1. School of Geography, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China;
2. Institute of Beijing Studies, Beijing Union University, Beijing 100101, China
Abstract：Many scholars have been discussing about the topic of "keeping the visible natural landscape and people's nostalgia under the urbanization in China" since the central government of China issued a new document at a conference of urbanization in the end of 2013. Nostalgia relates to space and place and is closely associated with people's emotions. So the concept of Nostalgiais closely related to geography. One of culture functions is guiding people's mind and behavior. Of course it includes guiding people's spatial behavior and place practice. So one of the core tasks of cultural geographers is understanding and judging the phenomena which exist in spaces and places. The epistemology of this study stems from humanistic geography which considers nostalgia as a need of humanity. And this study also relates to moral geography and ethical geography which are originated from humanism geography. This perspective looks at nostalgia in a moral context.This study introduces two dimensions of moral analysis for nostalgia practice. One is space, the other is place. This paper includes several case studies of nostalgia practice, which show how to judge them in a humanistic geography context. Our conclusions are the following. First, the morality of nostalgia should be considered from a spatial perspective, just like size, distance and mobility. Second, the morality of nostalgia should be considered as having three distinct dimensions: body, living experiences and social construction.Third, both spatial dimension and place dimension for nostalgia practice judgement, they all answer the basic questions of morality: how do we treat ourselves, how do we treat others, and how do we treat nature. At the end of this paper, an analysis framework of cultural geography to nostalgia study comes out. It needs to be discuss by the readers of this paper.
