In geography, the quantitative revolution (QR) was a paradigm shift that sought to develop a more rigorous and systematic methodology for the discipline. It came as a response to the inadequacy of regional geography to explain general spatial dynamics. The main claim for the quantitative revolution is that it led to a shift from a descriptive (idiographic) geography to an empirical law-making (nomothetic) geography. The quantitative revolution occurred during the 1950s and 1960s and marked a rapid change in the method behind geographical research, from regional geography into a spatial science. In the history of geography, the quantitative revolution was one of the four major turning points of modern geography – the other three being environmental determinism, regional geography and critical geography. It contributed to the technical geography branch of the discipline, culminating in the emergence of quantitative geography, which includes geographic information science, geoinformatics, and spatial analysis. The quantitative revolution had occurred earlier in economics and psychology and contemporaneously in political science and other social sciences and to a lesser extent in history.
Antecedents During the late 1940s and early 1950s:
The regional tradition, which believed the objective of geography was to describe and explain the areal differentiation of the Earth's surface, dominated geography studies. The closing of many geography departments and courses in universities took place, most notably, the abolition of the geography program at Harvard University (a highly prestigious institution) in 1948 was seen as an “academic war over the field of geography". There was a continuing division between human and physical geography – general talk of human geography becoming an autonomous subject. Geography was regarded as overly descriptive and unscientific – it was claimed that there was no explanation of why processes or phenomena occurred. Geography was seen as exclusively educational and "not a university subject" – there were few if any applications of contemporary geography. Continuing debates regarding what geography is – science, art, humanity or social science – took place. After World War II, technology became increasingly important in society, and as a result, nomothetic-based sciences gained popularity and prominence. All of these events presented a threat to geography's position as an academic subject, and thus geographers began seeking new methods to counter critique.
The Revolution The quantitative revolution responded to the regional geography paradigm that was dominant at the time. Debates raged predominantly (although not exclusively) in the U.S., where regional geography was the major philosophical school. In the early 1950s, there was a growing sense that the existing paradigm for geographical research was not adequate in explaining how physical, economic, social, and political processes are spatially organized, ecologically related, or how outcomes generated by them are evidence for a given time and place. A growing number of geographers started to express their dissatisfaction with the traditional paradigm of the discipline and its focus on regional geography, deeming the work as too descriptive, fragmented, and non-generalizable. To address these concerns, early critics such as Ackerman suggested the systematization of the discipline. Soon thereafter, a series of debates regarding methodological approaches in geography took place. One of the first illustrations of this was the Schaefer vs. Hartshorne debate. In 1953 Exceptionalism in geography: A Methodological Examination was published. In this work, Schaefer rejected Hartshorne's exceptionalist interpretations about the discipline of geography and having the region as its central object of study. Instead, Schaefer envisioned as the discipline's main objective the establishment of morphological laws through scientific inquiry, i.e. incorporating laws and methods from other disciplines in the social sciences that place a greater emphasis on processes. Hartshorne, on the other hand, addressed Schaefer's criticism in a series of publications, where he dismissed Schaefer's views as subjective and contradictory. He also stressed the importance of describing and classifying places and phenomena, yet admitted that there was room for employing laws of generic relationships in order to maximize scientific understanding. In his view, however, there should be no hierarchy between these two approaches. While debates about methods carried on, the institutionalization of systematic geography was taking place in the U.S. academy. The geography programs at the University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Washington were pioneering programs in that respect. At the University of Iowa, Harold McCarty led efforts to establish laws of association between geographical patterns. At the University of Wisconsin, Arthur H. Robinson led efforts to develop statistical methods for map comparison. And at the University of Washington, Edward Ullman and William Garrison worked on developing the field of economic and urban geography, and central place theory. Graduate students from the University of Washington, such as William Bunge, Artur Getis, and Waldo R. Tobler expanded on this work throughout their careers, with Bunge's book Theoretical Geography "described as "perhaps the seminal text of the spatial-quantitative revolution." These institutions engendered a generation of geographers that established spatial analysis as part of the research agenda at other institutions including University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Loyola University, Ohio State University, the University of Michigan, among others. The changes introduced during the 1950s and 1960s under the banner of bringing 'scientific thinking' to geography led to an increased use of technique-based practices, including an array of mathematical techniques and computerized statistics that improved precision, and theory-based practices to conceptualize location and space in geographical research. Some of the techniques that epitomize the quantitative revolution include:
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