Yi fu tuan biography of martin

By Mary Ellen Gabriel

Yi-Fu Tuan, a towering intellectual figure and University of Wisconsin–Madison professor emeritus of geography died Aug. 10 at UW Hospital in Madison at age 91, with a dear friend and former student, Charles Chang, by his side.

People think that geography is about capitals, landforms and so on.

But it is also about place — its emotional tone, social meaning, and generative potential.”

—Yi-Fu Tuan

Tuan was a prolific writer and deep thinker who was known as the father of humanistic geography. A movement within the field of human geography, humanistic geography arose in the 1970s as a way to counter what humanists saw as a tendency to treat places as mere sites or locations.

Instead, a humanistic geographer would argue, the places we inhabit have as many personalities as those whose lives have intersected with them. And the stories we tell about places often say as much about who we are, as about where our feet are plante 段义孚 - 维基百科，自由的百科全书 NUP