The 90s show: Culture leaves the farm and hits the streets

The tradition of American cultural geography was defined by studies of the rural, and in its more prosaic form focused on cataloging and mapping artifacts such as fence posts, barn types, and gravestones in order to delimit culture areas. In contrast, the city was all but ignored, treated as a cultural vacuum, and conceived only as a site of work, production, and economic relations. Hence, the importance of urban spatial science that from the late 1950s formalized that economism as central place theory, or Alonso's map of bid-rent curves, or models of retail location. Even when urban geography began eschewing formal models and theory, turning toward some kind of Marxist approach during the 1970s, the focus on things economic remained, but couched now in a different vocabulary such as rent gap, urban gatekeepers, and uneven development. The economism of spatial science and Marxism could not be sustained, however. Culture had to be let in. From 1990 pressured by outside theoretical developments such as cultural studies, and postmodernism, and changes from inside the discipline such as the rise of the new cultural geography, urban geography finally cracked, explicitly allowing culture in first as a trickle, but by the end of that decade as a flood. Culture had finally left the farm and hit the streets.