Facets of Constructed Space, continued

"Antipode: a Radical Journal of Geography" was first published in 1969; Harvey's influential Social Justice and the City in 1973. The sort of critiques these works embodied were part of an effort to take the '60s-era transformation ethics into more vital, fundamental, preventative realms than just the protest and march (curative). Harvey's book was related to his "anguished personal and logical journey from a constellation of unsatisfying liberal assumptions towards a systematic Marxist analysis" (Johnston et al, 1994). It was also inevitable, as counterculture in general was, that Marx's ideas would be applied to geography just as they were to other fields. What exactly about Marxism is geographic? Quaini tells us:

"Marx...was not a geographer, in the same way as he was neither a historian or a sociologist, but in Marxism just as there is a theory of history and an analysis of society , there is also a geography, provided that by geography we primarily mean...the history of the cognitive conquest and regional development of the earth, as a function of how society has come to be organized." (1982)

To the Marxist, geography and space are constructed, socio-culturally and econo-politically alike. Further, though, in capitalist society, there is a tendency for space-time to be abstracted, homogenized, and, ultimately, eliminated as a concern entirely (Johnston et al, 1994; Altvater, 1994). The growth ethic, in fact, is related not just to growth in bank accounts, but to geographic growth, expanding spatially not only the sphere of influence and the control of resources, but the ability to externalize the costs and negative effects of production. Elmar Altvater says, in Is Capitalism Sustainable?, "Production means production of space and production of nature. The results of production...manifest themselves spatially as cultural landscapes" (1994). The question geographers, of the radical variety, began to ask themselves was, "What sort of space and nature do we want to construct?"

In a closely related sense, but using different language, a major facet of feminist geography has been an emphasis on "situated knowledge," on all knowledge as situated in relation to historical, social, economic, class, and, of course, gender realities (Johnston et al, 1994). While Marxist geographers were quite common in academic geography by the mid-1980s, still one has the sense that the stigma of Marxism/socialism was enough to keep most scholars from being too vocal or activist in their association with Marxist views. Feminist geography, however, appears more openly associated with the activist aspect of radicalism, with the overt desire to change things fundamentally. The Women and Geography Study Group of the Institute of British Geographers says:

"What we argue for...is not...an increase in the number of studies of women per se in geography, but an entirely different approach to geography as a whole. Consequently we consider that the implications of gender in the study of geography are at least as important as the implications of any other social or economic factor which transforms society and space...We are concerned to introduce the idea of feminist geography‹a geography which explicitly takes into account the socially created gender structure of society; and in which a commitment both towards the alleviation of gender equality in the short term and towards its removal, through social change toward real equality, in the longer term, is expressed." (1984)

The aim was not only to transform academic geography (the theories), but also to radically alter the unequitable manifestations of geographic and other worldviews.