"For A New Geography" is devoted to a critical review of the evolution of geography in the search for open doors to many discussions to come, as the Totality of Space, Form, Function, Structure and Process, among others.Thus, the book is divided into three major parts: a) The Critique of Geography, b) Geography, Society, Space, and c) A Critical Geography.The first part, the author wants a tour de force by the different currents of geographic thought, based on the classical founders and its scientific pretensions, through the "New Geography", until the crisis that has made geography the "Widow of Space." Beginning with the Colonial geography, the author, citing Freeman recalls that it considers that "there is even a relationship between geographic expansion and colonization", and even Vidal de la Blache sometimes "seemed to appreciate the work colonizing" .Talking about the classics of geography, the author shows the relentless pursuit of geography to the status of science and ultimately take advantage of excessive analogy with the natural sciences, has legitimized. This is a serious mistake, continues the author, because, unlike the natural sciences in which the possibility of repeating an experience is the sine qua non for the validity of the scientific method, historical phenomena "are never repeated in the same way." Moreover, the character "exact" natural science is weak when we observe, as an example, how our grasp of reality is altered to "the level of scientific progress achieved."The changes that science has passed after the 2nd World War, and certainly the whole society, enormous challenges arose around what was later called "New Geography", is giving rise to new forms of research, new objects, or needs that arose. Reappeared with renewed strength, the measurement coming from the classical deterministic, now escorted by systems theory, the models and the various forms of recovery of perception.Then we went through a brief interlude before the Geography of Perception, the author conceptualizes as "the specific way each individual perceives and evaluates the area" only, inside the criticism, lose sight of the practice to the detriment of behavior, making this perception one way street from subject to object.For all these criticisms before, the author ends by completing the "triumph of formalism," certainly ideological, leaving the Geography "widow of space", only to reveal cracks in this structure of the crisis through which passes all the quantitative method.Now, in the second part of the book, the author pleads for a new interdisciplinary - that many today would call transdisciplinarity - in the quest to break the isolation of geography on other fields of knowledge by launching the following proposal: to redefine the object of geography as the space as a historical product. Hence the author uses a concept of space, among others that it also borrows from other approaches, as "a set of representative forms of social relations of past and present .
.. manifested through processes and functions. Space is then true field of forces whose acceleration is unequal. "To fulfill entirely the self-imposed obligation to define space as a geographical object, Milton Santos poses some questions about the essence of space. Thus, faced with the question "Space: Reflection and Social Fact?", The author does not hesitate for a second alternative makes and quoting Henri Lefebvre, for whom "the city is the projection of society on the ground", sidewalks, even in the Marxist view of Lefebvre, the "relations of production." Similarly, the author will assert the role of space in its entirety as social specific instance, not completely dependent, but provided with a range (relative).Thus ended this journey around the bases of geographical thought in the third and final part of the book the author launches into the job of exposing a Critical Geography, which he has become today, surely one of the exponents.Suddenly, Milton Santos advocated for an end to the dichotomy of man versus nature, on behalf of what he calls "total space of our day." Faced with the universalization of the economy, which often leads to the universalization of trailer space, the author leaves no doubt as to the epistemological course of its work to defend the dialectic of space. Then come the concepts of structure, process, form and function as categories of analysis of space, revealing its essence more alive, and stating the author's position as defender of the spaces (and territories) in underdeveloped countries.In this context, and beyond, it appears the concept of social formation, to which the author thus alludes: "the notion of social formation offers the possibility to interpret the accumulation and overlapping of forms, including the geographical landscape." Add to this the desire of the author to add a sense of time, assuming a "need for periodization" in geographic studies in order to understand the space as well as an "unequal accumulation of time" in the face of a deeper reality and complex (re) valuation on the space.Finally, we come to a crossroads at which one of two alternatives must be chosen: a) justify the existing order by concealing the real social relations in space or, b) analyze the relations of space, its contradictions and the possibilities of destroying them. By openly defend a Geography Released a New Geography, Milton Santos actively responds to the second.