ABSTRACT
Introduction At the heart of Human Geography lie questions about the relationship between social characteristics and places. How do the differences between groups and individuals within society map on to, reflect and reinforce spatial categories? Do the qualities of different places affect how society uses, enjoys and even accesses those places? And perhaps more challengingly – why do some social characteristics seem to have a much stronger relationship with place than others? Geographers have recognized the relevance of these questions across a range of scales from the global to the local and paying attention to them has shaped not only the content of what we study as Human Geographers but also the methodologies through which we conduct our research. While we may have long agreed that Human Geography is about this central relationship between space and place, how we have chosen to study it has been the subject of much more variation and debate.
In this chapter I will chart the development of Human Geographers’ thinking on the relationship between society and space within the discipline, identifying three main ‘phases’ in the progression from spatial determination to the co-construction of people and place. The
