Page "Social geography" Paragraph 1

The different conceptions of social geography have also been overlapping with other sub-fields of geography and, to a lesser extent, sociology.

When the term emerged within the Anglo-American tradition during the 1960s, it was basically applied as a synonym for the search for patterns in the distribution of social groups, thus being closely connected to urban geography and urban sociology.

In the 1970s, the focus of debate within American human geography lay on political economic processes ( though there also was a considerable number of accounts for a phenomenological perspective on social geography ), while in the 1990s, geographical thought was heavily influenced by the " cultural turn ".

Both times, as Neil Smith noted, these approaches " claimed authority over the ' social '".

In the American tradition, the concept of cultural geography has a much more distinguished history than social geography, and encompasses research areas that would be conceptualized as " social " elsewhere.

In contrast, within some continental European traditions, social geography was and still is considered an approach to human geography rather than a sub-discipline, or even as identical to human geography in general.