From the Inside Looking out and the Outside Looking in: Whatever Happened to ‘Behavioural Geography’?

From the Inside Looking out and theOutside Looking in: Whatever Happened to‘Behavioural Geography’?

N.M. ARGENT* and D.J. WALMSLEYDivision of Geography and Planning, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351 Australia*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Received 15 May 2007; Revised 4 December 2007; Accepted 5 February 2008

AbstractAs part of the Institute of Australian Geographers’ Millennium Project, this articleexamines the shift of behavioural geography from a cutting edge sub-discipline toa branch of enquiry that is now much less prominent in mainstream humangeography, especially in Australia. Through an exploration of the rationale forbehavioural geography, a brief outline of the nature of the work that was done, anda consideration of the critiques of behavioural geography, the paper argues thatbehavioural geography enriched the discipline in several ways: it was instrumen-tal in encouraging geographers to consider the epistemological foundations of thediscipline; it fostered consideration of a variety of philosophical and method-ological positions; and it highlighted the need to consider interrelationshipsbetween individuals, groups, society and environment thereby bringing intoprominence the ways in which shared environmental meanings are contested andnegotiated. Behavioural geography might be a term that is used much less than itonce was and behaviourally-orientated research might increasingly find expres-sion in interdisciplinary outlets rather than in mainstream geography journals butcontemporary geography is heir to the endeavours of behavioural geography.

KEY WORDS Behavioural geography; epistemology; images; perception;structuralism

IntroductionThis paper stems from the Millennium Projectof the Institute of Australian Geographers. Aspart of this project, senior geographers wereinterviewed about their careers and their viewson the discipline of geography at the turn ofthe century. Specifically, the paper reflects on-going discussion between the authors, promptedby an initial interview in the Millennium Pro-ject, about the nature and status of that branchof human geography which was often called‘behavioural geography’ (see Gold, 1980). Frombeing an exciting and cutting edge field withinthe discipline in the 1970s, behavioural geogra-phy in Australia had become something of an

intellectual backwater by the first decade ofthe new millennium. ‘Behavioural geography’has perhaps fared better elsewhere (Golledge,2006). There is, for example, an active,almost 200-strong, Environmental Perceptionand Behavior Specialty Group within the Asso-ciation of American Geographers but, by andlarge, research in behavioural geography nowfinds expression in interdisciplinary outletsrather than in mainstream geography journals(e.g. journals such as Environment and Behav-ior, Journal of Environmental Psychology, andSpatial Cognition and Computation and organi-sations like the Environmental Design andResearch Association (EDRA)).

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Geographical Research • June 2009 • 47(2):192–203doi: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2009.00571.x

mailto:[email protected]

The paper’s title is an adaptation of the titleof a famous article by two of the pioneers ofbehavioural approaches in the social sciences,one a geographer (Roger Downs), the other apsychologist (David Stea). Writing about envi-ronmental imagery and what goes on in the mindwhen individuals learn about new environments,they felt that they were on the outside ‘lookingin’ at the workings of the mind as it ‘looked out’at the world (Stea and Downs, 1970). With ref-erence to this paper, one of the authors (JimWalmsley) has had a long interest in behaviouralgeography, being involved in the sub-disciplinefrom the start of his academic career in the early1970s. The other author (Neil Argent) began hisprofessional career in geography in what mightbe thought of as the post-behavioural era, anera that was characterised by being ‘post’ manythings: Fordism, structuralism, industrialism,and colonialism, to name a few. They represent,respectively, the views of someone looking outfrom the core and someone looking in from else-where in geography. A discipline which desig-nates many things as ‘post’ is clearly a disciplinewhich is interested in the evolution of intellectualtraditions and ideas. In this context, the paperasks why a branch of geography that seemed tooffer so much and to be so vibrant twenty tothirty years ago is much less prominent today inmany places. Did it evolve into a different branchof geography which is currently more fashion-able? Did it pose a set of questions which wereanswered or otherwise became irrelevant? Wasit in fact a sort of archaeopteryx, an evolution-ary step between the lumbering dinosaur-likeareal differentiation school of old style regionalgeography and the lively multifaceted world ofcontemporary geography? Did it divert its ener-gies from mainstream geography into the inter-stices between geography, psychology, cognitivescience and geographical information science?This raises a further question: what happened tothose geographers who were attracted to behav-ioural geography because they were interested inhow people view the world and had an ideologi-cal commitment to the importance and integrityof individuals in contemporary society?

In many ways, it is appropriate that the ques-tion of what happened to behavioural geographybe asked at the University of New England(UNE). After all, one of the world’s pioneersand leading exponents of behavioural geography,Reg Golledge, is a UNE graduate. Much ofthe early rationale for a behavioural approachin human geography was spelt out by another

one-time UNE staff member, Harold Brookfield(1969). Two important texts in behavioural geog-raphy have been co-authored by Golledge andanother UNE graduate, Bob Stimson (Golledgeand Stimson, 1987; 1997). Other prominentbooks have been written by one of the authorsof this paper and a sometime UNE colleague,Gareth Lewis (Walmsley and Lewis, 1984;1993). Additionally, other UNE staff have madesignificant contributions to specific fields withinbehavioural geography, notably John Humphreys(1990) on place learning and Dick Day (1976)on urban distance cognition. In Australia morebroadly, important contributions to what was rec-ognised at the time as behavioural geographycame from a range of researchers, includingWood (1970), Mercer (1972), Taylor (1978), andWhitelaw and Gregson (1972). There was alsoan important review of the state of the sub-discipline by Golledge et al. (1972).

Any consideration of what happened to behav-ioural geography needs to be based on an exami-nation of both the rationale for the sub-disciplineand the form that research in behavioural geog-raphy took. Looking at critiques of behaviouralgeography in this context provides an insightinto the ways in which behavioural geographersencouraged the discipline generally to considerits epistemological and ontological foundationsand thus opened the discipline up to furtherdevelopments which capitalised on theseinsights.

The rationale for behavioural geographyPrior to the 1970s, human geography had a longhistory of being interested in aggregate patternsof behaviour rather than in people as individuals(Walmsley and Lewis, 1993, 25). At the centre ofattention were the features that could be observedwhen groups of people interacted with their envi-ronment. A lot of attention focussed on spatialinteraction models. Although the nature of suchmodels varied widely, they highlighted aggregatespatial behaviour, often assuming a standardmotivation for behaviour or at least a randomspread of behaviours around an idealised postu-late like rational economic behaviour. Alongsidesuch spatial interaction models was an extensivebody of research concerned with what might bethought of as social-spatial structures. Using themethodology from factorial ecology and sociol-ogy, these approaches analysed census data toproduce maps of the structure of cities. Both ofthese approaches have been labelled ‘empiricalstructuralism’ because they describe the structure

N.M. Argent and D.J. Walmsley: From the Inside Looking Out and the Outside Looking in 193

© 2009 The AuthorsJournal compilation © 2009 Institute of Australian Geographers

of behaviour through empirical measurementof aggregate patterns. Of course, none of theworkers in these fields would have used the term‘structuralism’ at the time because this work hadits intellectual origins in a time before the wordentered the geographer’s vocabulary (Walmsleyand Lewis, 1993, 26). Geographical interest instructuralism per se did not really arise until‘transformational structuralism’ made an impact(Walmsley and Lewis, 1993). This approachargues that monitoring individual actions, even inaggregate, is unwarranted because what is im-portant to understanding people-environmentinteraction is an appreciation of how unobserv-able structures influence behaviour, no matterwhether those structures relate to the neuro-physiology of the brain or, more usually, to theinterpretation of political economy favoured inMarxism.

The rationales for behavioural geography restvery largely on the fact that both empirical andtransformational structuralism subjugate indi-viduals to a passive role. Individuals are eitherassumed to be rational economic beings or arethought of as automatons in a play driven eitherby the forces of capitalism or by the sifting andsorting of people into social areas on the basisof life stage, life level, and life style. In particu-lar, it was dissatisfaction with the normative andmechanistic notion of rational economic behav-iour which prompted geographers to look for anon-normative approach which focussed on theway people acquire, evaluate and use informa-tion as a prelude to acted out or overt behaviourin a real, rather than an ideal, world (Box 1).Although it is usual to date this dissatisfaction tothe late 1960s and early 1970s (with Cox andGolledge editing the first book on behaviouralapproaches in 1969), the thinking behind it has alonger intellectual heritage, dating back at leastto 1952 when Kirk (1952) argued that the objec-tive environment in which people operate is dif-ferent from the behavioural environment. Thecore thinking behind this idea was expressedvery simply by Brookfield (1969, 53): ‘decision-makers operating in an environment base theirdecisions on the environment as they perceive it,not as it is’. Despite what early critics of behav-ioural geography might have thought, this doesnot mean that researchers ignore the materialworld and focus exclusively on cognition.Rather it means that the material world is fil-tered through the cultural lens of perception.Nowhere was this more clearly shown than inresearch on perception of the risk associated

with natural hazards like floods (White, 1964;Kates, 1962) and drought (Saarinen, 1966). Inshort, behavioural geography came into beingas part of a reaction to unrealistic norma-tive models that ignored the complexity of realworld situations in favour of idealised postulateslike economic rationality based on perfect infor-mation and omniscience. The aim was to put theemphasis on people as thinking individuals, apoint forcefully made in Hagerstrand’s pioneer-ing work on unit-based migration flows (seeHagerstrand, 1970).

In contrast to fully rational actors living onthe featureless isotropic plain so beloved oflocation theorists, behavioural geography arguedthat the focus of inquiry should be on decision-making units. A particularly forceful contribu-tion to the rationale for behavioural researchwas Pred’s (1967) idea of a ‘behaviouralmatrix’. The two axes of this matrix comprisethe quality and quantity of the information avail-able to a decision-making unit on the one handand the ability of the unit to handle such infor-mation on the other hand. From this perspective,rational economic beings occupied one extremecorner of the matrix, showing that such behav-iour was theoretically possible but very unusual.The difficulty of devising a metric for the axesin Pred’s model was, predictably, enormous butthe conceptual contribution of the matrix wasprofound. Of course, decision-making unitswere not simply individual human beings. Theterm also encompassed families (for examplechoosing where to go for leisure or whereto migrate) and organisations (for example,business firms choosing where to locate newestablishments).

Geography of course was not the only disci-pline to experience ‘the behavioural turn’ in itsresearch profile (although the term ‘turn’ didnot enter common usage until much later, when‘the cultural turn’ influenced the social sci-ences). Economics has long had researcherswho felt uncomfortable with the assumptions ofeconomic rationality and who recognised thatmuch behaviour was, at best, boundedly ratio-nal and based on satisficing, rather than opti-mising, strategies (Simon, 1952; 1957; 1959).This work inspired pioneering geographicalresearch by Wolpert (1964) on the ways inwhich farmers could be satisficers rather thanoptimizers, operating in a state of ‘boundedrationality’. In particular, it was an economist,Kenneth Boulding (1956), who popularised thenotion that the real world is too big and too

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complex for people to comprehend in itsentirety with the result that they form, in theirminds, simplified images of reality and thenbehave in relation to these simplified imagesrather than to reality itself. Ultimately, thereappeared a powerful field of enquiry known as‘behavioural economics’, one of its leadingpractitioners being Nobel Laureate DanielKahneman. In psychology, too, there was grow-ing acceptance of the need to move away frombehaviourism (the notion that complex behav-iour can be broken down into simple stimulus-response bonds) and growing awareness of the

desirability of changing the focus of attentionfrom laboratory to real world conditions (seeIttelson et al., 1974). Thus the sub-disciplineof ‘environmental psychology’ emerged. Thecentral theme of the rationale for theseapproaches, as in behavioural geography itself,was that individual decision-makers are notpowerless in the face of reified concepts likeclass or culture. Similarly, they do not haveperfect information and fully rational powersof computation. At the same time, of course,individuals are not sovereign decision-makers.Rather they operate under constraints of one

Box 1: From the inside looking outI have often wondered about what drew me to behavioural research. It certainly did not figureprominently in my undergraduate career at the University of Cambridge. I therefore wasn’t exposedto any inspirational teaching in the field. The answer is probably to be found in the fact that I havealways had an ideological commitment to the importance and integrity of individuals. Behavioural-ism gave me a way of gaining insight into people’s behaviour. Although, like almost all geogra-phers, I have an interest in macro-scale spatial patterns, I always feel the urge to explore what thesepatterns mean to people in their daily lives. When I first began my research career, I felt an intuitiveattraction to behavioural approaches. It wasn’t a case of evaluating competing approaches andassessing their relative strengths and weaknesses. It was something much more basic. Not havingbeen trained in ‘behavioural geography’ (a term that was only just starting to emerge at the time ofmy PhD), I became a largely self-taught behavioural researcher. ANU was in many ways an idealplace for such a voyage of self-discovery. A stream of visitors (notably Reg Golledge and GunnarOlsson) added to the stimulus of in-house discussion.

There is, of course, no one behavioural approach and I have spent a lot of time teasing out thedifferences between positivistic and humanistic approaches, exploring the nuances of phenomenol-ogy, existentialism and idealism, before settling on transactional-constructivism as, in my view, themost cogent framework. Sorting out these “isms” and relating them to structuralism and itsderivatives, so as to gain insight into the structure-agency debate, has occupied a good deal of mytime. Such inquiry has been rewarding in that it has helped with the teaching of the nature andphilosophy of geography. However, I often feel guilty about such philosophising: it seems almostindulgent and more than a little divorced from the critical issues that are pressing on human society.Of course, much the same can be said about the direction taken by a great deal of behaviouralgeography. Behavioural geography itself has been all too easily equated with mental maps andtherefore dismissed as something ephemeral: n-dimensional manipulations might be clever but theydon’t immediately appear to offer much help in tackling disadvantage in society.

My own view is that the core geographical question is a simple one but, at the same time, one withprofound implications; who does what, where, when, why and with what effect? The side-trackingof behavioural research into mental maps is most unfortunate because the techniques and underly-ing philosophy of behavioural research offer a way of wrestling, at the micro-scale, with what I seeas the core question of geographical inquiry. Migration, shopping behaviour, tourism, industriallocation and housing are topics which are better understood because of the behavioural perspective.The term ‘behavioural geography’ has become something of an anachronism because behaviouralresearch has become mainstream. The sorts of questions and problems that initially promptedgeographers like myself to explore behaviouralism are still with us. No-one would today callthemselves a behavioural geographer. But, by the same token, no-one would undertake a majorstudy in human geography without incorporating a behavioural perspective. In a sense, I feel, we areall behavioural geographers. JW



sort or another. Perhaps the realistic andgrounded approach that underpinned behav-ioural geography was best summarised byGolledge and Rushton (1976, viii) in their pio-neering work on the decision processes under-lying overt spatial behaviour: ‘if we canunderstand how human minds process informa-tion from external environments and if we candetermine what they process and use, then wecan investigate how and why choices concern-ing those environments are made’.

The nature of research inbehavioural geographyThe popular image of behavioural geographyoften focuses on the study of ‘mental maps’.Certainly, mental maps hold a fascination thatextends beyond the limited academic research onthe topic and into more general literature, as evi-denced by Gould and White’s (1974) popularpaperback. This reflects a misnomer: the ‘mentalmaps’ of Gould and White are revealed spacepreferences (reflecting where people would liketo live) rather than ‘cognitive maps’ that serveas part of the mental apparatus that helps inwayfinding (Golledge, 1981; 2006). In essence,research in behavioural geography was con-cerned with how people come to know theenvironment in which they live and how suchknowledge influences their subsequent behav-iour. Although it might be true to claim thatmental maps captured much early attention, thethrust of research soon extended more broadly tocover: how people derive information from theenvironments in which they operate; how theprocess of cognitive mapping can be scientifi-cally analysed; how people use both public (e.g.mass media) and private (e.g. word-of-mouth)information channels; how information is evalu-ated in the process of making decisions aboutwhere to go and what to do (usually termed‘spatial behaviour’); how preferred behavioursare sometimes suppressed in the face of con-straints of one sort or another; how environmen-tal meaning can be socially constructed so thatthe same meaning is shared by many people andinfluences the decision-making and behaviour ofthose people; and how people can develop asense of belonging and attachment to places(Walmsley and Lewis, 1993, viii).

The fundamental argument in behaviouralgeography was that deeper understanding ofpeople-environment interaction could beachieved by looking at the various psychological

processes through which individuals come toknow the environment which surrounds them(Box 1). This is not of course to say that behav-iour represents nothing more than the outwork-ing of deep psychological processes; far fromit. Deep down, behavioural geography rested onthe foundation of behaviouralism. This shouldnot be confused with behaviourism and its goalof reducing the analysis of behaviour to simplestimulus-response bonds. Behaviouralism, bycontrast, is a movement within social sciencewhich aims to replace simple, mechanisticideas about people-environment interaction withthe recognition of the enormous complexity ofbehaviour. It stresses the significance of predis-posing factors (attitudes, beliefs, values, percep-tions, images) as well as the ways in whichpeople make decisions (for instance about whereto go and what to do) within a set of constraintsthat are generated by and reflect the society inwhich the people in question live (cf.Cloke et al.1991, 57–92). In this sense, behavioural geogra-phy encompasses intersubjectively shared envi-ronmental meanings.

The link with behaviouralism was, at one andthe same time, a major strength and a majorweakness of behavioural geography. Although itgave research a sound intellectual foundation, itmeant that there was no one behavioural geogra-phy. The sub-discipline had no core content.Instead, behavioural geography was character-ised by very rich variety. A behavioural per-spective could be applied to almost all topics:shopping; migration; housing markets; industriallocation; farming; tourism; leisure; wayfind-ing; belonging; crime; community development;crowding; health care; and others (Walmsley andLewis, 1993). This absence of a core topical area(as existed, for instance, in ‘industrial geogra-phy’ or ‘retail geography’) led Walmsley andLewis (1993, 6) to caution against the use ofthe term ‘behavioural geography’, arguing that,without a core substance, what was at issuewas not so much a sub-discipline as a generalapproach. Similar sentiments were expressedby Cox and Golledge (1981). Despite this, thenotion of something distinctive called ‘behav-ioural geography’ was widely accepted (seeGold, 1980).

While many behavioural studies in geographyfocussed on images and schemata, and on envi-ronmental cognition generally (Golledge andStimson, 1987), research expanded to cover awide range of topics, reviewed at length byGolledge and Stimson (1997) and Walmsley and



Lewis (1993). Most research in the 1970s and1980s adopted an essentially positivist view ofthe mind and sought to measure both antecedentpsychological conditions and actual behaviour inempirically replicable and verifiable ways. Socialsurvey research methods were used to generateunit record data. Research methods becamemore sophisticated over time with experimentaland quasi-experimental research designs and anemphasis on new analytical tools like logit andprobit models and multidimensional scaling(Golledge and Stimson, 1997). Building on thegeneral foundation of behaviouralism, muchresearch adopted a transactional-constructivistperspective (Moore and Golledge, 1976) where-by individual human beings were thought toconstruct images of the environment in theirminds while they were engaged in transactionswithin the environment, with these imagesinfluencing their subsequent behaviour. Thisapproach appealed to many. Others were deeplyworried by the failure of such behaviouralresearch to engage with the more general issue ofhuman consciousness (Guelke, 1989). It was thisworry which contributed much to the rise ofhumanistic geography. To give a simple example,it was often obvious that behaviour was influ-enced by what might be thought of as the taken-for-granted world and yet the nature of such aworld, with its attendant presuppositions andvalues, was something which could not readilybe studied in positivistic social science.

The divergence between positivistic andhumanistic behavioural research in geographywas recognised early on (Downs and Meyer,1978). Those of a positivist persuasion soughtempirically valid, scientifically respectable,quantitative measurements of behaviour whilethose of a humanistic persuasion focussed ondescription and empathy to reveal the meaningsof different environments to the people who livedin them. In simple terms, humanistic geographerssought to position themselves, metaphorically, inpeople’s shoes in order to see the world throughthose people’s eyes. Above all, they adopted anexperiential perspective that sought to capturethe totality of life rather than the quantification ofa particular element of it. Of course, as withscientific behavioural research, such humanisticapproaches had a significant intellectual traditionand a long-standing engagement with other fieldsof endeavour, not least with landscape studiesand with research on myth and reality in theviews that settlers held of new lands (see Powell,1978; Meinig, 1979). This is not the place to

review the tensions between positivistic andhumanistic geography (see Walmsley and Lewis,1993). The significance of this tension is thatit fuelled a critique of behavioural geographywhich, in turn, encouraged the evolution of geo-graphical thinking more broadly.

Critiques of behavioural geographyOne of the hallmarks of behavioural geography isthat its practitioners tended to reflect on whatthey did. Evidence for this can be seen in the wayin which humanistic approaches gained favourwith those who recognised the shortcomings ofrelying purely on scientific method. At the sametime, researchers who were never persuaded bythe rationale for behavioural geography offeredcriticisms. There therefore emerged a substantialcritique of behavioural research in geography,itself closely linked to debates about epistemol-ogy and ontology which did much to add rigourto the intellectual development of human geog-raphy generally.

One of the main criticisms of behaviouralresearch was that it tends to assume simplisticlinks between the mind and behaviour, perhapsexemplified by the notion that mental maps influ-ence travel behaviour in ways that are more oftenasserted than proven. Added to this, Bunting andGuelke (1979) criticised behavioural research forputting too much emphasis on egocentric inter-pretations of the environment. Another criticismrelated to the inadequacy of behavioural researchin terms of tackling social problems. This viewargued that much behavioural research over-looked people’s capacity to change the world,preferring instead to adopt a value system thatsupports the status quo insofar as the focus is onbehaviour as it is rather than on how behaviourcan be changed to improve human well-being(Walmsley and Lewis, 1993). Other elementsof the critique highlighted the fact that behav-ioural research might be ontologically deficient.Jensen-Butler (1981), for example, claimed thatmuch behavioural research was ontologicallygrounded in idealism rather than in materialismand that it was weakened as a result. From thisperspective, choices, images and preferencesare really epiphenomena which divert attentionfrom the study of the really important underly-ing structures (Box 2). Epistemologically, too,behavioural research in geography has beenchallenged by those who see such research aslocked into an independent-dependent variableframework. In the early days of behaviouralgeography, Cullen (1976) saw the ubiquity of



Box 2: From the outside looking inLooking back, my geographical education at the University of Adelaide was quite strongly, ifsomewhat implicitly, imbued with the behavioural approach. To my recollection, University ofAdelaide human geography teaching broadly conformed to a dialectic of scale. The grand modelsemanating from the systems thinking of Haggett and Chorley formed a macro-scale in whichaggregate human spatial behaviour, evident in phenomena such as migration or urban residentialand industrial location, could be modeled and comprehended. At the micro-scale, mental maps andother cognitive tools provided access to the individual decision-making behind such collectivebehaviour, as well as demonstrating the role of human agency in these otherwise impersonal andpowerful processes. Via this dichotomous approach we gained an appreciation for the personalstories that informed and, sometimes, conflicted with, gravity models and other quantitative ana-lytical methods of spatial science. In addition, we gained an insight into the philosophical dilemmasof the structure/agency debate that would occupy many of us later in postgraduate work. Morepragmatically, perhaps, the ethical importance of exploring and communicating the human dimen-sion in our work, and of seeing the active role of individuals in influencing the social, cultural andeconomic forces that structure society and form the decision-making contexts for individuals, wasbrought home to us. Structural analysis, of whatever variety, was all very well, we were taught, butwhat made that academic exercise worthwhile and meaningful were the human stories that gaveflesh, blood and emotion to aggregated location decision-making. So, while we didn’t learn the‘behavioural approach to geography’ as such, we did become familiar with its rationale and modusoperandi.

As worthy and interesting as this behavioural approach was, though, I have to confess to beingleft just a little cold by it. I came to university, rather later in life than most perhaps, fired with theinjustice so evident in the world at that time, hungry for the knowledge, and the conceptual andpractical skills to apply this knowledge. In my ardent idealism, I found in much geography just thiscombination of understanding and practical skills. However, grand spatial modeling just didn’tseem to be what I was after. When we learnt about cognitive models of urban residential locationin social geography I couldn’t help but think that we were playing about, given that in another unitI was simultaneously learning about the ways in capitalist land and housing markets dictated whocould exercise exactly what kind of residential choice. For some considerable part of my under-graduate and postgraduate years, my thinking was nourished by the deep insights, concepts andmuscular language of Marxian-style political economy, together with some of its feminist andpost-structuralist critiques. These ideas greatly influenced my research into agrarian and ruralcommunity change in South Australia. In accordance with my geographical education, though, acommitment to fieldwork in testing out the applicability and ‘hold’ of theoretical ideas – conceivedin the ‘in here’ of a university – in the ‘out there’ of everyday rural communities and farm families,forcefully reminded me of the importance of not only documenting the views and perceptions ofreal people entangled in the processes of ‘rural restructuring’, but actually folding these into anyexplanation of the causes and effects of that change. Therefore, understanding how and why peoplemay perceive particular situations differently, and how these perceptions are translated into actions,began to become more important in my research.

That does not mean, of course, that I became a fully fledged behavioural geographer; far from it.However, as my more recent work has come to consider, for example, the plights and challengesfacing rural communities on the fringes of the Australian ecumene, I have found myself drawingincreasingly from the deep intellectual wells of behavioural geography research and techniques toinform my work. Because what has become more important to me has been the need to documentpeople’s perceptions of their changing social, demographic and economic environment, and howthey act in response to these perceptions, to the extent to which they can or choose to act at all. Inother words, then, as someone who has come onto the academic scene nearly a full generation afterthe onset of the main wave of behavioural geography research and researchers, I feel that I amincreasingly absorbing selected aspects of its philosophy, concepts and techniques. I may have oncefound these wanting in relation to more structuralist modes of thinking but I have neverthelessrediscovered the potential power of its insights. NA



this framework as its fundamental weakness. Inhis view, it could be applied almost everywherebecause it was almost wholly lacking in specificcontent, explained nothing and produced no test-able hypotheses. At the same time, behaviouralgeography was exposed to the danger of psy-chologism, the notion that social phenomena canbe explained in terms of the mental characteris-tics of individuals without due recognition oftheir social, economic and political situation(Mills, 1970). In this context, concern wasexpressed about the uncritical interdisciplinarytransfer of concepts and ideas and about the lan-guage sometimes used. Billinge (1983, 400), forinstance, pulled no punches in his attack on ‘theperversion of meaning, the disguise of medioc-rity of sentiment, the inflation of authors’ self-regard and the representation as profound ofideas which are in reality clichéd or banal’.Others were more guarded and complained onlyof an apparent fascination with esoterica and asometimes precious form of writing that seemedto be lacking in concern for the human condition(Brookfield, 1989).

Methodology also figured prominently in cri-tiques of behavioural geography. At the heartof the problem is what Olsson (1969) calledthe ‘geographical inference problem’ of relatingform and process to each other at a satisfactorylevel of aggregation. This is an acute problem inbehavioural geography because pattern is usuallydescribed at the macro-scale of the environmentas a whole whereas process is usually specifiedat the micro-scale of the individual decision-making unit. So, for example, although it is pos-sible to aggregate individual images to create acomposite mental map, this map has little opera-tive value because it is not necessarily meaning-ful to any, let alone all, of the individuals understudy. Underlying this unease is the fact thatmacro-scale and micro-scale approaches arebased on different methodological and philo-sophical positions (Watson, 1978). Macro-scalestudies assume that individual behaviour is socomplex as to be indeterminate and impossible tostudy. As a consequence, from this perspective,the generalisation of aggregate patterns is allthat can be meaningfully achieved. Micro-scalestudies argue, in contrast, that aggregate patternsdo not enable the specification of causal linksand therefore have very limited predictive andexplanatory power. From this perspective, someof the things that are important simply cannot bemeasured at an aggregate level (e.g. sense ofplace).

The reflexive nature of behavioural geographymeant that researchers adapted to the critiquethat was offered. A wider range of methodologieswas employed and there was a shift from themeswhich were readily amenable to behaviouralanalysis to a focus on issues that were pressingsocial problems. In this way, behavioural re-search became not an end in itself but a steptowards a deeper understanding of real worldissues. Several research themes emerged (Aitken,1991). One school of thought advocated analyti-cal behaviouralism. This represented a conti-nuation, a distillation and an advance on earlypositivistic work. In the words of Golledge andStimson (1987, i), ‘research requiring an analyti-cal mode has produced the greatest academic andapplied knowledge contributions to the entirearea of behavioural research in geography’.There is ample evidence to support this view inthe most recent review by these authors(Golledge and Stimson, 1997). Mathematicalmodelling of behaviour in relation to social prob-lems is certainly an ongoing theme in geography.Baker’s (2000) work, again emanating from theUniversity of New England, on shopping tripsand the ways in which these are influenced bytrading hours is a case in point in the fieldof analytical behaviouralism. One particularlyimportant development has been the interfacingof spatial information technologies and GISmethods with disaggregated analysis of humanspatial behaviour through the development ofcomputational process models (see Albert andGolledge, 1999).

A second focus of behavioural research hasbeen the sense of attachment and belonging thatdevelops between people and places. Long aconcern of humanistic geographers, the study ofsense of place has changed somewhat. An initialpreoccupation with the relevance of imagination,values, beliefs and environmental meaning hasgiven way to attempts to place human subjectiv-ity and consciousness in a prominent positionwithin geography so as to take account of mate-rial conditions (Ley and Samuels, 1978). Pred(1991, 4) put it very simply:

For me, what goes on in people’s mindscannot be separated from the construction ofunevenly developed built environment, from theshaping of landscape and land-use patterns,from the appropriation and transformation ofnature, from the organization and use of specia-lised locations for the conduct of economic andsocial practices, from the pattern of movementand interdependence between such localised



activities, from the formation of symbolicallyladen ideology-projecting sites and areas.

Pred summed up his sentiment forcefully:‘Human consciousness and human geographyproduce one another’.

A third focus of research to endure in theface of the critique of behavioural geographyhas been a concern with environmental knowl-edge, with ‘wayfinding’ (Golledge, 1999), andwith the process known as ‘cognitive mapping’(Kitchin and Freundschuh, 2000). Recognisingthat the study of environmental images is not anend in itself, many researchers have sought adeeper understanding of the way in which envi-ronmental knowledge is built up over time.Several questions have been at the heart of thisresearch: How does environmental knowledgecome about? Does knowledge involve the accu-mulation of bits of information or the awakeningof a priori structures in the brain? How doesknowledge impact on behaviour? (Walmsley,1988, 11). Particularly important has been workon the development of environmental knowl-edge in young children and the ways in whichthis relates to Piaget’s model of development(Matthews, 1992). Equally important is thework on wayfinding and the investigation of thespatial behaviour of groups such as the visuallyimpaired and those with mobility restrictions(see Golledge et al., 1998). Other examplesrelate to the ways in which tourists learn theirway around previously unfamiliar environments(Walmsley and Jenkins, 1992) and the ways inwhich newcomers adjust to urban environments(Humphreys, 1990).

A final focus of attention has been on thenature of decision-making and the precise linkbetween cognition and behaviour. Brookfield, forexample, has pointed out that there are no simplebonds between cognition and behaviour. Thesorts of decision-making that are of concern ingeographical research involve a multiplicity ofdecision-makers. As a result, researchers need toconsider a range of actors as well as the resourcesavailable to them and the constraints under whichthey operate: ‘A large subset of all decisions ofconsequence have “downstream” effects: theyimpact on others . . . By the same token, afurther large subset of decisions have “upstream”preconditions, the consequences of former deci-sions’ (Brookfield, 1989, 315). The upshot of thisargument is that real world material conditionshave to be taken into account in investigating anyissue, particularly as those conditions changeover time.

Some see the changes that have occurred as aresult of the critique of behavioural geography asbeing a sign of convergence across differentstyles of geography (Aitken, 1991), with behav-ioural geography, for example, acting ‘as some-thing of a ‘bridge’ leading from the ‘peopleless’landscapes of spatial science through to the‘peopled’ landscapes of humanistic geography’(Cloke, Philo and Sadler, 1991, 67). Others havequestioned whether convergence is the way togo or whether a ‘new geography’ is neededthat encompasses a variety of new approaches(Walmsley and Lewis, 1993, 20). Perhaps there isa case for a micro-geography and a macro-geography along the lines of the micro-macrodivision in economics (Walmsley, 1988, 311)?Certainly, the critiques of behavioural geographyhave helped to bring home to geographers thefact that the central assumptions of naturalscience and its associated scientific methodology– namely that study can proceed in such a way asto be independent of context – is untenable in thesocial sciences (Eyles, 1989). It has also raisedthe question of whether there can ever be ‘laws’of human spatial behaviour when so much de-pends on ideology, power, constraints and thedistinctly human trait for the actors under studyto be reflexive in their behaviour.

A revitalised geography?The development, conduct and critique of behav-ioural geography has enriched the overall disci-pline of geography in several ways. In a veryfundamental sense, it encouraged geographers toconsider the epistemological foundations of thediscipline. Behavioural geography, because of itssubject matter, raised questions about the source,nature and form of knowledge. It asked how asubject comes to know an object. It came to rec-ognise that knowledge is neither externally deter-mined nor innate but rather the product of theinteraction between individuals and their sur-roundings. The focus of behavioural research onpersonal geographies and direct experiencesbrought into question the extent to which knowl-edge is intersubjectively shared. It therefore chal-lenged geographers to think about the issue ofsubjectivity and, inevitably, this led to a consid-eration of the conditions in which valid knowl-edge could be achieved. Above all, behaviouralresearch was a way of providing detail to fleshout the general insights provided by macro-scaleand structural approaches (Box 2).

In tackling epistemological issues, behav-ioural geography also brought into focus the



question of the extent to which geography is acontextualising or a nomological discipline(Sayer, 1991). Underpinning behavioural re-search was the question of whether geographersshould seek out invariant laws of ‘spatial behav-iour’ (a nomological approach which emphasisescontext-independent facets of behaviour) orwhether they should look at ‘behaviour in space’(thereby interpreting behaviour in terms of thecontext in which it occurs). The distinctionbetween ‘spatial behaviour’ and ‘behaviour inspace’ is, in other words, much more than a playon words. At the heart of the distinction is thequestion of whether it is better to recognise therich variety of behaviour or whether it is impor-tant to see the general in the particular. If theformer, contextualising, approach is adopted,researchers are unlikely to formulate overarchingtheories of how society works because howsociety works will vary from place to place. Con-templation of these sorts of issues encouragedconsideration of ‘spatiality’ and of the sociallyconstructed meaning of space and place. Recog-nition that context could be variously interpretedpresented challenges to the discipline.

Underpinning the issue of epistemology, butless well articulated, were concerns with ontol-ogy, that is to say a concern for what exists andwhat can be known. The questioning and reflec-tion undertaken by behavioural geographershelped open the door of geography to realism.Geographers came to recognise that reality couldbe studied on three levels: mechanisms (whichhave causal power), events (which are the reali-sation of mechanisms), and experiences (wherepeople appreciate the outcomes of events)(Johnston, 1989). Thus, it became widely recog-nised that the empirical, experienced domain,with which behavioural geography was con-cerned, might reflect a real domain (causalforces) and an actual domain (events). The cor-ollary is that behavioural research needed to becomplemented by other forms of geographicalresearch for genuine and deep understanding tobe achieved. And it is at this point, perhaps, thata singular, distinctive branch of human geogra-phy labelled ‘behavioural’ began to disappear –or at least to blend with other approaches toproduce a more humanistic geography.

Implicit in the notion of deeper layers ofreality is the notion of shared constraints onbehaviour. One of the legacies of behaviouralgeography is in fact the challenge it offered toresearchers to consider the balance betweenchoice and constraint. Behavioural geographers

came to recognise the dynamic nature of con-straints: ‘humanly constructed structures con-strain behaviour which itself subsequently altersthe form of those structures and their interpreta-tion’ (Walmsley and Lewis, 1993, 136). Transac-tional constructivism seemed to offer a way ofmeeting this challenge insofar as it emphasisedthat transactions between individuals and theirsurroundings were mediated by simplified im-ages of the environment, but that these imageswere constructed by active individuals who wereinfluenced by their own goals as well as by exter-nal, situational and material factors. At the coreof transactional constructivist approaches was aconcern for the ways in which environmentalmeanings originate, are contested and are nego-tiated. However it should be acknowledged thatbehavioural geography’s early fascination withthings like mental maps meant that rather toomuch emphasis came to be placed on construc-tivism (images) and rather too little on transac-tions (the processes whereby constructions of theworld are negotiated and brought into being)(Aitken and Bjorklund, 1988), a fact recognisedin the way in which the analytical behaviouralschool of thought gave increasing emphasisto cognitive mapping processes and to waysof analysing such processes (Kitchin, 1994;Golledge and Stimson, 1997).

Behavioural geography was not of coursealone in contributing to changes in geographygenerally. Similar developments took place inother parts of the discipline. Nor should it besuggested that the excursion into behaviouralgeography solved many of the problems at thecore of human geography. The key issuesremain how to relate the behaviour of individu-als to the structures and contexts within which itoccurs, how to demonstrate that the structureand spatial organisation of society are both acreation of human beings and a major constrainton the behaviour of those individuals, and howto describe aggregate patterns of human behav-iour in such a way as to be useful to plannersand policy-makers without losing sight of therich variety of human experience and the waysin which this is both shared and continuallychanging (Walmsley and Lewis, 1993, 128).What behavioural geography did was to contrib-ute to the rich variety of geography. It fostereddifferent approaches to the study of people-environment interaction and, at its best, itoffered up deeper, more human-centred perspec-tives on space, place and society. This pluralityof approaches was not a weakness but a strength



of the discipline because it provided differentand complementary insights into why the worldis like it is. Inevitably, almost, this plurality ofperspectives fostered interdisciplinary links (see,for example, Kitchin et al., 1997). The ways inwhich behavioural researchers in geographycontributed to publications outside mainstreamgeography is, in many ways, laudable. It showsthe appeal and the relevance of the research.

ConclusionBehavioural geography produced epistemolo-gically well founded, grounded research thatfocussed on the rich variety of human behaviour.It highlighted the experiential, recognised thecomplexity of behaviour, and accepted the needfor interdisciplinary discourse. In particular, itcame to recognise that humans are social animalswith shared but contested interpretations of theirsurroundings. Behavioural geography was not afad that went out of fashion. Rather it can beargued that it represents an evolutionary stage – abehavioural stage – which has enriched thediscipline of geography. Behavioural geographydid not wither away and die. From the perspectiveof the authors, in Australia it became absorbedinto mainstream geography. No researcher todaywould return to idealised postulates of whatbehaviour should be like. Relatively few research-ers today would call themselves ‘behaviouralgeographers’, certainly compared to the headydays of the 1970s, but the contribution that behav-ioural geography has made implicitly influencesmost contemporary geographical research andresearch beyond the discipline.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThe authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments ofReg Golledge and Bob Stimson on a draft of this paper.

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From the Inside Looking out and the Outside Looking in: Whatever Happened to ‘Behavioural Geography’?