Recent spatial_ucsb_csiss_classics items

John Snow, The London Cholera Epidemic of 1854. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

By mapping the incidence of cholera deaths, Dr. John Snow was able to trace the spread of Cholera in 1854 to the pump at the corner of Cambridge and Broad Street in London. Inference from the spatial pattern supported his argument that water contamination was a major source of causation of the disease and spread of Cholera, and it illustrated the value of spatial analysis in solving social problems.

Kevin Lynch, City Elements Create Images in Our Mind, 1960. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In The Image of the City, Lynch documents and describes key elements in the built structure of a city that are important in the popular perception and efficient functioning of city. This pioneering study was based on field interviews and surveys in Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City. This research was instrumental in raising the profile of spatial thinking within planning and urban design.

Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 1983. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Tufte addresses two major objectives in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information—to identify many of the mistakes and abuses common to informational graphics and to develop a general theory of data graphics to increase their efficiency and effectiveness.

Robert W. Fogel, The Argument for Wagons and Canals, 1964. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In Railroads and American Economic Growth, Fogle illustrates how the interpretation of economic history is enhanced through a spatial perspective. He uses distance buffers to represent ease of transport and to assess the likely impacts of regional economic expansion associated with different scenarios of change in transport technology.

Zvi Griliches, The Diffusion of Hybrid Corn Technology, 1957. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Griliches' research demonstrated that the adoption of new technologies like hybrid corn was not a single event, but was instead a series of developments that occurred at different rates across geographical space.

Charles M. Tiebout, A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures, 1956. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The Tiebout Hypothesis is that individuals reveal their preferences for high or low public services (and related high/low taxes) by "voting with their feet." Competition among jurisdictions results in homogeneous communities, with residents that all value public services similarly, such that, in equilibrium, no individual can be made better off by moving, and the market is efficient.

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 1861. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Mayhew approached his work on London Labour and the London Poor ethnographically, interviewing his subjects directly to render vivid biographical sketches of those who struggled to survive in Victorian London. He also completed a series of choropleth maps on the overall intensity of criminality, illiteracy, teenage marriage, and other social indicators. Mayhew's maps were among the earliest attempts to study crime using cartographic techniques.

Sam Bass Warner, Modeling the Streetcar Suburbs, 1962. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In his 1962 book Streetcar Suburbs, Sam Bass Warner, Jr., using Boston as an example, highlighed how suburbanization, the attendant abandonment of the urban landscape, and a lack of coherent planning contributed to social class segregation and dependence on long-distance commuting.

Rupert B. Vance, Space and the American South. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Vance paid close attention to the geographic patterning of economic and demographic factors across places. He was especially interested in what set the American South apart from the rest of America. His research explored ecological and geographic factors in Southern exceptionalism; the spatial basis of Southern migration; and the importance of regionalism.

Friedrich Ratzel, Clark Wissler, and Carl Sauer, Culture Area Research and Mapping. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The organization of human communities into cultural areas remains a common practice throughout the social sciences, drawing on the anthropological and geographical work of Ratzel, Wissler, and Sauer.

Lou Skoda and J.C. Robertson, The Isodemographic Map of Canada, 1972. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In 1972 Lou Skoda and J.C. Robertson published an isodemographic map (a cartogram) of Canada that represented a population-oriented rendering of the 1966 Canadian census divisions. The map was developed with a physical analog model that kept all of Canada together in a contiguous mass while preserving recognizable divisions and province outlines.

Gordon R. Willey, Settlement Patterns in Archaeology. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Willey's looked at archaeological evidence on a regional scale. He demonstrated this approach in Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Virú Valley, a work now recognized for changing the way that archaeologists view landscapes.

Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Space. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Georg Simmel developed many important insights on the social construction of space, linked to developments in urban ecology and communciation studies. These include concepts of personal space, social distance, and social boundaries.

Florence Kelly, Slums of the Great Cities Survey Maps, 1893. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In 1893 the U.S. Congress commissioned a Special Investigation of the Slums of Great Cities to assess the extent of poverty in urban areas. Florence Kelley led a related effort in Chicago to create a series of maps similar to Charles Booth's (1840–1916) maps of poverty in London. The objective was to provide graphic evidence of the urgent need to address poverty and other social problems.

Patrick Doreian, Modeling Sociological Processes Using Spatially Distributed Data. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Patrick Doreian is credited for hissignificant role in making fellow social scientists aware of spatial processes andfor illustrating the value of spatial methodologies in social science research.

Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, Urban Ecology Studies, 1925. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In the 1920s, Park and Burgess developed a distinctive program of urban research at the University of Chicago. In projects focused on Chicago, they elaborated a theory of urban ecology that drew parallels with processes found in natural ecosystems, leading ultimately to the division of the urban space into distinctive ecological niches or "natural areas" in which people shared similar social characteristics.

Melinda S. Meade, Medical Geography and Human Ecology, 1977. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Meade synthesizes ideas from anthropology, ecology, medicine, and demography to construct an integrated model of the core dimensions of medical geography. This model sees health as the outcome of interactions among the dimensions of population, environment, and culture.

Vladimer Orlando Key, Mapping Southern Politics, 1949. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Key's book, Southern Politics in State and Nation, delved into the political practices of the American South and problems in the development of multiparty democracy across the region prior to the civil rights movement. It also represents an early use of maps to clearly depict spatial patterns of behavior and electoral geography that would have been invisible through traditional statistics and displays of data in tables.

Walter Christaller, Hierarchical Patterns of Urbanization. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

An overview of Christaller's Central Place Theory, one of the classic contributions to spatial thinking in geography and regional science.

Ian McHarg, Overlay Maps and the Evaluation of Social and Environmental Costs of Land Use Change. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

McHarg's landmark book, Design With Nature, presented an environmentally conscious approach to land use, and provided a new method for multi-criteria decision making over the location of controversial facilities, e.g., highways.

Peter Gould and Waldo Tobler, An Experiment in Geo-Coding. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This CSISS Classic documents a simple experiment that captures the importance of identifying precise locations in everyday life—mailing a postcard to a friend.

Grady Clay, The Reading of the American City, 1973, CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Clay's redefinition of spatial thinking in an urban environment made use of "Wordplay" to capture the dynamic interrelationships of things and places, as acharacteristic of American cities in the mid-twentieth century.

Mark Jefferson, "Civilizing Rails," 1928. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Jefferson provided early cartographic attempts to map the world's railroad networks, invoking concepts on the advance of civilization, and progress. While these concepts have been challenged, his use of graphic elements of buffers and catchment zones link to current practices in geographic analysis and transportation research.

G. William Skinner, Marketing in Rural China, 1964–1965. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

G. William Skinner's studies into rural Chinese economic systems displayed the value of spatially explicit theories, such as central place theory, in applied situations that served to explain or even fundamentally reshape our understanding of how social and economic systems are organized and function.

Bronislaw Malinowski, Identifying the Kula Ring of the Trobriand Islanders: The Role of Ethnographic Field Observation in Pattern Recognition. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Combining ethnographic field observation with theory (functionalism), Malinowski draws linkages and meaning from spatial patterns and social practices. He established an approach to research that endures in modern cultural anthropology.

Charles Joseph Minard, Mapping Napoleon's March, 1861. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Charles Joseph Minard's Napoleon map, along with several dozen others that he published during his lifetime, set the standard for excellence in graphically depicting flows of people and goods in space.

Claudius Ptolemaeus (Ptolemy): Representation, Understanding, and Mathematical Labeling of the Spherical Earth. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Claudius Ptolemy helped bring geography to the forefront of scientific thought, his contributions influenced a broad range of disciplines to the importance of accuracy in locational measures and to the need for an equal-area perspective in evaluating spatial relationships among diverse phenomena and in making geographical comparisons.

Lotfi Zadeh, Fuzzy Logic Incorporating Real-World Vagueness. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Zadeh's paper on fuzzy sets introduced the concept of a class with unsharp boundaries and provided a new qualitative approach to the analysis of complex systems in which linguistic rather than numerical variables are employed to describe system behavior and performance.

Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay, The Social Disorganization Theory. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The social disorganization theory, developed by Shaw and McKay based on their studies of Chicago, has pointed to social causes of delinquency that seem to be located in specific geographical areas. Although the theory contributed to the understanding of delinquency, critics note that it does not explain why delinquency is concentrated in certain areas of a city.

Pablo Picasso, Cubism—A Revolution of Spatial Presentation in Artistic Expression (with parrallels in cartography), CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Cubism, method of portraying multiple dimensions onto a two dimensional canvas, is not unlike the task of the map maker in representing the earth in two dimensions. Parallels between Cubism and cartography are identified in this essay.

Ellen Churchill Semple, The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains, 1901. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Semple is recognized as a pioneer in the study of human-environment interaction. Her research also foreshadowed contemporary concerns with cultural and political ecology in the social sciences.

Leonhard Ludwig Finke, Medical Geography. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Finke (1747–1837) was a pioneer of medical geography, a medical officer, and physician in Germany who advanced ideas about environmental conditions and the need for regional and world perspectives for disease mapping.

Ernest George Ravenstein, The Laws of Migration, 1885. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In a paper to the Statistical Society in England in 1885, E. G. Ravenstein outlined a series of "laws of migration" that attempted to explain and predict migration patterns both within and between nations. The ideas derived from his work continue to inform studies of human migration more than a century later.

Torsten Hӓgerstrand, Time Geography. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Years after its introduction in the 1960s, Hägerstrand's time-geography model of society continues to inspire new ways of understanding human activity in space, and promises novel solutions for solving problems in the temporal organization and spatial development of human built environments.

Colin Loftin and Sally K. Ward, Application of Spatial Autocorrelation in Sociology. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Loftin and Ward introduce spatial autocorrelation as a way to take spatial interaction and spatial processes into consideration when social data depend on geographically defined units.

Alma and Karl Taeuber, Residential Segregation in U.S. Cities, 1965. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The Taeubers demonstrated the value of census mapping of residential and educational segregation in the United States. Their early attempt to integrate quantitative segregation research and cartographic techniques (Negroes in Cities, 1965), used the dissimilarity index to compare residential segregation in 207 U.S. cities.

Vernor C. Finch, The "Fractional Code" for Land Use Mapping, 1933. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Finch played a major role in reshaping the way spatial information was cataloged and used piror to the development of computers. This essay details his uses of a fractional code for multi-variable mapping and land classification.

Hans Kurath, Linguistic Atlas of the United States. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Kurath's primary goal was to use the Linguistic Atlas to map the evolution of American English from the relatively "pure" forms of English brought to the United States by early settlers to the regional dialects that existed in the contemporary United States. He saw language patterns on maps derived from field surveys as a living record of events related to the growth of trade and transport systems, urbanization, and population movements.

Johann-Heinrich von Thünen, Balancing Land-Use Allocation with Transport Cost. CSISS Classics

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In 1826, Johann-Heinrich von Thünen published Der isolierte Staat ("The Isolated State") that included one of the first general models to describe the land use practices radiating out from a central market location in response to transport costs. His approach became a foundation for research in regional economic geography and optimiztion modeling for understanding and predicting both agricultural and urban land-use change.

Edward T. Hall, Proxemic Theory, 1966. CSISS Classics

Mon, 6 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Hall's concept of proxemics considers human uses of space within the context of culture. Implications relate to cross-cultural communication processes and to the design of built environments.

Joel Garreau, Edge Cities and the Nine Nations of North America. CSISS Classics

Mon, 6 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Edge City and The Nine Nations of North America reflect observations by a journalist about the social and political forces transforming the geography of contemporary North America. Garreau's analysis has intrigued both academic and nonacademic audiences, especially his concepts of regionalization and ideas about the urban-regional transformation of landscapes at local and continental scales.

Linked Index to CSISS Classics Collection

Tue, 30 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

CSISS Classics provides summaries and illustrations of major contributions to spatial thinking in the social sciences. This collection focuses on research before 1980, with an attempt to capture and acknowledge the repository of spatial thinking in the social sciences, and related disciplines and professions, for the last few centuries

John Kirtland Wright, Early Quantitative Geography, 1937. CSISS Classics

Fri, 26 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Wright was an early advocate of the adoption of quantitative statistical techniques in geographic study. In 1937 he published an article demonstrating how the Lorenz Curve could be applied to geographic areas in the investigation of inequality and for regional comparisons.

Alfred Weber, Theory of the Location of Industries, 1909. CSISS Classics

Fri, 26 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

With the publication of Über den Standort der Industrie (Theory of the Location of Industries) in 1909, Alfred Weber developed a general theory of industrial location. His model took into account spatial factors for finding the optimal location and minimal cost for manufacturing plants.

Richard Meier, Communications Theory of Urban Growth, 1961. CSISS Classics

Thu, 25 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Meier's Communications Theory of Urban Growth was one of the first works to recognize the importance of communications functions and networks in the spatial development and sustenance of urban areas.

Alice Coleman, Design Disadvantagement, 1985. CSISS Classics

Wed, 24 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Coleman's Utopia on trial: Vision and reality in planned housing (1985) challenged planning concepts for public housing estates in the United Kingdom with ideas of defensible space, environmental design, and disadvantgement.

Constantinos Doxiadis, Ekistics, 1968. CSISS Classics

Wed, 24 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Doxiadis sought to establish an interdisciplinary community of scholars for research on cities and the best ways to manage them. Many of his ideas about the science of human settlement (ekistics) and urban development have been integrated into mainstream academic and popular thought.

Charles Booth, Mapping London's Poverty, 1885–1903. CSISS Classics

Tue, 23 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Between 1886 and 1903 Charles Booth produced a remarkable series of maps of London carefully coded for social class with data gathered by visiting, literally, every street in London.