Research Strategies for Rural Spatial Planning

Let me dissent from the apparent purpose and intent of this section, admitting that such dissent may well be founded upon ignorance. In the first place, I do not know what 'rural geography' is. Surely it is time we got over the nonsense of splitting human geography into ever-smaller pieces labelled with anachronistic adjectives from the thirties? Next, I do not think it helpful to pull out of their overall spatial context those patterns, relationships and processes that characterize the work of man in the less-densely settled parts of the earth. In Africa, such conceptual butchery seems particularly foolish, for if one thing characterizes spatial behavior on the continent today it is the increasingly interlocked nature of the African space economy. To focus exclusively upon rural problems in an Africa of the late twentieth century is ingenuous, conveying an air of condescension that must both amuse and gall our African colleagues. They, at least, know better. On occasion one can make a case for artificially excising a group of problems for study, but to tear the rural liver from the African body leaves too many jagged and spurting blood vessels. The resulting mess can only obscure our understanding of the patient's system. Such a macabre analogy is deliberate, emphasizing that we must focus instead upon those functional relationships that bind the urban nodes to their rural hinterlands in general systems of space organization. Finally, I feel increasingly uneasy as a social scientist with the notion of focusing exclusively upon Africa, for unless we are very careful-and too often it seems we are not-we may feel that characteristics unique to Africa are important instead of trivial. After all, what sort of knowledge are we after? Factual tidbits unique in the wholly trivial sense that everything is unique in time and place? Or knowledge with some cutting power that can illuminate the particular instance-whether it be in Africa or elsewhere

Archaeology · Context (archaeology) · Dissent · Environmental ethics · Geography · Ignorance · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Agriculture and Rural Development Research · History · Law · Local Economic Development and Planning · Philosophy · Rural development and sustainability

• Energy Flow and Spatial Order Mixed Hexagonal Hierarchies of Central Places

  Open Access•Michael J Woldenberg•Geographical Review•1968

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