Dr Archie Davies, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Geography, has translated Milton Santos’s For a New Geography. It is the first time this text has been translated into English.
Originally published in 1978 in Portuguese, the book marked the emergence of Milton Santos as a major interpreter of geographical thought, a prominent Afro-Brazilian public intellectual, and one of the twentieth century’s foremost global theorists of space. Arriving in English at a time of renewed interest in alternative geographical traditions and the history of radical geography, For a New Geography remains a powerful reflection on the history and purpose of thinking about space and nature.
Santos wrote For a New Geography when the discipline was undergoing profound transformations. Arguing that both the post-war quantitative turn in geography and the history of European, colonialist geography needed to be rethought, he set out on a systematic reconstruction of what a new geography could do, and how it could be done:
“Geographers must lay the foundations of a truly human space. This will be a space that unites men through and for their work, that does not divide classes from one another and exploiters from exploited. [...] It will be not an artifice but a social nature that is open to the direct contemplation of human minds [...] it will be space as an instrument for the reproduction of life”.
Dr Davies said:
“It was a privilege to translate and introduce Milton Santos’s wonderful book. For a New Geography is both an incisive critique of the history of geography and an eloquent and challenging theory of space. Translating is a particularly intense kind of close reading, and I learnt a huge amount by spending so much time with Santos’s ideas. He was an intellectual of the most inspiring sort: committed, rigorous, and original.”
For a New Geography is available now via The University of Minnesota Press.