近40年来，西方人文地理学发生了巨大的变化。50年代末期开始计量革命。70年代初开始，人文主义、行为主义、结构主义与后现代化主义等观念涌现，它们对西方地理界起了不同程度的影响。演变至今，人文地理学可说是一个百花齐放的多元化时代。人文主义与后现代化主义在70年代与80年代期间，先后出现于西方地理学。二者与上列其他观点有根本的不同。在地理学上，它们强调各地情况都有其特性。同时，批判性的社会理论也在地理学中占了日益重要的地位。从80年代开始，出现了一种新的区域地理学，它强调了人的能力及角色与社会结构如何影响地方特性的形成，也探讨了外在大环境以及地方力量对社会形成的关系。

In the last four decades, human geography in the West has experienced major changes in both theoretical and empirical orientations. These changes began with the appearance of the quantitative revolution in the late 1950s and the 1960s which greatly enhanced the position of theory in geographic scholarship. Adopting logical positivism as its theoretical foundation, early quantitative geographers clearly displayed epistemological arrogance who considered views of knowledge other than their own as either invalid or insignificant. However, by the late 1960s, both the revolutionaries and the bystanders had become disillusioned about the revolution’s future as it had failed to achieve what it had set out to do earlier: the development of geographic laws and metatheories. This set the stage for the emergence of a host of competing schools of thought in human geography, ranging from behavioralism, Marxism and humanism. Postmodernism made its appearance in American human geography in 1984. It rejects any narrow epistemological stance that sees the complex world through only one predetermined lens. It argues that no metatheory is capable of accounting for the complex reality, and it does not favor any one type of represented world over others. It emphasizes the importance of difference, heteorogeneity, context and human agency, which have since found their way in a new regional geography centered on the study of localities. Local conditions in China since the 1978 reforms have varied greatly, with places in different regions acquiring unque place identities. Such a condition is suitable for the use of postmodern perspectives for place based studies.