1.1 What is Human Geography?

Studying Human Geography

Human geography: The study of the ways human activity shapes the world; How people use, adapt to, and change the Earth-- as well as how they’re influenced by it.

Physical geography: The study of natural processes and the distribution of features in the environment (landforms, plants, animals, etc.)

• Geography overlaps fields of study with many other disciplines, but one significant feature is a geographer’s focus on the relationship between humans and the Earth, not one or the other.

Geographic Perspectives

• Geographers use two vital perspectives to analyze and explain the complex interactions between human societies and their surroundings.

Spatial perspective: Geographic perspective that focuses on how people live on Earth, how they organize themselves, and why the events of human societies occur where they do.

• In the same way that history is concerned with time and chronological aspects of human life, geography is concerned with spatial aspects (where things are located and why.)

Ecological perspective: The relationships between living things and their environments.

• Using this perspective involves studying the relationships between living things, ecosystems, and human societies.

• Helps explain human’s dependence on diverse ecosystems for essential resources.

• The acknowledgment of multiple perspectives is integral to a geographer’s understanding of other people and cultures.

• Geography can be boiled down to three elements: Where, why there, and why care? Using these three basic questions, one can dig deep into their own inquiries and gain the most insight from them.

Location and Place

Location: The position that a point or object occupies on Earth.

• Location can be expressed in absolute or relative terms.

Absolute location: The exact location of an object, usually expressed in coordinates of longitude and latitude.

Relative location: A description of where a place is in relation to other places or features.

• For example, the absolute location of the city of Budapest, Hungary, is 47.50° N, 19.04° E.

• The relative location can vary, depending on what relative signifier one uses. Budapest could be described as 134 miles southeast of Vienna, Austria.

• Alternatively, one could say it straddles the Danube River in the middle of the Carpathian Basin in north-central Hungary.

Place: A location on Earth that is distinguished by its physical and human characteristics.

• Place is related to, but different than, location.

• A place is distinguished by its physical and human characteristics.

• Physical characteristics: Climate, landforms, soils, water sources, vegetation, and animal life.

• Human characteristics: Languages, religions, political systems, economic systems, population distribution, architecture, and quality of life.

• A “sense of place” refers to the emotions one has attached to that place. This is based on personal experiences and the sense of place is stronger for well-known places than for unfamiliar ones.

  • Places can change-- through political, economic, and cultural means-- but the sense of that place generally stays the same

• Human geographers focus on two factors that influence how humans use a particular place.

Site: A place’s absolute location, as well as its physical characteristics, such as the landforms, climate, and resources.

• A site is the characteristics contained within that absolute location.

Situation: Location of a place in relation to other places or its surrounding features.

• Situation refers to the relativity and connectivity of the place.

• This can be transportation (and where those methods of transportation go,) political associations, nearby resources, and economic/cultural ties.

Space, Pattern, and Flow

Space: The area between two or more things.

Distribute: To arrange within a given space.

• Studying distribution can help human geographers describe and analyze the organization of people, places, and environments.

• Density and patterns are key in distribution.

Density: The number of things—people, animals, or objects—in a specific area.

• Density is higher when more things are in a smaller place. For example, cities have many people living close together. They have a high population density. Rural areas have a few people living far apart. This is low population density.

Pattern: The way in which things are arranged in a particular space.

• Depending on how and why humans settled in a place, patterns may be neat and geometric or erratic and fluid. Studying these patterns can give insight into the how and why.

• Patterns can help geographers understand different processes like agricultural production, urban settlement, or the distribution of fast-food restaurants in a town.

Flow: Movement of people, goods, or information that has economic, social, political, or cultural effects on societies

• Geographers are not studying a static world. Therefore it is important to understand flow and the way the world changes around them.

Human-Environment Interaction

• No matter where people live, they depend upon, adapt to, and modify the environment.

• Humans have always done this to our land-- using it for agriculture, tapping into resources, and building structures.

• New technology has given humans the ability to alter our environment to an almost unlimited degree.

Theories of Interaction

• In the 18th to 20th centuries, many geographers believed in a theory that has now been discredited and criticized.

  • Some experts believe it inaccurately favors the accomplishments of certain societies over others and has historically been used to justify racism.

Environmental determinism: The idea that human behavior is strongly affected, controlled, or determined by the physical environment.

• This theory would have proposed Western Europe and North America as the most successfully predispositioned societies, but ignores the fact that societies in North Africa and much of Asia arose earlier than Europe/North America and were incredibly successful for long periods of human history.

• Modern geographers favor a theory by the name of possibilism.

Possibilism: Theory of human-environment interaction that states that humans have the ability to adapt the physical environment to their needs.

• This theory assesses that while humans can be impacted by their environment, they are also capable of adapting to situational hardships and have more agency to produce results than environmental determinism would suggest.

  • This theory claims human societies and individuals as active members interacting with their environment, not passive features to be molded by it.

Distance decay: A principle stating that the farther away one thing is from another, the less interaction the two things will have.

Time-space compression: A key geographic principle that describes the ways in which modern transportation and communication technology have allowed humans to travel and communicate over long distances quicker and easier.

Sustainability

Sustainability: The use of Earth’s land and natural resources in ways that ensure they will continue to be available in the future.

• Sustainability is important for all geographers to consider when thinking about human-environment interaction.

• It requires the understanding of a resource’s renewability and the effects of using it on the environment.

1.2 Spatial Patterns: Scale and Region

Zooming In and Out

• When thinking about the world and where something is, it’s important to consider scale.

Scale: The area of the world being studied.

• This is different from the scale on a map, which tells you how distance on the map compares to distance on the ground.

• There are four scales: Global, national, regional, and local.

• Scale is important for an accurate depiction of data.

  • A national scale can be misleading if the data points are clustered in a specific part of that country; This is a limitation of national-scale maps.

  • Observations at a local scale can also reveal details that might not be apparent at a regional scale.

• All scales have their advantages and disadvantages.

• The scale of the map and scale of analysis is important to differentiate.

  • The scale of the map is what is being shown in its entirety. A map of the world is on a global scale. A map of a country is on a national scale.

  • The scale of analysis is the scale of the geographical groupings that data is being drawn from and representing the whole of.

• A national scale map may have a regional scale of analysis, if the distinctions in the area are not political boundaries (between states, provinces, territories, etc.)

  • This same map could then have a local (sometimes called substate, in this case,) scale of analysis if the data was then distributed according to said political boundaries.

Unifying Features

Region: An area of Earth’s surface with certain characteristics that make it distinct yet cohesive from other areas.

• Regions are human constructs, meaning people decide how they appear.

• More often than not, regions are not well-defined, and the boundaries between them are disputed.

  • Regions can be debated from person to person (perceptual) or can be officially established by a government or other authority (formal.)

• Regardless of their volatility, regions serve as an important tool for geographers to frame important knowledge and comparison.

• Regions can be of any size and scale.

Formal Region

Formal region: An area that has one or more shared traits; also called a uniform region.

• A shared trait can be physical, like a landform, or a climate, like a desert.

• It can be cultural, like a shared language or religion.

• It can be a combination of traits, like measures of population, income, ethnicity, or precipitation.

• A formal political region is one whose shared traits are government, laws, services, and taxes.

• A formal region can be as small as a county within a state within a country.

  • Or it can be as big as the continent of Africa, with its distinct boundaries.

• Even a city can qualify as a formal region.

  • Going smaller, a certain area within that city can have unifying characteristics that make it a region.

Functional Region

Functional region: An area organized by its function around a focal point, or the center of an interest or activity.

Node: The focal point of a functional region.

• Functional regions, or nodal regions, serve a particular function (usually political, social, or economic,) and the region is defined by where that service or function can reach/is available.

Suburbs: Less densely populated residential and commercial areas surrounding a city.

• Functional regions also exist at several scales.

  • The functional region of an airport could be global, showing everywhere that airport flies to. The airport itself functions as the region’s node.

• Some examples of functional regions and their nodes are:

  • Public transportation with a central stop or station as a node.

  • A port or dock as a node, servicing an area around them.

  • A pizza shop as a node, its delivery zone as the functional region.

Perceptual Region

Perceptual Region: A type of region that reflects people’s feelings and attitudes about a place; also called a vernacular region.

• Perceptual regions are personal and made from someone’s subjective views of the world around them.

  • Perceptual regions are some of the most disagreed upon.

• While these regions may help to impose a personal sense of order and structure on the world, they may do so based on stereotypes that can be inappropriate or incorrect.

1.3 Globalization and Sustainability

Global vs. Local

Globalization: The expansion of economic, cultural, and political processes on a worldwide scale.

• Recently, countries all around the world have become increasingly connected due to globalization.

  • Globalization is an overarching theme in human geography and is very important.

• Globalization has been made possible by several factors.

  • Lower production costs

  • Advances in transportation technology

  • The internet and remote connectivity

• Government policies play a large role in globalization as well.

• Trade deals have lifted restrictions that connect more people through economic means.

• Jobs and goods move across borders more easily now.

  • The overall trend since WWII has been more international trade.

• Globalization affects all aspects of human life.

• It is related to the geographic concepts of location, space, place, and flow.

• It also creates new or alters existing patterns that human geographers study.

Wallerstein’s World System Theory

Theory: A system of ideas intended to explain certain phenomena.

• In the 1970s, sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein developed the world system theory.

World System Theory: Theory describing the spatial and functional relationships between countries in the world economy; categorizes countries as part of a hierarchy consisting of the core, periphery, and semi-periphery.

• This theory helps explain the history of uneven economic development of some countries and why certain regions have held onto economic and political power for so long.

• It is based upon the idea that interdependence between countries has created a world system with an economy that is one single entity with a single market and division of labor.

  • This theory explains that companies are not limited to hiring within their country alone. They can open factories and sell products all over the world.

  • Even small countries that do not have a global impact themselves are likely to utilize the foreign market in some way or another.

• The world system theory (WST) places countries in three tiers.

Core countries: Classification of a country or region that has wealth, higher education levels, more advanced technologies, many resources, strong militaries, and powerful allies.

• Core countries are highly interconnected with good transportation and communication networks.

• They have well-established infrastructure and economies.

• Their governments and political alliances are strong and often long-standing.

Semi-peripheral countries: Classification of a country or region that has qualities of both core and peripheral areas and is often in the process of industrializing.

• Semi-peripheral countries are in the process of industrializing and are active in the markets of manufacturing and exporting.

• They have better connections than periphery countries with better transportation and connections.

• Their governments may be stable but new.

• These countries have the potential to grow into core countries.

Peripheral countries: Classification of a country or region that has less wealth, lower education levels, and less sophisticated technologies and also tends to have an unstable government and poor health systems.

• Peripheral countries tend to have unstable governments and poorer services.

• They are less connected with core countries and have inferior transportation and connection.

• Their infrastructure is inadequate and their economies are oftentimes fragile, unable to sustain many pressures.

• The WST states that these three tiers create a power hierarchy with core countries at the top, periphery at the bottom, and semi-periphery between them.

  • Strong central governments, trade partnerships, and skilled labor of core countries allow them to control and benefit from the world economy.

  • Core countries exploit peripheral countries for cheap labor and natural resources. They have weaker, less-stable governments that do not have much power outside of their own borders.

• Semi-peripheral countries are a link between the two. They can be exploited by core countries, but may also exploit periphery countries themselves.

  • Because of this exploitation, it is very difficult for peripheral countries to improve their standing.

• This has ties to historical colonization. Western countries used to exploit and colonize countries for natural resources.

  • Many of them are still core countries today, and many of their previous colonies are also still stuck in a position of being exploited, even though formal colonization is largely nonexistent.

• WST can also be applied at a smaller scale.

  • For example, a state like California is known for its wealthy cities and innovative tech-driven economy but also has much poorer rural areas.

  • New York City has core areas like Manhattan, as well as peripheral areas like the Bronx.

Sustainability

• The study of the impact of human societies on the environment is important to human geography. Whether that impact is sustainable is essential to the survival of humanity.

• Globalization has made the world more connected, but the advantages have disproportionately gone to core countries.

  • Climate change, depletion of the world’s resources, and wealth inequality are worldwide problems that continue to grow.

• To solve this, global leaders are taking steps to encourage governments and industries to operate more sustainably.

Sustainable development: Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

• Sustainability requires the consideration of resources, their renewability, and innovations to make sure of the most renewable resources with the least environmental impact.

  • There also needs to be efforts to actively reduce pollution and waste.

• It’s important to spread these goals through all countries and make it accessible for countries, regardless of economic standing, to enforce these regulations.