Plus ça Change.....Source: Area, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1971), p. 1Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20000500 .

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area Institute of Brinish Geographers

1971 Volume 3 Number 1

Plus ca change. .m E With the departure of Mr Hugh Prince as editor, Area has lost a strong guiding hand and one which has channelled it very surely and competently into a distinc tive and valuable contribution to geographical literature. Members of the Institute owe him much gratitude for the work and time which he has expended on starting the magazine off on so secure a footing. So secure indeed that the future format and content of Area is unlikely to depart greatly from its previous style.

The greatest service that Area can offer is as a vehicle for the rapid diffusion of ideas and information; less as a periodical than as a house journal which can

monitor the thoughts and ideas of members of the Institute. If The Times claims that its greatest selling point lies in the excellence of its correspondence columns, then a house journal of a discipline might well be evaluated by the vigour of its debating of specific issues in the field. Geography should by now have broken out of any blind infatuation with technique and moved into a phase of critical self-examination of philosophy and methods. Rather than jumping gleefully from the most recent technique to the most ultra-recent technique, it needs to take stock of what it has and evaluate the tools which it has used and is

using. It is interesting, for example, to note in the present issue, the use of trend surface techniques reported in the accounts of papers read to the Geomorpho logical Research Group on the one hand and the caveat thrown in by Unwin

and Lewin on the use of trend surface on the other. Embryonic debates of this sort, common enough in disciplines like history, have been curiously absent from geography. They have a much more positive value than pure catharsis and

reflect a growing scientific maturity in the discipline. It would be a service to

geography if such rejoinders and disagreements were to be more formally rehearsed in the pages of Area. There are certainly many starting points; from the vagaries of behavioural geography to the value of the vogue words recently garnered by Mr Whitehead in his new geographical thesaurus. Two more specific recent topics, well worthy of debate, come to mind: firstly the evaluation of the planning framework laid out in Strategic Plan for the South East and so admir ably introduced by Dr Wilfred Burns in his Guest Lecture at the Annual Confer ence; and secondly a provocative statement by Professor Berry in his own Guest Lecture a year ago in which he said that ' if we, as geographers, fail to perform in policy-relevant terms, we will cease to be called on to perform at all'. If

spleens are to be vented or cool assessments made on such and sundry geographi cal topics the pages of Area provide an ideal jousting forum.

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