On Growth and Form in Geomorphology

✍ Scribed by Spedding, Nick

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 24 KB
• Volume: 22
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0360-1269
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1096-9837(199703)22:3<261::aid-esp753>3.0.co;2-q

✦ Synopsis

Perhaps surprisingly, geomorphology's relative failure to deliver meaningful process-based accounts of landscape development has not stimulated much in the way of procedural debate. Although most geomorphologists seem to agree that a problem exists -how best to make explicit the links between process and form? -this tends to be seen as a substantive problem only, the solution to which lies within the existing framework of geomorphic research, located broadly within the tradition of positivist scientific method. Here I argue that we need to ask a new type of question in a new way: one which gives priority to organizational/compositional relationships rather than to detailed process studies, within the revived context of space-time dynamics. Such a framework draws loosely on complexity theory and realist philosophy, and, in the first instance at least, suggests a return to conceptual, qualitative methods of research.