Competing visions of the city

For urban geography the decade of the 1970s was a period of critical reflection on the positivist social science that had flourished in the 1960s. Two challenges to existing practice were of special importance. One, identified with humanistic geography, sought to broaden the idea of science and dissociate it from positive statistical analysis. The other, espousing a Marxist analysis, challenged the legitimacy of the science practiced by the profession. The former served to diversify the nature of the research contributed to the field. The latter sought to supplant it. The decade ended in discord, with urban geography suffering a loss of coherence in the absence of a productive discussion of the issues which confronted its practice.