Reginald G. Golledge: In Memoriam

The Editorial Board of Spatial Cognition and Computation notes in sadness the passing of Dr. Reginald (Reg) G. Golledge at the age of 71 on 29 May 2009 in Goleta, California. Reg was a member of the Advisory Board of this journal since its inception. In this capacity, he was eager to help shape the journal’s mission and promote the journal to a wide range of audiences. He was co-author of an article published in the very first issue of the journal (Klatzky, Beall, Loomis, Golledge, & Philbeck, 1999) and followed that up as co-author on an article published the next year (Waller, Loomis, Golledge, & Beall, 2000). Reg was born on 6 December 1937 in the small town of Dungog, New South Wales. As a boy, he worked hard on the farm, fished, and pushed other boys around on the rugby field. As a young man, he studied at the University of New England in Australia, receiving his B.A. and M.A. degrees in Geography. After a short stint as lecturer at the University of Canterbury in NZ, he received a scholarship to study in America, at the University of Iowa, where he earned his Ph.D. in Geography in 1966 with Harold McCarty. Reg took a faculty position at the University of British Columbia, followed a year later by a position at The Ohio State University. He spent his summers as a visiting professor at several universities in the United States and elsewhere, but in 1977, he was recruited by David Simonett to come to the Geography Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He spent the rest of his career there. As an academic, Reg was highly innovative, amazingly productive, communally directed, and very influential. He became something of a legend in the discipline of geography, virtually canonized in numerous textbooks and histories of the field. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was a main creator and popularizer of the subfield of behavioral geography, co-editing the 1969 symposium proceedings Behavioral Problems in Geography (Cox & Golledge, 1969) and writing influential early articles and chapters on cognitive aspects of economic decisions in space and place, and on people’s cognitive representations of cities, particularly Columbus, Ohio. The core insight of behavioral geography is that people’s behaviors in space and place depend on their beliefs about reality, not just reality itself, and that people’s behaviors can differ considerably from each other as a result of differences in their subjective worlds. People might shop at a particular market because they believe it is closest and has the best products, not because it actually is the closest and has the best products.