Paper long abstract:

Following Trevor J. Barnes’ seminal work on the ’quantitative revolution’ in Anglo-American geography (1950s and 1960s), and other works on the contested adaptations and narratives of German theories of spatial planning (von Thünen, Weber, Christaller, Lösch), my study aims to broaden this research with a critical focus on the geographies of Cold War geographical knowledge production. With the ’mangling’ of WWII, the military-industrial complex made American science a permanent centre (after a massive migration of European, mostly German scholars to the US), and the unfolding Anglo-American hegemony normalized former location theories in human geography and regional science. The emerging Cold War framework of a neopositivistic, mathematized and modell-based scientific approach enabled the ’immutable mobiles’ of location theories and concerning knowledge (e.g. systems theory, cybernetics, computation) to circulate into the Eastern block, after a turn in socialist scientific policy, and the „New Economic Mechanism” (1968) in Hungary. My preliminary research is to show the interchange of actor-networks enabling the diffusion and adaptation of these knowledges under different political contexts, particularly in socialist Hungary. The aim of this paper is to provide a contribution to a globalized understanding of Hungarian semi-peripherial knowledge production, which provided the later basis for a post-socialist context of geographical knowledge production and spatial planning.