Imagine you write a whole textbook only to find out you were on the wrong track. Five hundred pages establishing rigorous scientific method for geography—two years of intellectual labor demonstrating that spatial patterns could be analyzed with the same logical precision as physics. And then you look up from your equations and see Baltimore burning, students protesting, urban poverty that your elegant models somehow failed to predict or explain.
David Harvey himself had acknowledged in the book’s preface that he “wrote this book mainly to educate myself,” seeking to understand why his quantitative work kept producing “unpublishable papers.” 1 THE RIGHT TO THE CITY David Harvey He thought the problem was methodological sloppiness. He thought tighter logic and better statistics would solve it.
But standing in the ruins of American cities in the late 1960s, Harvey confronted a different possibility: perhaps the methods weren’t wrong exactly, but they were asking the wrong questions. You can’t model urban crisis without modeling capital. You can’t explain spatial patterns without explaining property. You can’t understand cities without understanding who owns the land and how they acquired it.
The textbook wasn’t false—it was beside the point. All that careful work distinguishing inductive from deductive inference, all those chapters on probability theory and classification systems, and somehow he’d managed to write 500 pages about space while avoiding the one thing that actually organizes space: value.
By 1973, Harvey had become a Marxist. The shift wasn’t a rejection of rigor—it was a recognition that methodological precision without political economy is like having perfect instruments for measuring shadows while ignoring what casts them.
“Explanation in Geography” remains a landmark. But it’s a landmark of a particular kind: a monument to what you can accomplish while carefully, meticulously, rigorously avoiding the most important question.
Does the land still have something to say?
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