Geographies of Explanation in Geography

Happy ninetieth birthday, David. David’s work has been my touchstone and inspiration since 1975 when as a first-year undergraduate at University College London I first read Social Justice in the City (1973). I still remember buying the book at Dillons on Gower Street. Copies of it were stacked up high in neat columns in the middle of the bookstore’s Geography section. The book became my lodestone. I learned by heart and could rattle off several of its more incendiary lines (or they seemed incendiary to me). My favourite: “The quantitative revolution has run its course and diminishing marginal returns are apparently setting in as … [it] serve[s] to tell us less and less about anything of great relevance” (Harvey 1973, p.128). Not that I understood everything. Parts of Social Justice were harder to follow than even the impossible equations of spatial autocorrelation to which I was also exposed at the time. But I knew it was a transformational book. It transformed me.

Also transformational was David’s first tome (and it was a tome at well over 500 pages), Explanation in Geography (1969). I bought that at Dillons in my first year, too. Like Social Justice it came with a striking cover by Escher (I would often try to connect the unconnectable arches in between reading the book), but Explanation never resonated with me as much. I was impressed but not passionate. Although different in tone and content from Social Justice, Explanation was nevertheless a revolutionary manifesto, albeit not directed towards a Marxist revolution, but a scientific revolution. In 1954-55 when David himself was a first-year university geography student at Cambridge, Geography was mostly an intellectually moribund discipline. To use Neil Smith’s imagery, Geography had become intellectually antiquarian, a museum piece, preserved under glass. Regional geography especially was the serial recitation of brute empirical facts, “mere description,” shunning theory, explanation, prediction, analysis, or really any ideas at all. The museum case desperately needed smashing and modernity allowed to storm in. This was the revolutionary intent of Explanation. It was both a philosophical justification of, and a how-to manual for, the use of a rational, modernist, scientific method within Geography. Like Social Justice, Explanation also came with memorable revolutionary mantras. On the book’s very last page, David (1969, p.486) exhorted, “pin up on our study walls … the slogan … ‘By our theories you shall know us,’” While not exactly a charge to mount the barricades, within the context of a 1960s Geography Department within an English provincial university (Explanation was written at Bristol University where David was a Lecturer), it perhaps amounted to the same thing.

Explanation, of course, did not emerge out of the blue, from nowhere. Rather, it very much reflected a view from somewhere. In this case, from an embodied and thick material geographical setting steeped in class and cultural politics: post-War Britain, and Cambridge University in particular, where David conceived his project.

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Within the auspices of the Beveridge welfare state, the post-War expansion of state funding in Britain’s higher education sector, which included individual bursaries and grants, enabled a small number of very bright working-class students like David – his father worked as a ship repairman – to attend university. Compared to today, that sector was tiny, however. In 1952, two years before David went up to Cambridge, across the entire UK there were only 85,000 university students, 6,000 academic staff, and 18 universities. Nonetheless, that represented a significant increase in both numbers and social mix than existed pre-War.

When David entered the Cambridge Geography Department a few young faculty and students were already trying to breathe new life into the discipline by making it more rigorous, more intellectually respectable, more modern. In 1957 after graduating with a First, David was appointed “Demonstrator” at Cambridge for a first-year undergraduate class taught by two assistant lecturers, later dubbed, the “terrible twins” of British Geography, Richard Chorley and Peter Haggett. Chorley a physical geographer, Haggett a human geographer, systematically introduced for the first time into the curriculum of British university Geography scientific methods and techniques including quantification, statistical modelling and formal theorising. Subsequently, David drew on those same methods and techniques in his 1962 doctoral thesis about the nineteenth-century dynamics of the Kent hop industry. By “enmeshing”, David’s term, his thesis within a scientific approach, he moved from the deadening exceptionalism of regional geography and mere description towards scientific generalization, organised numerical analysis and law-governed explanation.

Apart from these local forces at Cambridge there were also larger cultural and national politics that shaped Explanation.David was part of younger generation, almost exclusively male and white, many of them Oxbridge graduates like him, that during the early post-War period forcefully pushed back in multiple forms against the social rigidity, hide-bound conservatism, snobbishness and class elitism of 1950s and early 1960s “Little Britain”. They believed there needed to be root and branch change. That generation included “angry-young-men” playwrights like John Osborne (Look Back in Anger), novelists like Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim), tv presenters like David Frost (That Was The Week That Was), poets like Philip Larkin (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad./ They may not mean to, but they do.”), musicians like The Rolling Stones ((I can’t no / Satisfaction”), and satirists (and much more) like Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore (Beyond the Fringe). Slightly later was Monty Python’s Flying Circus. One of Python’s catchphrases was, “And now for something completely different.”  While that had practical purpose in allowing the show to move from one improbable comedy sketch to another, it also reflected the belief among its performers, and those from the same generation as David, that Britain needed a fundamental change. In an autobiographical essay, David makes a similar point:

Mine was the generation that spawned the Footlights Review that became That Was The Week That Was – a television show that mercilessly ridiculed the ruling class as well as almost everything else that might be regarded as “traditional” in British life. Cambridge was populated by an intellectual elite, and if something was seriously wrong with the state of Britain (and many thought there was), then this elite was surely in a position to do something about it. The modernization of Britain was firmly on the agenda, and a new structure of knowledge and power was needed to accomplish that task.

Explanation was not a single-handed attempt to modernize Britain, but it was a contribution to that larger end, providing a “new structure of knowledge” for the hitherto conservative, traditionalist discipline of geography. As part of a Cambridge intellectual elite, David believed he was “in a position to do something about it”. There was “the idea that we could break out of tradition,” David said. “There was a modern geography waiting to be constructed and we were the ones who could do it” David believed (2003a). Explanation was one of the consequences.

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There was another link between Explanation and the modernization of Britain that stemmed from a change in national politics. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, there had been one old man, one Old Etonian, Conservative Party Prime Minister after another – Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and Alec Douglas-Home. Finally, in 1964 the Labour Party won power under Harold Wilson who had promised the year before at the party annual congress in Scarborough to deliver “the white heat of the technological revolution.” For David this was “socialist modernization … backed by technological efficiency”. Under Wilson, increased technological efficiency, rational planning, and progressive social change would unfold in a new and modern socialist Britain, breaking with the old Conservative regime. While Explanation was not a manual for “socialist modernization”, it clearly drew its spirit in part from the wider political discussions in Britain at the time around the best means to move forward. As David (2002, p.166) says: “For those of us involved in geography [during the 1960s], rational planning (national, regional, environmental, and urban) backed by ‘scientific’ methods of enquiry seemed to be the path to take.”  Explanation was David’s contribution to those “‘scientific’ methods of enquiry.”  In this sense, while not overtly political, it was a thoroughly political text unavoidably soaking up the cultural and national political temper in which it was written.

May 1968, when David submitted the manuscript of Explanation to Edward Arnold publishers, was hardly a propitious moment for either science or modernity. The world seemed to be coming apart at the seams, with science and modernity the major causes. The pressing issues were not technical efficiency or rational decision making but justice and survival. In April, Martin Luther King was assassinated in a Nashville motel precipitating mass urban riots, arrests, deaths, arson and property destruction across 130 US cities. In May, there was almost a student take-down of the entire French government in Paris. In June, Robert Kennedy was murdered at the Democratic Party Convention in California. And throughout 1968,science’s technical problem-solving capacity, its manipulation and application of mathematical formulae and associated calculations, and materialised as US B-52 bombers, helicopter gunships and agent orange, were bringing untold horror and misery to millions of people in Southeast Asia. According to his friend, Keith Bassett, David’s motivation for his project appeared to wane. Bassett remembered going around to David’s Bristol flat and saw “the floor … strewn with final drafts of various chapters of Explanation. He already seemed to be losing interest, particularly with the final chapters on systems.”  What now animated him, Bassett said, were political questions, with David “often taking radical positions on issues like the Vietnam War”.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the year Explanation was published David moved to Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and four years later published Social Justice. Historically Baltimore as a place had been wrought precisely by issues of justice and survival. David’s new geography changed his life but also mine too. Thank you, David.

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