This is a bit of an esoteric start, but: when I think of geography, I think of Heidegger. Specifically, I think of his 1954 essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” In that essay, he asks basic questions about our relationship with “nature” and the built environment, and how we find a sense of meaning for our existence in the world. He argues, in my only vaguely informed reading, that building is a way of being in the world, a way of physically embodying our temporary nature: that both cultivating (e.g., agriculture, forest management) and constructing (literally raising roofs and laying roads, etc.) helps us participate in reality. I won’t pretend I understand the essay well, and his philosophizing does not take into account the frequently brutal ecological and human reality of modern methods of cultivating and constructing – but it is a good starting point for me because it explicitly connects modes of thinking to modes of living to modes of building. Geography, to this interloper (technically I am a data scientist), is the work of knitting social processes to the landscape and vice versa. The way we use resources, the layout of cities, the practices that contribute to wildfire risk – just a few examples of constructing and cultivating – change from place to place, and I think this has to do with different modes of thinking and living.
I don’t know a field other than geography that is equipped to deal with the cultural and spatial in tandem. My experience of geography is (historically) quantitative and aesthetic – I do lots of spatial calculations in Python, I make beautiful maps, I drool over “ideal city” designs from the 1960s by the likes of Paolo Soleri. For any process, though, the sort of “facts on the ground” you can glean from a map are partial and subjective. If I want to look at lithium extraction and trade (which I do), I can construe that as a global trade network and track the volumes of the mineral getting shipped to and fro. This could be one map of lithium extraction. It could perhaps be a map of what is constructed, where.
I could instead plot point data indicating where there have been conflicts over lithium mining, color coding by whether the marginalized activists (often indigenous) were successful or not. This could be another map of lithium extraction, one that says more about how we are living, where. Of course, how we are living, where, affects what is constructed, where. Culture and power swirl at the center of commodity production and exchange, of infrastructure, of the ways commodity production and infrastructure reinforce one another (e.g., westward expansion via railroad construction to connect eastern consumers to agricultural products in the west).
I think changing modes of building requires changes in and can help facilitate changes in power and culture; these things act iteratively, dialectically on one another. Though the quantitative strain of geography might be interested mostly in illustrating what has already been built, the flavors of geography that engage with social theory – how we think and live – can provide more insight on what changes might actually be feasible to create a society more capable of “sustainability” and well-being. This is the benefit I see in geography over the other quantitative fields I straddle, like network science and complex systems: an ability to robustly, comprehensively apply both quantitative-spatial techniques and social theory. This is not to say that I think there couldn’t be productive cross-fertilization between, say, geography and network science, or geography and environmental sociology – I think the practice of siloed white-tower disciplines building ramparts against each other is deeply unproductive – but that geography as an intellectual tradition has a unique contribution to make, a unique bridge to build. Its fulcrum isn’t that different from Heidegger’s driving questions: how do groups of people co-construct reality through the influence of and by influencing the physical world we find ourselves in?
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