Brian J.L Berry - Urban Geography in America, 1950-2000

Urban Geography in America, 19502000

Paradigms and Personalities

Edited by

Brian J. L. Berry

and James O. Wheeler

Published in 2005 by

Routledge

Taylor & Francis Group

711 Third Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Published in Great Britain by

Routledge

Taylor & Francis Group

2 Park Square

Milton Park, Abingdon

Oxon OX14 4RN

2005 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group

International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-95190-9 (Hardcover) 0-415-95191-7 (Softcover)

International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-95190-6 (Hardcover) 978-0-415-95191-3 (Softcover)

Library of Congress Card Number 2004029780

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Contents

We are proud to present this 50-year history of urban geography in America as told by its participants. The project began as an outgrowth of a paper session organized by James O. Wheeler at the 2001 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in New York entitled Urban Geography in the 1960s. The paper presenters in this session (John S. Adams, William A. V. Clark, James O. Wheeler, and Maurice Yeates) all obtained Ph.D.s in the 1960s. Their formative years, first as graduate students and then as assistant professors, coincided with the development and maturation of urban spatial analysis. For them, this was the urban decade, when human geography first became recognized as a legitimate part of the social sciences. This recognition was guided and advanced by Brian J. L. Berry and his many doctoral students at the University of Chicago, who together established the Chicago School of urban geography. Berrys students latched onto his innovative ways of thinking about and doing geographynew theories, concepts, methodologies, and policy insights. As a result, this was a decade of paradigm gained and molded. The paper presentations were published, along with Berrys commentary on The Chicago School in Retrospect and Prospect, in Urban Geography, 2001, Vol. 22, No. 6.

The Los Angeles meeting of the AAG in 2002 provided the opportunity for Wheeler and Berry to organize a second paper session, Urban Geography in the 1970s. Presenters included Martin Cadwallader, Larry R. Ford, Patricia Gober, Peter G. Goheen, and Risa I. Palm, whose Ph.D.s were awarded in the 1970s. These papers, with Berrys commentary, Paradigm Lost, were published in Urban Geography Vol. 23, 2002, No. 5. They revealed that the 1970s was a decade of experimentation and challenge to the spatial analysis paradigm.

The New Orleans meeting of the AAG in 2003 was the forum for two additional sessions organized by Wheeler and Berry: Urban Geography in the 1980s and Urban Geography in the 1990s. The former session comprised presentations by Larry S. Bourne, Sallie A. Marston and Geraldine Pratt, David R. Meyer, and Michael Pacione, with insightful commentary by Robert W. Lake. Paul L. Knox also contributed a paper, although it was not presented in the session. The second session included papers by Trevor J. Barnes, Michael Dear, Susan Hanson, Robert W. Lake, and Helga Leitner and Eric Sheppard. Published versions of the papers from these two sessions were published in Urban Geography, Vol. 24, 2003, Nos. 4 and 6, respectively.

The Chicago School of the 1960s did not arise in a vacuum. Papers by Chauncy D. Harris, Elisabeth Lichtenberger and Edward J. Taaffe previously published in Urban Geography describe the foundations on which the superstructure of the 1960s was constructed. Taken together, these papers and the four sets of AAG presentations constitute an important historical resource that should be of value to members of the geographic profession, now and in the future, and it has been our pleasure to draw them together in one place. Here are the voices of those who created and transformed modern urban geography in North America.