On Growth and Form in Geomorphology

Abstract

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. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.