Wonderful — you’re asking the kind of question that cuts to the soul of an entire discipline.
Geography, at its most rich and mature, is precisely the tension and interplay between space and place.
Let’s unpack it carefully:
🌍 1.
Classical Geography: About Space
In its early scientific formation (18th–19th centuries), geography focused on:
- Mapping,
- Measuring distances and coordinates,
- Analyzing landforms, climates, resources,
- Dividing regions, borders, and territories.
This is cartographic and topographic geography — it treats the Earth as abstract, measurable space.
👉 It aligns with physics, geometry, navigation, colonial expansion, and technocratic planning.
So yes:
Geography was initially very much about space — the measurable, controllable, and divided world.
🏘️ 2.
Human Geography: About Place
But in the 20th century — especially post-WWII — came a profound shift:
- Humanistic geography (e.g., Yi-Fu Tuan, Edward Relph),
- Cultural geography,
- Feminist, postcolonial, and critical geographies.
This new geography began to ask:
- How does space become meaningful?
- How do people dwell, remember, love, grieve in particular places?
- How does place shape identity and resist power?
So this branch of geography is all about place:
- Lived experience,
- Memory,
- Imagination,
- Home and exile,
- Sacredness and ruin.
👉 It aligns with phenomenology, existentialism, ethics, and aesthetics.
🧭 3. Modern Geography: The In-Between Discipline
Today, geography is a hybrid:
- It studies space as structure and system,
- But also place as experience and meaning.
Some geographers say:
“Geography is the study of spatial processes in particular places.”
That is:
- Global flows (space) meet local textures (place),
- Networks meet neighborhoods,
- Satellites meet street corners.
✍️ 4. Your Question in One Line:
Is geography about space or place?
👉 Geography begins in space, but it becomes real in place.
👉 Or: Geography is the art of finding life in the world’s coordinates.
✨ Bonus Thought
Yi-Fu Tuan — the great human geographer — once wrote:
“What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.”
Would you like a visual or poetic metaphor to capture how geography transforms space into place?
