1

This Academia entry consists of two related publications in the early 1980s about
phenomenology, one a single page and the other twelve page and over 6000 words, both of
which specifically address its importance for human geography.

The first, with the title "Edward Relph's Response," is from the Journal of Environmental
Psychology, 1983, Vol 3, No 2, p.201. It is a reply to a comment by Judith Sixsmith in J. Env.
Psych, Vol 3, No 1, pp. 109-111 about an earlier article by David Seamon, "The
Phenomenological Contribution to Environmental Psychology" J. Env. Psych, 1982, Vol 2 No 2,
119-140, in which she charged David Seamon with offering a confused interpretation of
existential phenomenology, also criticized my approach for generalizing my own experience of
place to the human situation, and then proposed that phenomenology is a useful methodological
addition to conventional empirical methods of psychology. Both David Seamon and I responded
that it, in effect, it was her interpretation that was confused because it failed to recognize that
phenomenology offers a fundamentally different approach to research about social and human
problems.

This "Response" provides a concise summary of my interpretation of phenomenology that is

presented at length in the second publication, titled simply "Phenomenology", which was
published as Chapter 5 in Milton E. Harvey and Brian Holly (ed) Themes in Geographical
Thought (Croom Helm) 1981(republished as a Routledge Revival in 2015.) The version here
differs in a few ways from the published one because it is based on the original, pre-computer era
manuscript that I had submitted to the publisher, which is the only version I have in my
possession. I was unaware of the republished version when I retyped it to make this digital
version, and in the act of retyping I updated some of the language, and modified a few
paragraphs to clarify what I was trying to express. These changes do not, I think, change the
overall argument, which I still broadly agree with even though I find its tone rather too strident
for my current liking.

Some of the ideas in "Phenomenology" are elaborated in two other items posted on Academia -
"Seeing Thinking and Describing Landscapes" (1984), and "Responsive Methods, Geographical
Imagination and the Study of Landscapes" (1989).
2
 3

Phenomenology
(Chapter 5 in M. Harvey and B. Holly (eds) 1981 Themes in Geographic Thought, London: Croom Helm)

Edward C. Relph
University of Toronto, Scarborough

"Positivism...decapitates philosophy" declared Edmund Husserl (1970, p.9), the originator of

phenomenology, and he meant that in its single-minded addiction to facts positivism omits all the
higher and broader questions of life. In the first years of the twentieth century Husserl reacted
against then fashionable attempt to reduce philosophy to a set of psychological generalizations.
He argued that philosophy was not a factual science, was not grounded in factual sciences and
could not use the methods of factual science, and he began to formulate a way of thinking about
philosophical questions that did not make assumptions about what could be studied and how, but
which was responsive to all phenomena of human experience.

The first accounts of this method of phenomenology were directed to issues of academic
philosophy, but as his thinking developed Husserl came to realize, as perhaps William Blake,
John Ruskin, Søren Kierkegaard and others had before him, that the reductive and decapitating
methods of positivistic thinking, which accept as true only that which can be objectively
established, had pervaded many aspects of human experience for which they were inappropriate.
It seemed that belief in art, religion and experience was being actively undermined. "Merely fact
minded sciences make merely fact minded people" Husserl exclaimed in his last work, The
Crisis of the European Sciences (1970, p.6), because when the methods of skepticism and
detachment that have proven so successful in natural science are applied to human concerns they
reduce our lives to mere facts or accidents of nature. In contrast, phenomenology revives issues
of ethics, knowledge and being that have been the traditional concerns of philosophers, and it
provides a means of exploring all facets of human experience without rendering them devoid of
meaning.

By the time of Husserl's death in 1938 phenomenology had achieved acceptance not only in
philosophy, but in anthropology, sociology and psychology, and it had influenced the work of
poets, artists and novelists. Acceptance has since grown to the point where phenomenology is an
approach adopted in most social sciences. In geography, however, the impact of this approach
has been limited to just a handful of methodological statements and substantive investigations,
and it is clear that among geographers there is little familiarity with phenomenology. Indeed,
because of the difficult and unusual language used in some methodological papers, there is
probably much confusion about it. I certainly do not wish to exacerbate this confusion by writing
yet another account of the technicalities of phenomenology. My aim here is to provide a
relatively non-technical circumscription of this approach, as well as to survey phenomenological
writings by geographers. In doing this I am sure I will fail to consider concepts and authors other
think to be essential, and I can only plead that I am concerned less with precise assessment than
 4

with giving a sense of the insights that phenomenology has to offer as a way of thinking
geographically.

Initial Circumscriptions

For those inclined to dismiss phenomenology as a non-rigorous and overly introspective method
I must affirm at the outset that it is a coherent philosophical position from which to address the
world. It acknowledges its antecedents and relations to other philosophical traditions, offers
critiques of their arguments and provides it own alternative arguments. It is not simply a
methodological technique somehow comparable to mental mapping or multivariate analysis, as
some commentaries suggest. The breadth and depth of phenomenology are substantial and
radical. They can be well illustrated by drawing a contrast with the philosophy of science.

The philosophy of science, as apparent in scientific method, involves a way of thinking that
constitutes itself as a way of doing. I mean by this that it tells us how to organize concepts and
facts through experiments and tests that provide explicit results. To verify hypotheses it is
necessary to separate ourselves from structures and processes of matter or society, to treat them
as external to ourselves, and to exercise control over the subject matter, whether atoms, rats in
mazes, or people spatially distributed. Indeed, without such control experiments cannot be
replicated and hence must be scientifically invalid. Furthermore, because of its detachment this
way of thinking is usually conceived of as non-social and non-political, that is as value-free.
Probably everyone knows that this is a pretense, that values and ideologies cannot be held in
abeyance, but the game of detachment in research is played even as science works through
missiles, television sets, automobiles and city planning to change our lives in countless ways.

If scientific method is a way of thinking that realizes itself as a way of doing, phenomenology is
a way of thinking that reveals itself as a way of being. Rather than treating the world as somehow
independent of us, it requires that we reflect on our own consciousness of things and explore the
various manifestation of them in our experiences. Subjective encounter, the very attitude that is
disposed of in scientific method, is taken to be fundamental in phenomenology, for it is only
through my consciousness or experience of things that I can possibly know them. In other words,
phenomenology requires that I must think about how I experience the world; my dispassionate
assessments, frustrations, imaginings and emotional outpourings are all considered to be facts of
experience, and no particular fragment of my experience is arrogated into some special status. In
fact, quite the opposite is required - I have to learn not to see objective measurable facts as
necessarily more important that my own experience.

To consider what this means consider the phenomenon of time. From a scientific perspective
time is unidirectional, a constant frame of reference, and our lives happen in the context of, yet
apart from, time. Phenomenologically, however, time is part of our lives; it is variable and
multi-directional for we have memories and moments of prescience, there are days that hang
heavily and weeks that fly past. A phenomenological study begins with such experiences and
attempts to sort them out by identifying varieties of time experience and patterns within them.
 5

The consequences of exploring our own experiences can be profound. Husserl (1970, p. 137)
wrote: "...the total phenomenological attitude is destined to effect a complete personal
transformation comparable in the beginning to a religious conversion." For geographers imbued
with impersonal methods based on statistical surveys this may seem mystical and heady stuff,
though for anyone with a passionate commitment to their work it should not be difficult to grasp.
It means that while phenomenology is a formal method of thinking and seeing, it also leads to
insights that once attained cannot be easily dismissed and which might change our attitudes to
the world and existence.

If phenomenology can effect such profound changes in the outlook of individuals it follows that
it could have tremendous social and political consequences. It is, however, not clear what form
these might take because they have never been realized. Phenomenology remains a peripheral
way of thinking in a society governed by science and technology.

Varieties of Phenomenology

Since phenomenology was conceived as an approach to philosophical problems it is to be

expected that much phenomenological discussion has been about issues in academic philosophy.
Much of this discussion is expressed in technical and obscure language. From a strictly
philosophical perspective such language is essential to differentiate conceptual nuances, but for
the outsider it can be difficult to penetrate - its inuendoes and subtleties have to be learned much
as one has to learn the rules of calculus. Rather than plunging directly into the works of Husserl
or Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty (probably the three leading phenomenological philosophers) a
neophyte is better advised to start with the writings of some of their interpreters, such as John
Wild (1963), Don Ihde (1977), Maurice Natanson (1963) or Stewart and Mickunas (1974).

As a philosophical approach phenomenology is a radical way of examining the phenomena of

our consciousness or experience (the two words are virtually interchangeable in
phenomenology). For geographers methods mostly involve actions such as making maps or
analyzing data, but the methodological stock in trade of philosophers is thought and discourse -
how to think logically, dialectically and so on. Phenomenology is often said to be "a
presuppositionless return to the things themselves," a phrase that refers to how we are to think
about how we experience the myriad things of the world. This is radical because it aims to get
back to the roots of experience by attempting to set aside concepts and abstractions we have
acquired in our formal education. Rather than analyzing or elaborating the opinions of
philosophers or other geographers, we should attempt to recapture a sense of wonder about the
world we directly encounter in our lives, and then use that as the basis for understanding.
Experiences involved in those encounters are as diverse as life itself, so it follows that the subject
matter of phenomenology spans the entire realm of human experience. In philosophy, however,
phenomenology has been used mostly as a method to examine phenomena of philosophical
interest, such as existence, time, religious encounters, modes of thinking, and being.

A second type of phenomenology is used in academic disciplines other than philosophy. In these
phenomenology has usually been employed in a less radical manner, for rather than being taken
as a complete methodological reorientation it is regarded as one methodological perspective
 6

among alternatives, for instance positivism, structuralism and marxism that can provide a basis
for studying social issues. There are, of course, many topics that cannot or need not be examined
phenomenologically, such as foreign aid transfers, commuting patterns, or the history of cities.
But because phenomenology accepts the complexities and meanings of human experience it is
especially appropriate for studying how individuals relate to each other or to their environments,
for considering the needs and satisfactions of people, or for investigating any topic that touches
on issues of existence.

Possibly the strongest statement for phenomenology as an academic method is that formulated
by Alfred Schütz (1962), a German sociologist who wrote during the 1930s, 40s and 50s. He
argued, and indeed demonstrated in his own writings, that phenomenology is empirical because
it is based on observation; it is systematic because it is concerned with the organization of the
phenomena of experience; and it is rigorous because it is reflexive, that is, it subjects its own
procedures to critical appraisal. Indeed, Schütz suggested that by using phenomenological
methods it is possible to formulate propositions that can be tested and verified. This is probably
leaning too heavily on the language of science for many phenomenologists, and regardless of
whether phenomenological observations are verifiable the difference from scientific method
always remains - phenomenology is directed to the acceptance and full appreciation of the facts
of experience, not their reduction into elegantly simple explanations.

A third type of phenomenology is suggested in Husserl's remark that the total phenomenological
attitude is tantamount to religious conversion. Much of the writing by phenomenologists is not
just scholarly and academic reflection about existence, but a call to a way of living. Martin
Heidegger's writing, although difficult to grasp, has been the most influential contribution to this
"lived" or existential phenomenology which recognizes that the "most real world" we live in that
of fellow human beings and commonplace objects. His early work was a complex study of the
phenomenology of being, but his later investigations became increasingly poetic and spiritual as
he grappled with the implications of his radical insights into the nature of human existence
(Heidegger, 1971). His work has been an especially important source of inspiration for
theologians who have attempted to show that phenomenological methods of thinking and seeing
can demystify religion and confirm it as a part of immediate human experience.

Their efforts recall the comment by John Ruskin, the nineteenth century critic of art and society,
that: "To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion - all in one" (Ruskin, 1905). Perhaps the
simplest characterization of existential phenomenology is that is an attempt to see clearly. If we
can achieve this it is bound to change our attitudes to our own existence, to other people and to
the world around us. It will make us more aware of the meanings of our lives, more critical of
theories and ideologies that restrict the quality and variety of existence. And, to use of term of
Heidegger's, it will make us more inclined to "spare", that is to avoid imposing our ideas and will
on things or environments or other people (Heidegger, 1971). This attitude of sparing, or
"touching the least", requires that we develop a sense of caring and responsibility for things,
places and people that allows them to be themselves with the minimum interference from us.
This is, I think, the essence of Heidegger's existential phenomenology, and if we can accept it
and put it into practice rather merely talking about it or hypocritically acting otherwise, it must
have profound implications for the manner of our living.
 7

Phenomenological Method - The Things Themselves

Phenomenology discloses and elucidates what we experience and how we experience it. This
requires probing behind what we take for granted in everyday living and thinking. There are
many styles of doing this and it is misleading to speak of phenomenological method as a rigid set
of procedures. Nevertheless, some authors have identified key phases in this method, and one,
Don Ihde (1977) has gone so far as to suggest a sequence of procedures that can be followed in
order to break down habits of thinking and to develop phenomenological insights. These are,
however, never more than rough guidelines for beginning to think and see phenomenologically,
and I think it will be less misleading if I discuss phenomenological method without reference to
them but instead explore the crucial notion of "the things themselves" to which phenomenology
aims to return.

Our experiences of things, whether elusive or substantial, transitory or enduring, are the facts
that phenomenology explores and unfolds. This statement needs elucidation, so let me offer an
illustration. A few years ago William Kennedy was interviewing the novelist Gabriel García
Márquez in Barcelona (Kennedy, 1977, pp. 57-58). They were walking in the city centre when
Kennedy saw a trolley car cross the street they were on about three blocks away. It crossed from
right to left, was visible for only a few seconds, but he could see that it was yellow and old-
fashioned. No one else noticed it. Now what was interesting is that there had been no yellow
trolleys in Barcelona for some time, the last one had been buried in formal ceremony two years
earlier. Kennedy writes: "What had I seen? I have no idea. 'To me,' García said, 'this is
completely natural.'" A scientific investigation of this experience might look for a yellow truck
that had crossed the street, or perhaps explain it away as some sort of hallucination, and so deny
that the experience was real. On the other hand, a phenomenological account would accept the
experience just as it had happened, as García did, and consider its various implications and
subtleties, its context and significance. The phenomenological perspective is that we can only
know things - whether enigmatic trolleys, buildings, other people, silence, sorrow or elation -
through our experiences of them, and those experiences nothing should be considered
comprehensively, and nothing arbitrarily dismissed.

Ihde (1977, p.14) has suggested that phenomenology, considered as the investigation and
description of the world as we experience it directly, immediately and without presuppositions, is
probably best understood by doing it. In other words, no amount of writing by me can convey
adequately both the challenges and insights that it offers. However, numerous artists and writers
have attempted to something something similar, to break down ingrained ways of seeing and
thinking and try to see things as though for the first time, with as little prejudice and the fewest
possible assumptions about them. Their comments can provide hints about what phenomenology
involves. When Goethe (1970) undertook a journey to Italy in the 1780s he deliberately
undertook "to see with clear fresh eyes" and to abandon his habits of thinking. The sculptor
Alberto Giacometti (1964) described his way of experiencing the world as one of constant
wonder and surprise. Such a suspension of entrenched ways of looking at things may sound
naively simple, but it is likely to involve considerable tension as cherished convictions are
overthrown. For example, E.F. Schumacher (1977) wrote in A Guide for the Perplexed:
 8

"There is nothing more difficult that to become aware of the presuppositions of one's
own thought. Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see.
Every thought can be scrutinized except the thought by which we scrutinize. A special
effort, an effort of self-awareness, is needed: that almost impossible feat of thought
recoiling upon itself - almost impossible, but not quite."

Such deliberate efforts for self-awareness demonstrate that phenomenology is not merely a form
of introspection, that what is involved is not a casual consideration of how I feel about something
but a systematic reflection on the character of experiences I have. Furthermore, these experiences
are not locked up within individuals. They are intersubjective, which is to say shared with others,
because, as Doris Lessing (1973, pp.13-14) has argued: "nothing is personal in the sense that it is
uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others since your problems,
pains, pleasures, emotions, and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas, can't be yours
alone...Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience
is what everyone shares."

There have been many discussions of further stages of phenomenological method - how to
maintain awareness, how to identify order and structure and meaning in the chiaroscuro of
experiences, and so on. These are dependent on the return to things themselves and the reflective
self-awareness this involves, and, as I have already indicated, they involve no firm set of
strategies. Suffice it to say that in practice a phenomenological investigation should always be
responsive to the phenomenon of experience being investigated and provide an account or
interpretation that enhances appreciation and understanding of that phenomenon. Like any
interpretation this can always be revised and improved by making more careful observations,
reflecting more thoroughly, adducing evidence from other studies, and otherwise adding to the
depth and breadth of insights. Rather than identifying some underlying cause, the overall aim is
to explicate and convey the complexity and diversity of ways the phenomenon is experienced.

Geography and Phenomenology

In the numerous geographical periodicals and books published since 1970 there are, to my
knowledge, just eight papers that deal explicitly with the relations between geography and
phenomenology, and four books that use phenomenological approaches to examine geographical
phenomena. Most of the papers are about methodology and make similar arguments to those I
have made here so there is little to be gained by reviewing them in detail. However, it will be
helpful to outline their genealogy before assessing the substantive phenomenological
contributions because the papers are chiefly concerned with academic phenomenology while the
books are in the rather different tradition of existential phenomenology.

The genealogy of the methodological papers is, I think, as follows. Husserl formulated the
phenomenological approach that countered scientism in philosophy, and this was adapted for the
study of social issues by Alfred Schütz. Mercer and Powell (1972), in their examination of
alternative approaches to positivism that might be relevant for geography, took the
phenomenological work of Schütz as a possible basis for an approach in human geography that
would be open to subjectivity and meaning. Their proposal appears to have influence Walmsley's
 9

(1974) rather more specific suggestion that phenomenology might be especially useful for
historical and behavioral research in geography. Entrikin (1977), in a review of writing by
geographers that he considered to be humanist, came to the conclusion, in contrast to Mercer and
Powell, that phenomenology does not constitute a significant alternative to scientific approaches
in geography though it could have a role as a way of criticizing those approaches.

In a paper on negativism and historical geography, Billinge (1977) returned to the writings of
Husserl and the proposal of Mercer and Powell, assessed phenomenological statements by
geographers and concluded that there is little in them that is "phenomenological at its hardest
core." He implied that soft-core phenomenology has little to offer "historico-geographical" work.
Buttimer (1976) and Ley (1977), however, in their considerations of the relevance of
phenomenological approaches for social geography were impressed by the philosophy of Husserl
and the sociology of Schütz. They both concluded that phenomenology would lead to broader
and more sensitive social geographies in which elements of scientific enquiry could be combined
with a humanist and phenomenological orientation.

Derek Gregory in Ideology, Science and Human Geography (1978) built on the papers by
Entrikin, Billinge and Buttimer and drew directly on Husserl and Schütz to make a complex case
for the role of phenomenology within a "critical theoretical geography." The latter was a notion
of geography as a scientific discipline that also recognizes the ideological bases of knowledge
and therefore requires its practitioners to be self-critical and aware of the foundations of the
explanations they make. The role of phenomenology in this comes from its reflexivity or
selfconsciousness in making interpretations. Gregory stresses reflexivity within the context of
committed explanations of geographical structures and processes, that is, explanations that
demonstrate social and political commitment. The consequence is that his account of
phenomenology emphasizes method rather than dwelling on the phenomena of experience and
their meanings.

This elliptical summary of publications by geographers suggests, ever to a partisan commentator

like me, a certain confusion and inclination to accommodate phenomenology to the prevailing
ethos of science. The sequence of arguments seems to have been something like this:
Phenomenology is a good alternative to scientific methods; at least, it looks useful for some
types of geography; well, it could be a valuable form of criticism; perhaps it can be used to
complement the work of scientific geographers from a humanist perspective; ah yes!
phenomenology provides some significant qualification within a committed scientific approach
to geography. These authors appear to be seeking a more sensitive and humanistic approach for
human geography, but they also want to apply it as an addition to ways for investigating
conventional sorts of geographical problems.

I think their interpretations are insufficiently radical. Phenomenology is indeed a form of

criticism, but of the foundations of scientistic thinking. Instead of a way of worrying out details
of scientific method, it redefines subject areas and topics. Furthermore, it is the case that to date
there have been no substantive studies in geography using the sort of academic
phenomenological method they describe, and I get the impression that in all the writings about
how to do phenomenology but never actually applying it, the arguments have quietly been
absorbed by the conventional wisdoms of scientific geography.
 10

A more radical type of phenomenological geography, and one that has led to substantive
investigations of geographical phenomena, corresponds with lived or existential phenomenology
in which methodological concerns are explicit rather than implicit. In his paper on "Geography,
Phenomenology and the Study of Human Nature," Yi-Fu Tuan (1971) explores some of the
relationships between Heidegger's version of phenomenology and geography, especially the
notion of "man-in-the-world," that is, the individual as implicated in and responding to the places
and landscapes encountered in everyday life. Tuan argues that a phenomenological perspective
can make us more aware of our spatial and geographical experiences, such as those of "home"
and "journey," and more sensitive to the meanings of our relationships with environments. From
this we can begin to understand phenomenology not as a method to be applied to existing
geographical topics but instead as a perspective that restructures subject matter and leads to
discussions of such things as the relations between body asymmetry and spatial asymmetry, or
egocentric and ethnocentric space. These are topics that are perhaps new and strange for
geographers as academics yet should be familiar to them through their everyday encounters with
the geographical life-world.

The Geographical Life-World and Phenomenological Geographies

Phenomenology has to do with beginnings, with phenomena as they are first lived and
experienced, and which are only subsequently formulated as concepts. Geography as formal
body of knowledge presupposes our geographical experiences of the world; in other words,
geography as a discipline has an experiential or phenomenological foundation (Relph, 1976a).
Concepts of space, landscape, city, region, have meaning for us because we can refer them to our
direct experience of these phenomena. We live in a world of buildings, streets, sunshine and
rainfall, and other people with all their sufferings and joys, and we know intersubjectively the
meanings of these things, events and emotions. This pre-intellectual world, or life-world, we
experience not as a set of objects somehow apart from us and fixed in time and space, but as
meaningful things and dynamic relations. That is to say, from the outset landscapes, places, and
the people involved in them all matter to us to greater and lesser extents, and in diverse ways we
are concerned about them and we care for them.

The geographical life-world is a part of the total life-world, not clearly separable of course but
nevertheless identifiable to us through a set of specific interests that has to do with places and
environments rather than other individuals or plants or planets or whatever. It is both social and
natural, consisting of the pedestrians and buildings we notice when driving along a street, the
scenery we see when hiking, clouds, the litter in the gutter, trees in blossom, and indeed
everything we see and sense out of doors. It is the world experienced as an ever-present,
surrounding backdrop, the unavoidable context of our lives that affects our activities and intrudes
into our thoughts in countless different ways.

Our experiences of the geographical life-world have been investigated by Eric Dardel (1952). He
uses the term géographicité, a word that can be translated as 'geographicality,' to describe our
pre-reflective and preconceptual experiences of space, place and landscape. Geographicality
binds people to their surroundings, manifesting itself in sense of place and sensitivity to
 11

landscape. All of us have to participate in some way the creation, maintenance and destruction of
landscapes in order to stay alive; in such activities and in admiring sunsets or feeling
overwhelmed by the intensity of a city's downtown, geographicality is apparent. Dardel (1952, p.
47) wrote: "Geographical reality demands an involvement of the individual though emotions,
body, habits, that is so total that we come to forget it just as we forget our own physiological
lives." It is taken for granted, accepted, and it is always specific - our geographical experiences
are always of this street, the valley, this place.

All substantive phenomenological investigations by geographers have been either of phenomena

of the geographical life-world or of particular aspects of the experiences of geographicality. In
Topophilia Yi-fu Tuan (1974) examined the variety of pleasant experiences of landscapes and
place. Topophilia, which strictly means love of place, is a home-directed sentiment, one that is
usually comfortable and relaxing but can also involve ecstatic and uplifting experiences of
natural or man-made settings. Tuan's study of topophilia was implicitly rather than explicitly
phenomenological. By this I mean that his attention to the range and meanings of topophilic
experience are clearly phenomenologically inspired yet he nowhere discussed his approach. I
think this is so for two reasons. One is that the subject matter of environmental experience and
the phenomenological method by which he investigated it are mutually sympathetic and
therefore merge into each other. The other may be that Tuan did not want to be tied by
methodological restrictions because he considered an accuracy of principle and style to be more
important than rigid adherence to methodological rules. His approach was to draw carefully on
diverse accounts of a particular type of environmental experience and to offer a coherent
interpretation of these. Rather than examining his own experiences directly he chose to approach
them indirectly through the sensitivities of others, a strategy that demonstrates clearly the
intersubjective nature of geographicality.

A different approach to experiences of the life-world was used by David Seamon (1977) in his
investigation of movement, rest, and encounter. His interpretations are based on reports of daily
environmental experiences he solicited from a number of individuals. The reports were generated
through group discussions of topics such as the focal places in the participants' lives, what they
noticed in particular environments, how they decided on destinations for trips, whether they
always followed the same route to work, what parts of environments they ignored, what
manifestations of spring they noticed and how they reacted to them. It is scarcely possible to do
justice to this approach here, but it should be noted that the participants were given very little
direction and were actively involved in a process of increasing their self-awareness of
environmental experiences; they were not treated as convenient sources of information. The
reports provided a wealth of specific, individual reflections about environmental encounters that
Seamon structured around three themes: movement, especially its habitual character whether
crossing a room or crossing a city; rest, which refers to the significance of belonging somewhere,
having a place where we can regenerate our energy; encounters, which are those situations of
heightened consciousness when we are particularly aware of our surroundings.

Rather than emphasizing experiences of the geographical life-world, two phenomenological

studies have paid attention to its phenomena of space, place and sense of place. In Place and
Placelessness (Relph, 1976) I employed phenomenological procedures and concepts to explore
how places and landscapes, which in various ways have almost always been a focus of
 12

geographical writing, are immediately and directly experienced. I aimed to show how the
diversity of the ways that geographicality is revealed by returning to the phenomenon of place as
it is experienced in everyday life, and to this I drew a combination of my own observations and
those of others. One conclusion was that modern landscapes are relatively placeless because they
appear to demonstrate that scientism and technique have reduced our abilities to create or
experience significant places.

In Space and Place Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) again used phenomenology implicitly. In this book, as in
Topophilia, he proceeded from physiological experiences to cultural aspects of space, and then to
the increasingly complex and subtle forms of sentiment and feeling about places. As before he
took much of his material from the diverse observations and reports of others, presumably as a
way to grasp and express the character of his own experiences of space and place.

Doing Phenomenological Geography

A recurrent theme in the phenomenological writing of geographers is that phenomenology leads

to self-awareness and a heightened sense of responsibility for the environments we live in and
the ideas we express about them. Phenomenology helps people to appreciate their worlds and
their lives more fully, and also to begin to see what modern science, technology and
consumerism have wrought in the name of efficiency and satisfaction. It might, therefore, be
suggested that a major role for phenomenology lies not in research but in teaching, and that once
the insight of grasping the world from the perspective of one's own experience has been achieved
then necessarily one must practice geography phenomenologically. Of course, it takes time and
effort to translate this insight into consistent practice, but in the meantime motivations and
interpretations will fall towards the human sentiments of phenomenology and away from the
abstract strictures of scientism.

I would like to think that phenomenology can be communicated this directly. In fact, it may be
that the conceptually pre-ordered ways of scientistic thinking have become so deeply entrenched
that any work that does not follow accepted patterns of data collection, analysis, model building
and so on, is likely to seem second rate. Moreover, phenomenological studies will be criticized
by the scientifically minded as trivial, lacking in objectivity, and impractical since they have no
direct policy implications. In order to do sound phenomenological investigations in geography it
is necessary to transcend these self-doubts and criticisms. This is difficult because there is no
external framework on which you can depend, and which can take the responsibility out of
thinking.

The few phenomenological studies in geography have tried to evade the full measure of this
responsibility by leaning on accounts of other peoples' experiences, and several of the
methodological studies have hedged around the radical differences between scientific and
phenomenological methods. In short, phenomenological writing by geographers has been rather
cautious and lacking in self-confidence. I do not intend a counsel of perfection by this - the
measure of any work is whether it adds to our knowledge of the world or understanding of
ourselves or enhances life in some way, not whether it follows methodological rules. But I do
believe that if phenomenological geographers do not keep in mind the philosophical origins of
 13

phenomenology as a radical critique of positivism and scientism, then we are likely to find
ourselves participating in some mongrel methodology that gives us numerical models of
topophilia or experiential expositions of urban systems. Or, more probably, the profound
methods and insights of phenomenology will slowly be subverted by prevailing rationalistic
modes of thinking and doing.

If such subversion can be avoided, then the subject matter for phenomenological geographies is
enormous but different from most of the topics currently studied by geographers. Research
subjects are generally defined by tradition or by practical and policy concerns, and it is not
possible to study urban systems, filters in housing markets or decision-making in resource
management from a phenomenological perspective. Phenomenological topics are either
phenomena of the life-world, such as particular places, suburban landscapes, mountains, or
experiences of the life-world, such as movement, rest and encounters with places. These topics
seem to have no direct or obvious planning and policy implications. And because it is the case
that it is fashionable to try to use geographical knowledge to support arguments for improving
social and environmental management this raises the question of whether phenomenology has
value for planning. Such a question reveals the depths to which scientism has penetrated, for it
implies that the application of formal expertise and techniques is the only useful way to organize
social processes or modify environments. It is as though people did not think carefully, create
communities and great buildings, or build towns before the advent of rational science.

There are many ways of thinking and doing - religious, vernacular, emotional, rational,
premeditated, spontaneous, habitual, traditional, and so on - all of which can be employed
carelessly or carefully. Rationalistic ways have somehow been arrogated into a position where
they dominate all the others. Phenomenology aims to reinstate other ways of thinking and doing,
and this radical goal seems to suggest that it has little of immediate practical value to offer
society. However, because it can change the outlook and being of individuals, and because these
are intersujectively linked, the long-term significance of phenomenology for the way in which
people create their worlds could be considerable. What form these worlds might take I have no
idea, though in moments of utopian speculation I wonder about the whether they might involve
something like society that was contemplated by the late-nineteenth geographer Pyotr Kropotkin
in his book Mutual Aid (1972), with individuals and communities helping one another and using
intermediate technologies to enhance ecological stability and local autonomony. However, these
will be empty achievements without the sort of philosophical reconstruction offered by
phenomenology, a reconstruction that rejects dependence on rationalistic procedures and instead
promotes a way of life that acknowledges and enhances all aspects of human existence.

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 14

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