Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science

CSISS Classics provides summaries and illustrations of major contributions to spatial thinking in the social sciences. This collection focuses on research before 1980, with an attempt to capture and acknowledge the repository of spatial thinking in the social sciences, and related disciplines and professions, for the last few centuries

Vance paid close attention to the geographic patterning of economic and demographic factors across places. He was especially interested in what set the American South apart from the rest of America. His research explored ecological and geographic factors in Southern exceptionalism; the spatial basis of Southern migration; and the importance of regionalism.

Finke (1747–1837) was a pioneer of medical geography, a medical officer, and physician in Germany who advanced ideas about  environmental conditions and the need for regional and world perspectives for disease mapping.

Meier's Communications Theory of Urban Growth was one of the first works to  recognize the importance of communications functions and networks in the spatial development and sustenance of urban areas.

G. William Skinner's studies into rural Chinese economic systems displayed the value of spatially explicit theories, such as central place theory, in applied situations that served to explain or even fundamentally reshape our understanding of how social and economic systems are organized and function.

Willey's looked at archaeological evidence on a regional scale. He demonstrated  this approach in Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Virú Valley, a work now recognized for changing the way that archaeologists view landscapes.

Georg Simmel developed many important insights on the social construction of space, linked to developments in urban ecology and communciation studies. These include concepts of personal space, social distance, and social boundaries.

Combining ethnographic field observation with theory (functionalism), Malinowski draws linkages and meaning from spatial patterns and social practices. He established an approach to research that endures in modern cultural anthropology.

In a paper to the Statistical Society in England in 1885, E. G. Ravenstein outlined a series of "laws of migration" that attempted to explain and predict migration patterns both within and between nations. The ideas derived from his work continue to inform studies of human migration more than a century later.

In his 1962 book Streetcar Suburbs, Sam Bass Warner, Jr., using Boston as an example, highlighed how suburbanization,  the attendant abandonment of the urban landscape, and a lack of coherent planning contributed to social class segregation and dependence on long-distance commuting.