer, 1988 ; Strand, 1982 ; Öhman, 1994 ; Öhman & Simonsen, 2003 ), but also particular aspects of geography (e.g., Friis & Maskell, 1981 ; Jones & Olwig, 2008 ; Simonsen et al., 1982 ). The very existence of these regionally defined anthologies could be said to answer the question posed by the editors of one of them, “Is there a ‘Nordic’ human geography?” (Simonsen & Öhman, 2003 ). A significant number of geographers have over the years found that there is indeed something that could be termed Nordic (human) geography, and this is underscored by practices such as preparing A Geography of Norden for the 1960 conference of the International Geographical Union (IGU) in Stockholm (Sømme, 1960 ), the annual Nordic Symposium on Critical Human Geography between 1979 and 1999 (Berger, 1990 ), which inspired Eric Clark ( 2005 ) to initiate the still-existing biannual Nordic Geographers Meeting (NGM), and the publication of Nordisk samhällsgeografisk tidskrift (1984–2007). A “Nordic” geography identity has also been augmented by transnational doctoral courses and educational activities, seminars, research projects and informal networks. While not solely involving geographers, the launch of the Nordic Journal of Urban Studies is another recent example. Ideas of Nordic geographers as somehow forming a supra-national group is also entertained by “outsiders”. If in a somewhat more delimited form, for example, as early as the 1930s a German geographer worked on a summary of “new currents in Scandinavian geography” (Document, 1938 ), and in the recent historiography of critical geography (Berg et al., 2022b ), the Nordic countries are – of course – lumped together (on the difficulties of such delineations of research communities, see Berg et al., 2022a ). Seen from both the “outside” and the “inside”, we could say that many Nordic geographers form a “community of practice” (Wenger, 1998 ) shaped by the various meetings, discussions and publications that bring geographers together under the rubric “Nordic”. Nonetheless, almost 20 years have passed since the publication of the last collective book on Nordic geography (Öhman & Simonsen, 2003 ).

Our main concern in this book is not to delineate a “Nordic” field of geography. Rather, and linking up to discussions in and beyond the Nordic area, the book is guided by two overarching and often intersecting themes. First, while the field of human geography is increasingly leaning toward the old aphorism that geography is what geographers do, the book seeks to foreground theorisations of geography from human-geographical perspectives. In that respect, we are particularly (but not only) interested in articulations of socio-spatial theory, which is to say social-theoretical perspectives that approach the social and the spatial as mutually constitutive. Second, and here the “Nordic” becomes more evident, the book pursues the “double geography” that “there is a geography to all geographical knowledge” (Livingstone, 2019 , p. 461) in the sense that geographical knowledge is also situated knowledge. In the following, we will dig a little deeper into the two themes of the book before considering the notion of “Nordic geography” and outlining the approach of the book.

The Social and the Spatial

Thinking about and theorising space is often understood as geographic scholarship’s nodal point. Nonetheless, geographers have frequently struggled in this endeavour. “Those in the ‘discipline’ of geography have long had a difficult relation to the notion of ‘space’ and ‘the spatial’”, Doreen Massey ( 1985 , p. 9) reflected on developments in geography during the 1980s. As she put it, “There has been much head-scratching, much theorising, much changing of mind. Sometimes the notion has been clasped whole-heartedly as the only claimable distinguishing characteristic within the academic division of labour. Sometimes it has been spurned as necessarily fetishized.”

Though Massey undoubtedly had the United Kingdom in mind, her reflection also echoes the struggles of human geographers in the Nordic countries to come to terms with, and theorise, space and the spatial as well as related if distinct human-geographical keywords, such as place, landscape and scale. Developments in the Nordic geographical traditions are in this respect perhaps not that different from, and indeed entangled with, developments in human geography elsewhere, partly permeated by the same persistent confusions and conflicts concerning what geography could or ought to be. Though Nordic geography could be considered as a community of practice, it has certainly not developed in a vacuum and there have been important theoretical and philosophical exchanges, not only among geographers within the Nordic region but also with geographers situated elsewhere. Particularly in the early history of institutionalised Nordic geography the discipline was strongly influenced by German geography. But later inspirations have also come from particularly French, British and Anglophone North American geographers. Meanwhile, Nordic geographers of the past and the present have occasionally made impressions well outside the Nordic region (in this book, e.g., Paasi, 2022 ).

A characteristic of the discipline of human geography – and since the mid-twentieth century often a bone of contention for many geographers – is its historically close connection with physical geography and related natural sciences. In most of the Nordic countries, human geography is taught alongside physical geography in the bachelor programmes, Sweden being a notable exception (Asheim, 1987 ). Some Nordic geographers still strive to build bridges between the natural and the social sciences (in this book, see Holt-Jensen, 2022 ), but in terms of research and theoretical developments, human and physical geography in the Nordic countries have increasingly parted ways. Instead, interlacings of social theory, philosophy and geography have made for important cross-fertilisations between the subject of human geography and, for example, those of sociology and philosophy. Interrelating with similar efforts beyond the Nordic region (e.g. Gregory & Urry, 1985 ), a productive outcome of such liaisons has been the development of socio-spatial theories – social-scientific (and humanities-derived) theories that approach geography as constituted by, as well as constitutive of, social relations. This has generated a wide range of conceptual frameworks and approaches, which are part and parcel of the shifts and turns in the discipline of geography as it has evolved – also in the Nordic countries (in this book, e.g., Simonsen, 2022 ).

These liaisons are of no minor importance. Though most human geographers, despite considerable intellectual and political differences, could rally around the adage that “Geography matters!” (Massey & Allen, 1984 ), the ways in which it matters and the ways in which geography is put at the forefront of our analyses, or perhaps sneaked in through the backdoor, depend on the theories and philosophies that infuse understandings of the world. Particular understandings of space are inescapably linked to the social and our understandings of the social, a concept whose meaning has itself for decades been at the centre of several debates within the humanities and social sciences (e.g. Joyce, 2010 ; Latour, 2005 ). Moreover, acknowledging the importance of space opens a veritable Pandora’s box of never-ending debates on the proper interpretation and conceptualisation of space, and its relationship to the social. As the chapters in this book also illustrate, these debates span from whether space should be viewed as dialectical or static, absolute or relative (or both), contingent or necessary, embodied or disembodied, not to speak of the myriad of different and often seemingly conflicting ways that it can be understood and theorised as relational (e.g., Harvey, 2006 ; Simonsen, 2004b ). Furthermore, these long-running debates are also characterised by exchanges in which several vocabularies for theorising socio-spatial relations coexist, sometimes clashing and sometimes cross-fertilising (Jessop et al., 2008 ).

We should furthermore acknowledge that these discussions remain interconnected with debates about the purpose of the discipline and the interests it should serve. Most forcefully, such debates were expressed in the criticisms of and within geography, which from the 1970s onwards have guided many geographers (Berg et al., 2022b ; in this book, e.g., Jakobsen & Larsen, 2022 ). But they have continually constituted a topic for discussion, also among geographers today (in this book, e.g., Wikman & Mohall, 2022 ). Our ambition in this book is to take such debates seriously, as they continuously shape and reshape the geography discipline. The shifts and turns in geography, the showdowns between intellectual positions, and the debates about whose interests the discipline should serve, have often fuelled and been fuelled by genuine scholarly interests in the subject of geography and about the ways in which the relationship between the social and the spatial could or should be understood and theorised.

A key aim of this book is to shed some light on how geographers in the Nordic countries have understood and theorised geography, particularly relationships between the social and the spatial; how they have understood and worked with the notion of space, place, landscape, region, etc. Taken together, the chapters in this book in many ways reflect David Harvey’s ( 2006 , p. 293) assertion that space “turns out to be an extraordinarily complicated keyword.” Its meaning depends upon context, and “the terrain of application defines something so special as to render any generic definition of space a hopeless task” (Harvey, 2006 , p. 270). Instead of embarking on a hopeless task of definition, we have therefore asked human geographers from across the Nordic countries to explore the production and adoption of socio-spatial theories in “Nordic geography” in relation to a range of key topics and concepts that they have engaged with in the span of their research careers. As such, the book is decidedly not an attempt to cover Nordic geography in its entirety, but rather a contribution to Nordic geographers’ incessant head-scratching, theorising and occasional changing of mind.

Geographies of Geography

As underlined above, this is not solely a book about geographical knowledge, it is also a book about the production of knowledge within human geography. Alongside an emphasis on socio-spatial theory – and how geographical key concepts are currently and have historically been conceptualised – runs an equally important emphasis on the geographies of geographical knowledge production (cf. Boyle et al., 2019 ). In various ways the chapters explore a series of sometimes intertwined and sometimes discrete intellectual environments wherein geographers have conducted their research, and traces how these intellectual environments have shaped and been shaped by particular scholarly undertakings. It is in this sense a book that builds on Donna Haraway’s ( 1988 ) now well-established insistence that intellectually honest and responsible knowledge production must acknowledge the situatedness of any observer. Any view is a view from somewhere . Or, as Edward Said ( 1983 , p. 174) emphasises, theory “has to be grasped in the place and the time out of which it emerges as a part of that time, working in and for it, responding to it.” This is not necessarily to say that all “social theory and knowledge [is] inescapably context-bound” (Simonsen & Öhman, 2003 , p. 3). But it does mean that ideas and conceptualisations are hard to unfetter from their historical and geographical moorings, and are thus tied to some where (and some time ) (Livingstone, 2013 ; Shapin, 1995 ; Simonsen, 2004a ).

Ideas and conceptualisations are also tied to some one . Fully or partially autobiographical, some chapters in this book attest to how ideas are carried by people, shaping and shaped by their lived historical geographies. This links up with the pioneering work on autobiographies in Nordic histories of geographical thought organised by Hägerstrand and Buttimer ( 1988 ), a project which has several descendants (e.g., Holt-Jensen, 2019 ; Illeris, 1999 ; Olsson, 1998 ; see also Ferretti, 2021 ; Jones, 2018 ). Taking readers behind the scenes of the production of measurable output, an autobiographical approach can enable a fine-grained analysis of the craft of crafting knowledge. In contrast to a CV list of achievements, an autobiography can also cover that which was not published or otherwise explicated, along with an emphasis on inspirations and intentions, strategic decisions and coincidences, and the dynamics of people, places and times. But rather than simply shifting the focus from social setting to individual mind, an autobiographical method can be a way to underscore a more complex social and communal nature of knowledge production. As Purcell ( 2009 , p. 235) emphasises, “writing the life of an individual is always also, in part, writing the life of one’s society”.

In foregrounding the situated nature of geographical theorising, this book also engages with the circulation and reception of various conceptualisations. In this book, Wikman and Mohall ( 2022 ) explore central place theory within Swedish planning, for example, while Røe et al. ( 2022 ) discuss compact city ideals within Norwegian urban development. Both put emphasis on the academic and extra-academic contexts within which ideas are lodged, and how these contexts are subsequently transformed by these ideas. As David Livingstone ( 2013 , p. 113) remarks, “scientific ideas do not diffuse over a flat cultural plain. Rather, they are encountered in particular places.” Ideas that harmonise with hegemonic political projects in particular places are more easily inserted into policy discourse, and travel more easily as key policy concepts.

Furthermore, by emphasising socio-spatial (and geographical) theory in a “Nordic” setting, this book underscores geography as a discipline marked by a “linguistic privilege”, which “results in a highly uneven distribution of power to shape what counts as knowledge” (Müller, 2021 , p. 1459; see also Kallio et al., 2021 ). The flow of the traffic in ideas is not only a question concerning ideas’ intellectual value but also, as several chapters in this book highlight, one concerning how ideas travel and transform within an academic field where some places are often seen as producing “unlimited”, “global” and “universal” geographical theories, while others are seen as “limited”, “local” and “parochial” (Berg, 2004 ). Geography is at least partly permeated by a hierarchy between Anglo-American writers as “proper” theory-producing subjects and others, such as Nordic writers, providing “case-studies-from-another-place” (Simonsen, 2004a p. 526; see also Lehtinen & Simonsen, 2022 ). With this book such dualisms are put into question, as various authors elucidate how Nordic scholars have indeed produced socio-spatial theories, and continue to do so. However, there is in such theorising tensions between aspirations to make “Nordic” knowledge count as more than local illustrations or cases, and those who have instead insisted on emphasising the Nordic region as the starting point for their conceptualisations, underscoring local anchorings as a fundamental feature of how socio-spatial concepts are theorised. This is, for example, a prominent feature of Kenneth Olwig’s ( 2003 ) “substantive” landscape concept (in this book, see Germundsson et al., 2022 ).

A Certain Nordic Legacy

This is not the place to deconstruct “Nordic” imaginations and practices in and beyond geography, but in a volume partly devoted to theorisations of geography, some notes must be attached to this inherently socio-spatial – and far from politically innocent – notion (for a historical overview, see Jalava & Stråth, 2017 ). Footnote 1 Norden , in the Scandinavian languages, or Norðurlöndin in Icelandic and Pohjoismaat / Pohjola in Finnish, is today by most Nordic “insiders” seen to include the five states of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, while the autonomous entities of the Faroe Islands, Greenland and the Åland Islands are sometimes recognised as parts of the Nordic region in their own right. This geographical construct has been buttressed by institutions such as the nongovernmental Norden Associations (1919), the inter-parliamentary Nordic Council (1952) and the intergovernmental Nordic Council of Ministers (1971), and by inter-Nordic policies such as a passport union (1952), a joint labour market (1954) and the Nordic conventions on social security (1955) and language (1987). During the nineteenth century there were also, particularly among segments of the Danish and Swedish elites, attempts at promoting supra-nationalist ideologies of Pan-Scandinavianism and subsequently Nordicism (Østergård, 2002 ). National histories have traditionally dismissed these movements as romantic flights of fancy, but while modern attempts to establish more substantial Nordic (or Scandinavian) supra-state institutions have failed, inter-Nordic cultural and political-pragmatic practices have deepened (Glenthøj & Ottosen, 2021 ; Van Gerven, 2020 ). Rather than building an image of a community that is (or should be) limited and sovereign, as Benedict Anderson ( 1991 ) famously conceptualises a nation, the Nordic has in different ways reinforced discrete national identities in the North (Sørensen & Stråth, 1997 ). Still, while the Nordic is a mental construct, it is also a historical region (Østergård, 1997 ). Leaning on the conceptualisation of one of the contributors to this book, we could say that the Nordic is a region that is continuously formed and reformed territorially, symbolically and institutionally (Paasi, 1986 ). The aftermath of the Cold War, for instance, was a period when the spatial identity of the post-war Nordic region was opened up to new spatial-political orientations and imaginations in and towards the East, the West, the South and, indeed, the (Arctic) North (e.g., Moisio, 2003 ).

The Nordic is imbued with positive as well as negative auto- and xeno-stereotypes. For some it is an embodiment of progressive modernity, an early example being Marquis Childs’ This is Democracy: Collective Bargaining in Scandinavia (1938). For others, such as Roland Huntford in The New Totalitarians (1971), the Nordic is a dystopia – lately self-flagellatory, as bolstered by Nordic noir crime fiction (Dyce, 2020 ). In the expansive and largely positive formulation of Sørensen and Stråth ( 1997 ), the North is a pragmatic inflection of the Enlightenment, involving ideas of a Nordic trajectory shaped by an independent peasantry, education from below, a socially inclusive and democratic conception of the nation, state Lutheranism, social liberalism and welfare capitalism. Such historical explanations have been criticised, for instance the idea of an independent peasantry playing a key role in the evolution of Swedish democracy (Bengtsson, 2020 ). But beyond the faults and merits of such historical narratives, particularly Nordic welfare states are often reflected in geographical writings, including several chapters of this book. While acknowledging that “the Nordic countries are not as different from other European countries as ideology would sometimes have us believe,” Simonsen and Öhman ( 2003 ), p. 2) asserted that (at least until the early twenty-first century, see Baeten et al., 2015 ) “the welfare state has stood its ground” in the Nordic countries. However, the welfare state should not be understood as uncritically cherished by all Nordic geographers. Gunnar Olsson ( 2017 , p. 81) for example famously likened the evolution of the welfare state (and Swedish geographers’ involvement in this) to a Greek tragedy: “everything beautifully right in the beginning, everything horribly wrong at the end, no one to blame in between.” Meanwhile, Irene Molina ( 1997 ) has argued that the construction of the People’s Home, often seen as the Swedish Social Democrats’ crystallisation of an all-inclusive reformist socialism, was intimately entangled in racialised forms of othering underpinning residential segregation.

The Nordic is rife with contradictions, exceptions and diverse political, economic and cultural inclinations. It is no coincidence that attempts at forming substantial political institutions, such as a Scandinavian Defence Union in the aftermath of the Second World War and subsequently a Nordic Economic Union as an alternative to the European Economic Community, were unsuccessful. And talk of the “Nordic” is frequently actually about the Scandinavian states of Denmark, Norway and Sweden – with Sweden often occupying a “hegemonic position in Nordic discourses” (Andersson & Hilson, 2009 , p. 223). Nordic states (and peoples) also use each other as an identity-political “other”. In recent years, for example, Sweden has in Danish and Norwegian debates and media frequently been construed as the “other” when it comes to policies on migration, integration and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Nonetheless, “there is a long tradition of viewing the Nordic countries as one region based on considerable historical evidence” (Larsson et al., 2017 , p. 11). The same could be said about the idea of a Nordic geography. This idea includes certain myths and half-truths, for example that Nordic geographers somehow are united by language. For the editor of A Geography of Norden , the book was in great part realised “Thanks to the similarity of the Scandinavian languages, which permits oral and written communication without risk of misunderstanding” (Sømme, 1960 , p. i), while for Sune Berger ( 1990 , p. 129), the early Nordic Symposia on Critical Human Geography were rather often characterised by “a certain language confusion” (see also Öhman, 1990 ). As outlined in the opening of this chapter, however, there have long been communities of practice among Nordic geographers. Borrowing from a group of historians, we could say that among geographers there is also “a certain Nordic legacy”, which consists of “a successful mixing of the national framework and transnational reflexivity, a social and cultural process, rather than a fixed geographical space” (Larsson et al., 2017 , p. 15). Indeed, Baltic geographers are now part of the space of the Nordic Geographers Meeting, the 2015 meeting being held in Tallinn and Tartu, although it speaks of the inertia of the editors’ geographical imagination that no Baltic geographers were included in this book. The social space of Nordic geography is similarly not fixed. As attested by many contributions in this book, Nordic geography is heavily inspired by ideas from beyond the “Nordic”, which are often sustained by long-term personal relations. Furthermore, many extra-Nordic geographers have become part of the Nordic legacy, either by relocating to the region or without actually taking up permanent residency.

The Nordic tradition in geography could probably best be described as a “minor” one (cf. Antonsich & Szalkai, 2014 ), and it would be tempting to claim an underdog position. With good reason, several contributions to this book problematise the hegemony of Anglophone geography in terms of language, theory and academic practices, such as publishing. But it would be spurious to portray Nordic geography as marginalised let alone subaltern. Several Nordic geographers have become “international”, both in the sense of being present at conferences etc., and by becoming names known within geography internationally. Furthermore, the working conditions for Nordic geographers are generally superior to those found in many other places. Though characterised by scholars who often work in their second or third language, the Nordic region remains firmly entrenched in an arguably more powerful way of defining hegemonic centrality. It is Northern, Western and European, undoubtedly today part of the “core” in a Wallersteinian sense. In this book, Kirsten Simonsen ( 2022 ) positions herself (and Nordic geography) “in between” in the sense of drawing on Anglophone as well as continental European inspirations. In a wider perspective, though manifestly “Northern” and more comfortably situated than many “Southern” geographies, Nordic geography could possibly be seen as an “other geographical tradition” (Ferretti, 2019 ).

The chapters in this book reflect human geography’s long and complicated history in the Nordic countries. They address, in different ways and through different topics, the historical developments and intellectual histories of the subject in the Nordic region, but with an emphasis on how Nordic geographers have understood and theorised the relations between the social and the spatial, between the material-geographical and the cognitive/social-geographical. In short, socio-spatial theory. The chapters also address ways in which geographers situated here connect to contemporary debates and discussions about the subject of geography, and, accordingly, relate to discussions about the role of geography in social theory and the role of social theory in geography.

The book has its origins in a panel session of the 2019 Nordic Geographers Meeting in Trondheim, organised by Peter Jakobsen and Erik Jönsson, which sought to initiate (or re-awaken) a discussion of the role of socio-spatial theory within Nordic geography. When the panel session transformed into an idea for a book, one of the panellists was brought in as co-editor and we searched beyond the original panellists for additional contributors. We did so through a list of topics in contemporary and historical Nordic human geography we would like to cover. There are additional topics (and people) we would have liked to include, and some readers will undoubtably search in vain for their favourite “Nordic” topic or scholar. We gave contributors a relatively free hand in how to approach those topics and in what form to do so. This means that chapter authors approach the book’s overarching themes of theorisations of geography (and socio-spatial theory) and situated knowledge production in different ways. Situated knowledge production and the importance of contextualisation is in this respect a key feature of most chapters, while explication of the theorisation of geography generally proved to be more challenging. Rather than a problem, we see the latter as reflecting the continuous need for discussions of what we mean by “theory” and “geography”.

The chapters mostly address recent and contemporary developments in Nordic human geography, some striving to cover most of the Nordic countries, others focusing on a few or just a single country (or locality). Some authors have wholly or partially fashioned their contributions as intellectual autobiographies, but most chapters are implicitly “autobiographical” in the sense that the authors themselves have been or are active participants in what is discussed. The exceptions are the first three chapters on small state geopolitical thinking (Chap. 2 ), spatial science and planning (Chap. 3 ) and structural Marxism (Chap. 4 ). These chapters trace elements of what could be termed the pre-history of Nordic socio-spatial theory, modes of approaching and theorising geography, which more contemporary perspectives often strive to avoid or actively oppose. The same could be said of the subsequent chapter on ideas about geography as importantly characterised by synthesis between physical and human geography (Chap. 5 ). Such ideas are often resisted by contemporary human geographers, but as also suggested by the author, notions of geography as synthesis between “nature” and “culture” are still with us in important respects. While often involving historical perspectives, the rest of the book consists of chapters engaging with contemporary concerns within (Nordic) human geography. While topically distinct, there are many interlinkages between these chapters, and to not impose artificial boundaries, we have resisted an urge to group them in sections. Chap. 6 address contemporary scholarship on the politics and politicisation of nature. Questions concerning nature and the environment are also central in Chap. 7 , which focuses on theorisations of landscape. This is followed by chapters on gender (Chap. 8 ), innovation and regional development (Chap. 9 ), tourism (Chap. 10 ), policies for compact city construction (Chap. 11 ), displacement (Chap. 12 ), and social reproduction in northern peripheries both construed as symbolising “Norden” and othered as exotic inner elsewheres (Chap. 13 ). Together, these illuminate contemporary concerns within Nordic geography, underscoring the entanglements of policy, politics and knowledge production therein. At the end of this volume, three chapters address theories within Nordic geography through partially or fully autobiographical chapters. These concern nation and nationhood (Chap. 14 ), everyday life and the city (Chap. 15 ), and the institutionalisation of regions (Chap. 16 ).

At the very end of this book project, Arild Holt-Jensen, the author of Chap. 5, passed away at the age of 84 years. Arild was an active participant in the project. We are grateful for how he contributed, and we are happy he agreed to write a chapter on his long-standing view of geography.

Historically, often as a naturalistic if not deterministic way of interpreting relations between nature and society, Nordic geographers have also employed concepts such as “Fennoscandia” and “Baltoscandia” (Jalava & Stråth, 2017 ; Paasi, 1990 ). These highly politicised concepts typically divert somewhat from conventional notions of the “Nordic”. To complicate things, “Scandinavia” is frequently in English used to designate what Nordic “insiders” today would term the “Nordic” (e.g. Mead, 1981 ), but particularly in the nineteenth century, also “insiders” used the concepts more synonymous, if often with very different political meanings (Glenthøj & Ottosen, 2021 ; Hemstad, 2018 ).

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Evelien Bakker for initiating and (with Bernadette Deelen-Mans, Prasad Gurunadham and Sudha Elite) carrying through this book at Springer Nature, the contributors for their engagement and the anonymous referees for their useful and encouraging reviews. We also wish to thank Lund University for funding open access publishing of the book.

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Jakobsen, P., Jönsson, E., Larsen, H.G. (2022). Geographies and Theories of Geography: An Introduction. In: Jakobsen, P., Jönsson, E., Larsen, H.G. (eds) Socio-Spatial Theory in Nordic Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04234-8_1

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