12. The Contribution of Milton Santos to the Theoretical Formation of Brazilian Geography

Milton Santos’ academic and political career in Brazilian Geography dates back to his first works on the reality of the state of Bahia—in the north-east region of Brazil—during the 1950s. His research and publications on urbanisation in Third World countries in the 1970s earned him international renown and made him a central author for theoretical production in human geography. In this context of great political effervescence and enormous transformations in the human sciences, Santos developed the theory of the two circuits of the urban economy—a critical approach to the current conceptions of urbanisation, which takes the specificity of peripheral countries as its starting point. Another of the author’s central contributions during this same period was the concept of socio-spatial formation, which considers space as a fundamental component of the social totality and its movement. More recently, in the 1990s, his conceptual proposals on what he called the technical-scientific-informational milieu—this geographical medium comprising an increasingly intensive presence of informational techniques, one of the main factors which permitted the advancement of the contemporary process of globalisation—were fundamental. This article aims to re-examine some of Milton Santos’ contributions, while also attempting to stress the historical contexts in which each of them were created. It is important to note that he is an author with an independent and critical theoretical production that expresses an emancipating vision of the geography of the Global South.