Towards a statistical approach to humanistic-geographical place concepts

In most human-geographical schools of thought, the concept of ‘place’ is characterised as irreducibly holistic and difficult to formalise. This would generally argue against the use of statistical and quantitative methods to study places. However, a thorough assessment of whether it is possible to apply a statistical epistemology to places is largely lacking. Focusing on the humanistic-geographical concept of place, René Westerholt takes a first step towards this understanding in an article published in Progress in Human Geography. The article first outlines a concept of place that is compatible with statistical approaches. At its core, the chosen conceptualisation is based on statistical essentialism, that is, the assumption that people act as naïve essentialists in their direct experience, consciously or unconsciously attributing essential criteria to meaningful places over time. This decision in favour of statistical essentialism offers two advantages: it avoids criticism of an overly metaphysical view (stronger forms of essences would imply that these exist somewhere ‘out there’ but without clear localisation) and it keeps places dynamic rather than static, as the practice of essentialisation is open to change. Next, the article locates randomness in places, mainly in concrete experiences of place and in the remaining and emerging constellations of essences. On this basis, the article discusses two key elements for a future statistical school of thought on the subject of place: a mindset with which one can deal with places in a statistically appropriate manner, and proposals for stochastic processes in relation to places. With regard to the former, the article proposes a mindset referred to as ‘upward synergistic abstraction,’ which describes the idea of simplifying an object of investigation (here: place) by ‘zooming out’ (in simplified terms) instead of using the typical downward abstraction employed in analytical approaches. The two stochastic processes proposed relate to lived engagements of and with places, that is, the re-enactment of previously formed places and the modification of these, as well as the above-mentioned constellations of essences that remain after a concrete experience. The aim of this article is to open up the prospect of a future productive statistical approach to places that avoids the otherwise frequent criticisms of a quantitative treatment of place.

Westerholt, R. (2025): Towards a statistical approach to humanistic-geographical place concepts. Progress in Human Geography. DOI: 10.1177/03091325251385581