Looking back at spatial science in the 1960s, I consider ‘the search for order’ as a case of abjection, anxiety about disorder which threatens the pure geometries of economic landscapes. This idea is developed with reference to central place studies from the 1960s, focusing particularly on the work of Woldenberg and Berry, Dacey, and Curry. Acknowledging that spatial order is a feature of economic and social life, I make a case for dialectical thinking and suggest that exploratory data analysis provides one means of examining the interplay of order and disorder.
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