Torsten Hägerstrand

Torsten Hägerstrand (1916, Moheda- May 3 2004, Lund), was a Swedish geographer. He is known for his work on migration, cultural diffusion and time geography.

A native and resident of Sweden, Hägerstrand was a professor emeritus of geography at Lund University, where he received a doctorate in 1953. His doctoral research was on cultural diffusion.

In 1969, he presented a paper entitled What about People in Regional Science? to the European Congress of the Regional Science Association in Copenhagen, Denmark. This paper, published in 1970 (see references), developed two concepts:

• The need to study the individual in order to understand social and group practices. Modern cultural geographers commonly now study everyday practices on an individualistic basis, in order to understand larger scale patterns. The study of just groups creates an homogenization of relaity and hides the truth.

• A link between space and time that had previously been poorly developed. Historically, social scientists had treated time as a relevant but external factor to spatial features. Hagerstrand's early work on innovation (cultural) diffusion - studying the geographical spread of new technologies - made him realise that the two, though speretate, were not independent of each other (they have what Lefebvre would call a dialectical relationship).

Hägerstrand's work was quantitative, which is important as the discipline of geography was, when he published his first paper in 1942, a highly descriptive subject. He developed models and statistical techniques, such as the time-space prism. His work informed the likes of Allan Pred and Nigel Thrift, who took it to the English speaking world.

Hägerstrand's work was an early factor in both the qualitative turn and the introduction of humanistic thought into geography. As the latter of these critiqued the former highly - to eventually form critical geography - Hägerstrand's later work revised his early time-geographies to include notions of embodiment and emotion. Still, his methods were critiqued by feminist geographers such as Gillian Rose, who claimed that his models showed a masculine and falsely-ordered view of the world.

Even so, development of Hägerstrand's work has continued to form part of the basis for non-representational theory, and a reapraisal of time geography from the likes of Alan Latham means that he remains an influential thinker today.

Sweden, and particularly Lund, has become a major center of innovative work in cultural geography. This is partially helped by Hägerstrand's work, which was almost entirely concentrated on the town and its surrounding region.

Honors

In 1968 Professor Hägerstrand received an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of American Geographers.

In 1985 he was awarded an honorary doctor of science degree from Ohio State University. The commendation accompanying the honorary degree noted that" his work on innovation diffusion, carried out in the 1950s and 1960s continues to be cited as a standard against which current research is measured' and that "this distinguished individual...inspired a generation of scholars around the world."

References

• Center For Spatially Intergrated Social Science
• Latham, Allan; 2003; Research, performance, and doing human geography: some reflections on the diary-photograph, diary-interview method; Environment and Planning A 2003, volume 35, pp 1993-2017
• Pred, Allan (ed.); 1981; Space and Time in Geography - Essays Dedicated to Torsten Hägerstrand; CWK Gleerup, Lund
• Rose, Gillian; 1993; Feminism and Geography; Polity Press, Cambridge

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