ABSTRACT

This book brings together international research on the quantitative revolution in geography. It offers perspectives from a wide range of contexts and national traditions that decenter the Anglo-centric discussions. The mid-20th century quantitative revolution is frequently regarded as a decisive moment in the history of geography, transforming it into a modern and applied spatial science. This book highlights the different temporalities and spatialities of local geographies laying the ground for a global history of a specific mode of geographical thought. It contributes to the contemporary discussions around the geographies and mobilities of knowledge, notions of worlding, linguistic privilege, decolonizing and internationalizing of geographic knowledge.

This book will be of interest to researchers, postgraduates and advance students in geography and those interested in the spatial sciences.

1) Introduction 2) Mathematics against technocracy: Peter Gould and Alain Badiou 3) Italian geographers and the origins of quantitative revolution: from regional studies to applied economic geography 4) The urban revolution. How thinking about the city in 1920s geography prepared the field for thinking about quantification and theory in Germany 5) A slow revolution? How numbers advanced in the images produced by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics before the “quantitative revolution” (1938-1960) 6) Changing attitudes to quantification in the history of Hungarian geography 7) “William Bunge and the making of Theoretical Geography” 8) Geographies of Quantitative Geography in Brazil 9) In the footsteps of the quantitative revolution: The double hermeneutic and Dutch and Belgian spatial science 10) Quantitative Geography and the Ecosystem. A citation analysis of a new paradigm in German geographical research 11) French “géographie théorique et quantitative” (1971-1996): an overview of the blossoming of a multi-faceted tradition 12) Translation and quantitative geography in the Brazilian journals: the cases of the Boletim Geográfico (1966-1976) and Revista Brasileira de Geografia (1970-1982) 13) Conclusion

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