Social geography

[2] In 1968, Anne Buttimer noted that "[w]ith some notable exceptions, (...) social geography can be considered a field created and cultivated by a number of individual scholars rather than an academic tradition built up within particular schools".

In fact, the first proven occurrence of the term derives from a review of Reclus' Nouvelle géographie universelle from 1884, written by Paul de Rousiers, a member of the Le Play School.

The first person to employ the term as part of a publication's title was Edmond Demolins, another member of the Le Play School, whose article Géographie sociale de la France was published in 1896 and 1897.

[28] Another pre-war concept that combined elements of sociology and geography was the one established by Dutch sociologist Sebald Rudolf Steinmetz and his Amsterdam School of Sociography.

[37][38] Nonetheless, Albert Demangeon paved the way for a number of more systematic conceptualizations of the field with his (posthumously published) notion[39] that social groups ought to be within the center of human geographical analysis.

Sorre developed a schema of society related to the ecological idea of habitat, which was applied to an urban context by the sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe.

[47] For the Dutch geographer Christiaan van Paassen [nl], the world consisted of socio-spatial entities of different scales formed by what he referred to as a "syn-ecological complex",[48] an idea influenced by existentialism.

His awareness of the temporal dimension of social life would lead to the formation of time geography through the works of Torsten Hägerstrand and Sven Godlund.