Humanistic geography focuses on subjective human experience and the meanings that people associate with places. It studies how individuals structure their environment and experience space. Key aspects include idealism, phenomenology, and a focus on the individual as the unit of analysis. Humanistic geography emerged in the 1970s as an alternative to quantitative spatial science approaches. It emphasizes everyday life and the cultural meanings embedded in landscapes. Major figures like Tuan, Buttimer, and Relph explored concepts like the lifeworld, insideness/outsideness, and how space is understood through place. Humanistic geography brought more attention to place and symbolic meanings over objective spatial facts.

1. Humanistic Geography
“The study of space, from the humanistic perspective, is thus the study of a people’s spatial feelings
and ideas in the stream of experience” – (Tuan, 1979: 388).
“Subjective experience, fantasy, and taste influence the character of places” – (Buttimer, 1976: 281).
Geographic Literature and History—
B. Winter

2. Presentation Structure
1. Overview of humanistic geography (Brief)
- Idealism
- Phenomenology
2. Addressing geographical ideas from readings
-Tuan
- Lifeworld
- Taken-for-granted world
- Insideness / outsideness
3. Larger concerns of the discipline via readings
4. Questions and comments

3. Humanistic Geography:
A Focus on the Individual
• Argued for a geographical focus on the individual as a decision-maker.
• Human agency
• Human creativity
• Human consciousness
• Emphasized a need for a geographical focus on the particular.
• Emerged in the 1970s as a human-based response to spatial-science and
quantitative modeling.
• Resulted in a variety of humanistic philosophies in Geography.

4. Roots of humanistic geography
From the Humanities:
- Relied on interpretations of history and literature.
- Focused on the meanings of places via a historiography of the cultural
archive of a place/location.
Cultural landscapes become a major focus.
From the Social Sciences:
- Traditionally has a major divide between deductive (positivist) and
inductive (grounded) approaches.
- Ethnography as preferred method.
Phenomenology

5. Idealism
(Guelke)
“One must discover what he believed, not why he believed it” – (Guelke, 1974 197).
“any system of ideas that man has invented, imposed, or elicited from the raw data of
sensation that makes connections with between the phenomena of the external world” –
(Guelke, 1974: 194).
Two major claims for Idealism in Humanistic Geography
1) Man’s mental activity is not “controlled by material things and processes”
2) Geographical knowledge can only be found through an individual’s subjective
experiences
Critics said (for my notes)
Omitted the consequences of social action
Difficult to be verified
Complexity of human behavior cannot guarantee a way to organize value-systems.

6. Phenomenology
(Relph, Buttimer, Tuan,)
a) Believe that all knowledge comes from how the world is experienced and is
not independent of that world.
b) Researchers are not to include personal ideas when trying to understand a
subject’s experiences and ideas.
c) Works at the individual level, but searches for common elements.
Major aims:
Interpretive study of human experience
Everyday life
Subject may not be aware of specific aspects of the experience
Subjectivity is focus of study
How people structure their environment (opposite of spatial science)

7. Addressing Geographical Ideas
from Readings
• Y.F.Tuan humanities human/nature
relations
• “Humanistic studies contribute…towards self-consciousness, towards
man’s increasing awareness of the sources of his knowledge” – (Tuan, p.
388)
• History has a limited role???
• Negotiating life/survival; experience through frustration
• “physiological conditions as material arrangements”
• The senses “give us our characteristic sense of space” (p. 390)(398-9)
• Objective reality “distinct from the one that our needs and imagination
call into being” – (p.390). (ex. Race track P. 402)

8. The Lifeworld
Buttimer intentionality “culturally defined spatio-temporal setting”
• “Many geographers have reflected on the experiential meaning of earth
occupance, although not the act of consciousness itself” – (Buttimer, 1976:
281).
• Sees the geographical “world” as a group of values and goods, not an
amalgam of “facts and affairs” – (p.281).
• The world is largely formed from the past “with a shared horizon” despite
individuals construing that horizon in a “uniquely personal way” – (p.281).
• Combines imaginative aspects of being with the external world.
• Differs from Tuan because “lifeworld” has emphasis on everyday life??

9. Taken-for-granted world
• Ley importance of everyday life “mundane experience”
• Attempted to show a “social reality” rather than an abstract scientific one.
• Focus on intersubjective meanings that form lifeworlds.
• “to locate the discussion of social geography within its philosophical
context” (p.503)

10. Insideness and Outsideness
(Edward Relph)
• Place and Placelessness (1976)
• Experiences have varying intensities
• Space is heterogeneous
• Our understanding of space comes from the places we inhabit
• Insideness and outsideness is core structure of understanding place
• Different places take on different identities for different individuals

11. Larger concerns of the discipline via
the readings
• Space v. place: Humanists brought place into a
more important role.
• Subjectivity (individual)/ objectivity
• Symbolic interactionism
• Humanistic geography a mere criticism of
spatial science? Or more?

12. Questions/ comments?