The Imprecise Wanderings of a Precise Idea: The Travels of Spatial Analysis

Abstract

The chapter uses a schematic map, “Quantgeog Airline,” first drawn by Peter Taylor in 1977, as an entrée to discuss the complicated geography of the spatial analysis tradition within the history of geography. That tradition seeks to explain spatial order using a formal vocabulary reduced to its simplest axioms. The chapter draws on science studies to fashion some concepts to understand the diffusion of the idea of spatial analysis. It makes use of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, Gieryn’s idea of a “truth spot”, and Latour’s notion of a “center of calculation,” applying these three concepts to provide a substantive (geographical) genealogy of the spatial analysis tradition that begins in ancient Greece, moves to Italy, and then in the seventeenth century shifts to Amsterdam and Cambridge (U.K.). The authors analyse the tradition’s complicated development in the twentieth century by looking at the United States in the 1950s during the so-called “quantitative revolution” and Northern Europe from the 1930s to early 1950s (Germany, Estonia, and Sweden).