Quantitative geography: representations, practices, and possibilities

Representations of quantitative geography, both by practitioners and by others, have tended to associate quantification with empiricism, positivism, and the social and academic status quo. Qualitative geography, by contrast is represented as nonempiricist or postempiricist, sensitive to complexity, contextual, and capable of empowering nonmainstream academic approaches and social groups. Attempts to engage in debate between these positions rarely challenge this dualism, reproducing the representation of quantitative geography as logical positivism, and a dualism separating quantitative and qualitative geography. I argue that this dualism can be broken down, by deconstructing the underlying representation. I discuss why this representation came into existence and how it was stabilized; how close attention to the practices of quantitative geographers, and particularly to the evolution of these practices, reveals its inadequacies; and what new possibilities for quantitative practices emerge from this deconstruction. GIS, one of the recent manifestations around which representations of quantitative geography polarize, is used as a case study to illustrate these arguments. I pay particular attention to the question of the relevance of quantitative practices for an emancipatory human geography.