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Logics and legacies of positivist urban

geography
David Wilson

Department of Geography and Information Science, University

of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Geography Davenport Hall 607 S.
Matthews, M/C 150, Urbana, IL 61801, USA
Published online: 20 Jun 2014.

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To cite this article: David Wilson (2014) Logics and legacies of positivist urban geography, Urban
Geography, 35:5, 633-635, DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2014.910326
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2014.910326

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Urban Geography, 2014

Vol. 35, No. 5, 633635, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2014.910326

INTRODUCTION
Logics and legacies of positivist urban geography
David Wilson*

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Department of Geography and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,

Geography Davenport Hall 607 S. Matthews, M/C 150, Urbana, IL 61801, USA

Logical positivism, widely understood as a distinctive stock of methods and procedures

that fuse quantitative practices with principles of scientific vision, rigor, and endeavor, has
both excited and haunted urban geographers for decades. While numerous streams of
positivism became influential across many disciplines in the twentieth century, in the
1960s a dominant form of methodological positivism achieved hegemony in urban studies
and urban geography, superseding a moribund ecological tradition and mobilizing a
neoclassical gaze on urban form and process (Lake, 1983). A bold new recipe was offered
for a new kind of urban analysisemphasizing the hallowed tradition of science implemented through mathematics and precision-calibrated models (Batty, 2008). Suddenly,
cities became the prime terrains in which people and transportation systems were numericalized, in order to guide the search for universal scientific principles. With the ascendance of mathematical models and empirical statistical analyses of city systems, bid-rent
curves, hedonic pricing equations, and other neoclassical analytical maneuvers, The City
(Park, Burgess, & McKenzie, 1925) became a scientific object.
But dominant disciplinary codifications are always unstable and contested, and this
was no exception. It was not long before this gazes supposed objectivity, neutrality, and
modes of explanation were challenged. A powerful structuralism, emerging in tandem
with a revitalized hermeneutic focus, assaulted this positivist hegemony from two sides
(Feagin, 1998). Structuralist Marxism, taking aim and informed particularly by the
writings of Harvey (1973) and Harvey and Chatterjee (1974), initially served up a
Marxist science to supplant a spatial science which would soon structurate and more
profoundly recognize human prowess. Grievances centered on the ways positivism
reduced a complex world to a Cartesian geometry, its failure to examine economic
structures rooted in an unstable capitalist city and society, and claims of objectivity. At
the same time, the reinvigoration of the city as a lived world in the 1970s represented an
assault on the positivist urban project (see Burawoy, 1991). The positivist project, in this
critique, lacked any serious engagement with symbolic content, emotive realities, and
human complexity. Cities were supposedly reduced to arid, vapid terrains for human life
as frozen, inert geometries; the analytical pursuit of abstract generalizations crowded out
humans and humanity.
This array of essays deepens the critical engagement with this positivism. It testifies to
a still unresolved and contentious rendering of cities as ideal sites for this scientific gaze.
At issue is a disciplinary codification with roots in mystified political designs, select usage
of understandings to ground it, a tenuous disciplines hunt for legitimacy, and a
*Email: dwilson2@illinois.edu
2014 Taylor & Francis

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634

D. Wilson

disciplines implicit aspiration to support the social relations and structures of a capitalist
economy. The trigger to this contentiousness? Such codifications forever impose a mix of
blindness and insight for all to digest and respond to (Skinner, 1985). Thus, one ontology,
one politics, one methodological package, and one delimiting of disciplinary boundaries
are forever privileged over othersgiving rise to a sense of both strengths and limitations
in vision. Hegemonic positivisms embrace of these movesset in a past and present
context of deeply politicized understandings at the scale of city, region, and world
transformationsleft it deeply vulnerable to challenges and refutations.
The first essay, by Eric Sheppard, powerfully argues that there has never been a
coherent positivism in urban studies. He chronicles three urban myths about this
positivist application to urban studies: there once was a stable, conservative positivist
research program in urban inquiry; that quantitative urban research must be positivist and
that post-positivist, critical urban studies have no space for quantitative scholarship.
Sheppards myth-busting ultimately portrays positivism in urban studies as a selective,
expedient, and unstable conceptual appropriation whose content itself has been misunderstood and caricatured by critics.
The second essay, by Audrey Kobayashi, takes aim at this history, deftly narrating the
ways a profoundly, political racist conception of neoclassical thought became rooted in
positivist urban geography. Kobayashis analysis reveals the operations of a knowledge
production machine that produces particular kinds of classed and racialized forms of
understanding. Urban geography, ever evolving but always intertwined with prevailing
social norms and social assertions, unmistakably reflects the prejudices and biases of its
times; all the while, claims of scientific neutrality and objectivity provide cover.
Bob Lake and Elvin Wyly carry this critique into the present. Lake, our third
essayist, keenly scrutinizes this positivist debate past and present and uses it to reveal
the need to produce moral knowledge across the social sciences. Lake reveals a debate
around this positivism that would make us believe the challenge is to become better
methodologists. For Lake, new moral inquiry informed by a pragmatist frame would
productively shift discussion in the social sciences from technical issues to moral
questions, revealing the obscured underpinnings of hegemonic positivisms very existenceand its alternatives. Wyly, our fourth essayist, provides an important interpretation of this positivisms current evolving character. He provocatively interprets current
economic and business trends as signs of a new round of an aggressive re-fashioning of
a caricatured positivism in neoliberal times. Positivism, identified as a once-human
emancipatory project of Auguste Comte, is argued to be a long-term distorted and
corrupted gaze by the forces of a capitalist space economys politics. Wylys updated
positivism, dragged through the morass of a blinkering neoliberalism, is now a more
deeply tainted tool kit and vision.
Yet this dominant conception of positivism in urban geography remains alive and well
in this discipline (Batty, 2008, 2013). Indeed, a recent review in Science of this vision, set
in a review of Battys (2013) latest book The Science of Cities, proclaims it a visionary
perspective. Clearly, this vision continues to resonate with its offer of scientific rigor, use
of powerful statistical procedures, and pursuit of universal principles. Proclamations of its
eclipse have been premature. But these essays are important because they deepen the
critique of this vision in urban studies, adding new insight into how it emerged, how it
evolves, and what it represents. These essays are thus vital interrogations for current and
future practitioners to digest as they seek the best future for urban studies. It is in the spirit
of this interrogation that I and we invite all to dig into these provocative essays, to enjoy,
and to come to their own judgments.

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635

Acknowledgements
I thank Bob Lake and Elvin Wyly for their extremely helpful comments on the manuscript.

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