Abstract
When I was 17 and thinking of leaving school, I applied for a job with a company that produced bespoke route maps for people planning to drive from A to B across pre-motorway Britain; today such information can be obtained on a smartphone in seconds. 1 That revolution in information provision is part of what Wyly identifies as geography’s second quantitative revolution – one that is not being undertaken by geographers (i.e. academics).
Historians of (Anglo-American?) geography all recognise that the discipline underwent a quantitative revolution in the 1960s–1970s. Quantitative human geography continues to be practised and most students encounter aspects of it – usually basic statistics and GIS mapping – in their undergraduate degrees and initial postgraduate training. The revolution has evolved very substantially since then – although this is not widely recognised by many of those who have joined the discipline in recent decades; central place theory no longer predominates and there is little law-seeking activity. And there has been little recognition of what Wyly terms the second quantitative revolution – in part because it has not been fomented within the discipline by academic geographers and so there has been no promotion of alternative paradigms, no stirring debates about the nature of geography that characterised the first revolution. This second revolution is characterised, according to Wyly, by one that displays the features of ‘our age of algorithmic efficiency and artificial intelligence’ in which big data are manipulated through GIS, GPS and other technologies to shape ‘the spaces and places of … [our] daily connected lives’ in an era of automation and dehumanization – activities that are not being undertaken by (academic, professional) geographers. This leaves Wyly wondering whether there is any need now for such geographers to tell people what is where (and even perhaps why).
Wyly’s book is not a detailed outline of that second revolution, however. Rather it is a partial exegesis of the work of one scholar – Edward Ackerman – whose 1963 Presidential Address to the Association of American Geographers (Where is a research frontier?) was prescient in foreseeing some of the second revolution’s characteristics. Ackerman was involved in the first revolution, though his participation is largely forgotten now – in part undoubtedly because he did not publish early statistical analyses of the type that captured attention then. A Harvard geography graduate (and a victim of the decision to close the geography department there), Ackerman spent much of the Second World War working in the OSS under Hartshorne and was then employed in a number of government agencies, mainly on aspects of environmental resource management, while for a time holding a position in Chicago’s geography department. In 1960, he became Executive Officer of the Carnegie Foundation, responsible for major funding of science projects.
Ackerman’s experience of developments in other sciences at Carnegie underpinned the arguments in his 1963 address. He promoted not only a law-seeking, quantitatively-based geography, as others were at that time, but also studies drawing on the behavioural sciences, general systems theory and what we now know as cybernetics, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Although quite widely cited then, because it promoted the sort of nomothetic geography that was part of the first quantitative revolution, Ackerman’s paper was not particularly influential on the development of quantitative (human) geography over the next decades – and nor was he (he died in 1973). Wyly’s focus on Ackerman in this book is thus perplexing. He had no influence on the second quantitative revolution, but Wyly seeks to link him to it. The book is part biographical, drawing on archival as well as published material, but is very partial: one learns more about parts of his career from Harris’s obituary (Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1974), for example, while some of Ackerman’s promotional writings – such as his 1958 Chicago monograph Geography as a Fundamental Research Discipline – get virtually no mention; and there is little on his chairmanship of the NAS/NRC committee that produced the influential 1963 report The Science of Geography.
Having set out Ackerman’s biography the reminder of the book is something of a puzzle in that it is far from clear what Wyly wishes to achieve – especially given the book’s title. Its fourth chapter, for example, is entitled Militant neo-Kantianism and is largely an exercise in classifying Ackerman’s (and Hartshorne’s) philosophy of geography which, Wyly claims, ‘has corrupted the discipline and accelerated the evolutionary dehumanization of human geography’. And the fifth chapter – The new evolution of geographic thought – is even more disappointing since it tells us very little about the second revolution. Apart from references to Brian Berry’s 1980 AAG Presidential address (Creating future geographies) which carried forward Ackerman’s argument – although Ackerman is not referenced, he and Berry were colleagues during Ackerman’s link to the Chicago department – there is little on the ‘second revolution’. Even less on the work of geographers, like Stephen Graham and Rob Kitchin, who have explored its nature and implications in detail; indeed, there is very little that can be considered geography in any sense of that term.
A disappointing book, therefore, which promises more than it delivers. Ackerman is presented as a forgotten pioneer and bringing attention to (some of) his work is a worthwhile enterprise – though I doubt Wyly’s conclusion that his work and ideas ‘shaped an entire generation of quantitative revolutionaries’. Similarly, pointing out the all-embracing nature of ‘geography’s second quantitative revolution’ is important, but Wyly leaves us ill-informed about its detailed nature and its implications for the academic discipline which seems largely to be proceeding in a similar state. Ackerman had a vision of what geography might become, and this is clearly being realised – though not by geographers and not deeply influencing practices in the academic discipline. The links between Ackerman and that revolution are almost nil and using them to ask ‘what kinds of human and nonhuman geographies we want to create in future generations’ seems at best a very marginal exercise in debates about the discipline’s future.