Makers of modern human geography

Reg Golledge was a pioneer of behavioural geography, an approach he championed for his entire career. In nearly 50 years of publications, he developed a consistent and coherent theoretical framework to support his view that the best way to understand the geographical world was to understand how people cognized the world around them and made choices and decisions on the basis of such knowledge. Behavioural geography argued that space is not experienced and understood in a similar manner by all individuals. Instead, each individual possesses a unique understanding of their surroundings, and that this understanding is shaped by mental processes of information gathering and organization. By analysing such knowledge it becomes possible to understand, explain, model and predict human spatial behaviour and to account for why human behaviour did not fit the patterns sometimes anticipated in models of spatial science. The approach developed throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s largely out of a dissatisfaction with the stereotyped, mechanistic and deterministic nature of many of the quantitative models being pursued at that time. As such, it was a challenge to the perceived, ‘peopleless’ geographies of spatial science, while retaining a scientific approach to study. As the contributions to this forum make clear, Golledge’s contribution to behavioural geography, and Geography more broadly, cannot be underestimated (see also Kitchin, 2004). Over the course of his career he developed a systematic program of research that consistently sought to deepen and strengthen the theoretical and methodological underpinnings and empirical scope of behavioural geography. So, for example, he engaged in wider ontological and epistemological debates within the discipline of Geography, seeking to tighten and advance behaviouralism’s theoretical tenets and to promote it to a wider audience. He developed a number of specific theories concerning the development and structuring of spatial knowledge, processes of spatial choice and decision-making (in different contexts – transportation, residential choice), and environmental learning with regards to different Figure 1. Portrait of Reg Golledge (reproduced by permission of Dan Montello) Progress in Human Geography 34(5) 678–690 a The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav 10.1177/0309132510362433 phg.sagepub.com