Exhaustive Human Geography Study Guide: Foundations, Population, Culture, and Geopolitics
Introduction to Human Geography and Spatial Concepts
Fieldwork: The process of observing and collecting data about people, cultures, and their environment in the field. This is a foundational method in human geography to understand local context and real-world applications of theories.
Human Geography: The study of how people make places, how we organize space and society, how we interact with each other in places and across space, and how we make sense of others and ourselves in our localities, regions, and the world.
Globalization: A set of processes that are increasing interactions, deepening relationships, and accelerating interdependence across national borders. It is also a set of outcomes that result from these processes.
Physical Geography: The study of spatial and temporal phenomena that make up the natural environment (such as landforms, climate, and ecosystems), distinct from human-created systems.
Spatial Perspective: An intellectual framework that allows geographers to look at the earth in terms of the relationship between various places. It focuses on the "why of where."
Spatial Approach ("Why of Where"): Analyzing how geographical phenomena are arranged on the Earth and why they are located where they are. It involves understanding distributions and patterns.
Spatial Distribution: The physical location of geographic phenomena across space.
Pattern: The geometric arrangement of objects in space, which can be linear, centralized, or random.
Medical Geography: The study of health and disease within a geographic context and from a spatial perspective. It examines the diffusion of diseases and healthcare access. - Endemic Disease: A disease that is constantly present in a certain population or region (e.g., malaria in some tropical regions). - Epidemic: A regional outbreak of a disease that is higher than expected. - Pandemic: An epidemic that spreads worldwide (e.g., or ).
Five Themes of Geography: - Location: The position of anything on Earth's surface (Absolute and Relative). - Human-Environment Interaction: The relationship between people and their physical environment. - Region: An area on Earth's surface marked by a degree of formal, functional, or perceptual homogeneity of some phenomenon. - Place: The unique human and physical characteristics of a location. Characteristics are often defined by Sense of Place (infusing a place with meaning and emotion) or Perception of Place (belief or "understanding" about a place based on images and books rather than personal experience). - Movement: The mobility of people, goods, and ideas across the surface of the planet.
Pattison’s Four Traditions of Geography: - Spatial Tradition: Mapping, spatial analysis, and boundaries. - Area Studies Tradition: Regional geography and description of specific places. - Man-Land Tradition: Human-environment interaction and environmentalism. - Earth Science Tradition: Physical geography, including the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere.
Location Theory: A logical attempt to explain the locational pattern of an economic activity and the manner in which its producing areas are interrelated.
Distance: The measurement of physical space between two points.
Accessibility: The degree of ease with which it is possible to reach a certain location from other locations.
Connectivity: The degree of direct linkage between one particular location and other locations in a transport network.
Spatial Interaction: The movement and flows involving human activity (e.g., transport, communication) between nodes in space.
Operational Scale: The level at which an environmental or social phenomenon is observed (e.g., local, regional, national, global).
Cultural Landscape: The visible imprint of human activity and culture on the landscape. Carl Sauer argued that cultural landscapes are the forms superimposed on the physical landscape by the activities of man.
Sequent Occupance: The notion that successive societies leave their cultural imprints on a place, each contributing to the cumulative cultural landscape.
Cartography, Scale, and Geographic Tools
Cartography: The art and science of making maps.
Map Types: - Reference Maps: Show locations of places and geographic features (e.g., road maps). - Thematic Maps: Tell a story about the degree of an attribute or the movement of a geographic phenomenon (e.g., maps showing population density). - Generalized Maps: Maps that simplify data and generalize trends rather than showing specific data points. - Dot Maps: Maps where one dot represents a certain number of a phenomenon (e.g., a population). - Topographic Maps: Maps showing the natural and human-made features of the land, specifically using Contour Lines to show elevation.
Map Projections: - Mercator Projection: Maintains direction but greatly distorts area, especially near the poles (makes Greenland look larger than Africa). - Robinson Projection: A compromise projection that seeks to minimize errors in area, shape, distance, and direction. - Peters Projection: An equal-area projection that shows the relative sizes of the continents accurately, often used to correct Eurocentric biases. - Planar (Azimuthal) Projection: Projects Earth onto a flat plane, typically centered on a pole; accurate at the point of contact but distorts toward the edges.
Map Scale: The ratio between the distance on a map and the actual distance on the surface of Earth.
Absolute Location: The exact position on Earth, often measured by latitude and longitude ( coordinates).
Relative Location: The position of a place in relation to other places (e.g., "next to the bank"). - Site: The physical character of a place (climate, water sources, topography, soil, vegetation). - Situation: The location of a place relative to other places and its importance (e.g., being a trade hub).
Mental Maps and Activity Spaces: - Mental Map: An individual's internal representation of the Earth's surface, reflecting their knowledge and perceptions of places. - Activity Space: The space within which daily activities occur (e.g., home to school to work).
Geospatial Technologies: - GPS (Global Positioning System): A system that determines the precise position of something on Earth through a series of satellites. - GIS (Geographic Information System): A computer system that stores, organizes, analyzes, and displays geographic data in layers. - Remote Sensing: The acquisition of data about Earth's surface from a satellite orbiting the planet or other long-distance methods.
Rescale: The involvement of players at other scales to generate support for a position or an initiative (e.g., taking a local issue to the national level).
Regional Concepts and Human-Environment Geography
Regional Types: - Formal Region: An area in which everyone shares in one or more distinctive characteristics (e.g., a state, or a region where a specific language is spoken). - Functional Region: An area organized around a node or focal point (e.g., the delivery area of a newspaper or a radio station's reach). - Perceptual (Vernacular) Region: A place that people believe exists as part of their cultural identity (e.g., "The South" in the United States).
Culture Concepts: - Culture: The sum total of the knowledge, attitudes, and habitual behavior patterns shared and transmitted by the members of a society. - Culture Trait: A single element of normal practice in a culture (e.g., wearing a turban). - Culture Complex: A related set of cultural traits, such as prevailing dress codes and cooking and eating establishments. - Cultural Hearth: A center where cultures developed and from which ideas and traditions spread outward. - Independent Invention: The term for a trait with many cultural hearths that developed independent of each other.
Diffusion and Barriers: - Time-Distance Decay: The declining degree of acceptance of an idea or innovation with increasing time and distance from its point of origin. - Cultural Barrier: Prevailing cultural attitude rendering certain innovations, ideas, or practices unacceptable or unadoptable in that particular culture (e.g., a Taboo).
Human-Environment Theories: - Environmental Determinism: The view that the natural environment has a controlling influence over various aspects of human life, including cultural development (widely rejected by modern geographers). - Possibilism: The theory that the physical environment may set limits on human actions, but people have the ability to adjust to the physical environment and choose a course of action from many alternatives. - Cultural Ecology: An area of inquiry concerned with culture as a system of adaptation to and alteration of the environment. - Political Ecology: An approach to studying nature–society relations that is concerned with the ways in which environmental issues reflect, and again result from, the political and socioeconomic contexts in which they are situated.
Population Dynamics and Composition
Population Densities: - Arithmetic Population Density: The total number of people divided by the total land area (). - Physiologic Population Density: The number of people per unit area of arable land, which is land suitable for agriculture ().
Vital Statistics: - Crude Birth Rate (CBR): The number of live births yearly per people in a population. - Crude Death Rate (CDR): The number of deaths yearly per people (also known as Mortality Rate). - Natural Increase: The difference between the number of births and the number of deaths (). - Total Fertility Rate (TFR): The average number of children born to a woman during her childbearing years ( to ). - Replacement Rate: The TFR required to keep a population at a constant size, usually cited as . - Infant Mortality Rate (IMR): The total number of deaths in a year among infants under year old for every live births. - Child Mortality Rate: Deaths of children between ages and . - Life Expectancy: The average number of years an individual can be expected to live, given current social, economic, and medical conditions.
Population Growth Metrics: - Doubling Time: The time required for a population to double in size. Use the Rule of : (\frac{70}{\text{Natural Increase Rate %}}). - Carrying Capacity: The maximum population size of a species that the environment can sustain indefinitely. - Zero Population Growth (ZPG): A decline of the total fertility rate to the point where the natural increase rate equals zero. - Demographic Equation: A mathematical expression that summarizes the contribution of different demographic processes to the population change (). - Demographic Momentum: The tendency for growing populations to continue growing after a fertility decline because of their young age distribution. - Stationary Population Level (SPL): The level at which a national population ceases to grow.
Population Health: - Infectious Diseases: Diseases resulting from an invasion of parasites and their multiplication in the body (e.g., malaria). - Chronic/Degenerative Diseases: Generally long-lasting afflictions now more common because of higher life expectancies (e.g., heart disease, cancer). - Genetic/Inherited Diseases: Diseases caused by variation or mutation of a gene or group of genes in a human (e.g., sickle-cell anemia).
Population Clusters: The four largest clusters are East Asia, South Asia, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
Population Models and Theories
Thomas Malthus: Postulated that population grows geometrically () while food supply grows arithmetically (), eventually leading to a "Malthusian Catastrophe" of famine and war.
Demographic Transition Model (DTM): - Stage (Low Growth): High CBR and High CDR resulting in low growth. Characterized by pre-industrial societies. - Stage (High Growth): CDR drops rapidly due to medical or industrial advances; CBR remains high. Rapid natural increase (e.g., many sub-Saharan African countries). - Stage (Moderate Growth): CBR begins to fall as social norms change; CDR continues to fall but more slowly. - Stage (Low Growth): Low CBR and Low CDR, resulting in near ZPG. - Stage (Negative Growth/Declining): Very low CBR that falls below the CDR (e.g., Japan, Germany).
Population Pyramids: Visual representations of the age and sex composition of a population. Wide base indicates high growth (Stage ); rectangular shape indicates stability (Stage ); narrow base indicates decline (Stage ).
Population Policies: - Expansive: Encourage large families to raise the rate of natural increase (e.g., tax incentives in Russia or Western Europe). - Eugenic: Designed to favor one racial or cultural sector of the population over others (e.g., Nazi Germany). - Restrictive: Designed to reduce the rate of natural increase (e.g., China’s One Child Policy).
AIDS Effects: Drastically impacts life expectancy and population structures, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, creating "population chimneys" in pyramids.
Migration Concepts and Flows
Movement Types: - Cyclic Movement: Movement that has a closed route and is repeated annually or seasonally (e.g., commuting, Activity Spaces, Nomadism). - Periodic Movement: Movement that involves temporary, recurrent relocation (e.g., Migrant Labor, Transhumance, college attendance, military service). - Migration: A change in residence intended to be permanent.
Key Migration Terms: - International Migration: Movement across country borders (e.g., Immigration into a country vs. Emigration out of a country). - Internal Migration: Movement within a single country's borders. - Forced Migration: Human migration flows in which the movers have no choice but to relocate (e.g., slavery, Trail of Tears). - Voluntary Migration: Movement in which people relocate in response to perceived opportunity, not because they are forced to move.
Factors and Models: - Gravity Model: A mathematical prediction of the interaction of places, interaction being a function of population size of the respective places and the distance between them. - Push Factors: Negative conditions and perceptions that induce people to leave their abode and migrate to a new location. - Pull Factors: Positive conditions and perceptions that effectively attract people to new locales from other areas. - Distance Decay: The effects of distance on interaction, generally the greater the distance the less interaction. - Step Migration: Migration to a distant destination that occurs in stages (e.g., from farm to village to town to city). - Chain Migration: Migration of people to a specific location because relatives or members of the same nationality previously migrated there. - Intervening Opportunity: The presence of a nearer opportunity that greatly diminishes the attractiveness of sites farther away. - Kinship Links: Types of push or pull factors that influence a migrant's decision to go where family or friends have already found success.
Political and Social Impacts: - Deportation/Repatriation: The act of a government sending a migrant back to their home country. - Refugees: People who have fled their country because of political persecution and seek asylum in another country. - Internally Displaced Persons (IDP): People who have been displaced within their own countries and do not cross international borders. - Asylum: Shelter and protection in one state for refugees from another state. - Genocide/Ethnic Cleansing: The systematic killing or forced removal of an entire people or nation. - Quotas: Established limits by governments on the number of immigrants who can enter a country each year. - Selective Immigration: Process to control immigration by barring individuals with certain backgrounds (criminal records, health issues).
Historical Flows: - Russification: The Soviet policy to promote the diffusion of Russian culture throughout the non-Russian republics. - Guest Workers: Legal immigrants who have a work visa, usually short term. - Islands of Development: Places built up by a government or corporation to attract foreign investment and which has relatively high concentrations of paying jobs and infrastructure. - Ravenstein’s Laws of Migration: Significant empirical generalizations about migration (e.g., most migrants go only a short distance, long-distance migrants head for major centers of economic activity).
Culture and Identity Geography
Types of Culture: - Local Culture: A group of people in a particular place who see themselves as a collective or a community, who share experiences, customs, and traits. - Folk Culture: Cultural traits such as dress modes, dwellings, traditions, and institutions of usually small, traditional communities. - Popular Culture: Cultural traits such as dress, diet, and music that identify and are part of today's changeable, urban-based, media-influenced, western societies. - Material Culture: The art, housing, clothing, sports, dances, foods, and other similar items constructed or created by a group of people. - Non-material Culture: The beliefs, practices, aesthetics, and values of a group of people.
Cultural Processes: - Assimilation: The process through which people lose originally differentiating traits, such as dress, speech particularities or mannerisms, when they come into contact with another society or culture. - Custom: Practice routinely followed by a group of people. - Cultural Appropriation: The process by which cultures adopt customs and knowledge from other cultures and use them for their own benefit. - Neolocalism: The seeking out of the regional culture and reinvigoration of it in response to the modern world. - Ethnic Neighborhood: An area within a city containing members of the same ethnic background. - Commodification: The process through which something is given monetary value; occurs when a good or idea that previously was not regarded as an object to be bought and sold is turned into something that has a price and can be traded in a market economy. - Authenticity: In the context of local cultures or customs, the accuracy with which a single stereotypical or typecast image or experience conveys an otherwise dynamic and complex local culture or its customs.
Space and Diffusion: - Relocation Diffusion: The actual movement of individuals who have already adopted an idea or innovation, and who carry it to a new locale, where they proceed to disseminate it. - Expansion Diffusion: The spread of an innovation or an idea through a population in an area in such a way that the number of those influenced grows continuously larger. - Contagious Diffusion: The distance-controlled spreading of an idea, innovation, or some other item through a local population by contact from person to person. - Hierarchical Diffusion: A form of diffusion in which an idea or innovation spreads by passing first among the most connected places or peoples. - Stimulus Diffusion: A form of diffusion in which a cultural adaptation is created as a result of the introduction of a cultural trait from another place (e.g., the veggie burger in India). - Reverse Hierarchical Diffusion: Diffusion up the hierarchy, such as from small towns to large cities (e.g., Wal-Mart). - Time-Space Compression: The social and psychological effects of living in a world in which time-space convergence has rapidly reached a high level of intensity. - Reterritorialization: With respect to popular culture, when people within a place start to produce an aspect of popular culture themselves, doing so in the context of their local culture and making it their own. - Placelessness: The loss of uniqueness of place in the cultural landscape so that one place looks like the next. - Glocalization: The process by which people in a local place meditate and alter regional, national, and global processes.
Ethnicity and Gender: - Gender Identity: How one identifies their own gender, often defined against social norms. - Race: A categorization of humans based on skin color and other physical characteristics. - Residential Segregation: The degree to which two or more groups live separately from one another, in different parts of an urban environment. - Invasion and Succession: Process by which new immigrants to a city move to and dominate or take over neighborhoods or sectors previously occupied by other immigrant groups. - Sense of Place: State of mind derived from the infusion of a place with meaning and emotion by remembering important events that occurred in that place or by labeling a place with a certain character. - Queer Theory: Theory defined by geographers Glen Elder, Lawrence Knopp, and Heidi Nast that highlights contextual nature of opposition to the heteronormative and focuses on the political engagement of ‘queers’ with the heteronormative. - Dowry Deaths: In the context of arranged marriages in India, disputes over the price to be paid by the family of the bride to the father of the groom (the dowry) have, in some extreme cases, led to the death of the bride. - Barrioization: The dramatic increase in Hispanic population in a given neighborhood.
Language Geography
Foundations: - Mutual Intelligibility: The ability of two people to understand each other when speaking. - Standard Language: The variant of a language that a country's political and intellectual elite seek to promote as the norm for use in schools, government, the media, and other aspects of public life. - Official Language: In multilingual countries, the language selected, often by the educated and politically powerful elite, to promote internal cohesion; usually the language of the courts and government. - Dialect: Local or regional characteristics of a language. - Isogloss: A geographic boundary within which a particular linguistic feature occurs.
Language Families and Evolution: - Language Families: Group of languages with a shared but fairly distant origin. - Subfamilies: Divisions within a language family where the commonalities are more definite and the origin is more recent. - Sound Shift: Slight change in a word across languages within a subfamily or through a language family from the present backward toward its origin. - Proto-Indo-European: Linguistic hypothesis which proposes the existence of an ancestral Indo-European language that is the hearth of the ancient Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit languages. - Backwards Reconstruction: The tracking of sound shifts and hardening of consonants "backward" toward the original language. - Extinct Language: Language without any native speakers. - Deep Reconstruction: Technique using the vocabulary of an extinct language to re-create the language that preceded the extinct language. - Nostratic: Language believed to be the ancestral language of Proto-Indo-European and other language families. - Language Divergence: When a language breaks into dialects due to lack of spatial interaction. - Language Convergence: The collapsing of two languages into one resulting from the consistent spatial interaction of peoples with different languages.
Theories of Diffusion: - Conquest Theory: One major theory of how Proto-Indo-European diffused into Europe which holds that the early speakers of Proto-Indo-European spread westward on horseback, overpowering earlier inhabitants and beginning the diffusion and differentiation of Indo-European tongues. - Agriculture Theory: Proposed that Proto-Indo-European diffused westward through Europe with the spread of agriculture. - Dispersal Hypothesis: Hypothesis that the Indo-European languages that arose from Proto-Indo-European were first carried eastward into Southwest Asia, next around the Caspian Sea, and then across the Russian-Ukrainian plains and into the Balkans.
Lingua Franca and Trade: - Lingua Franca: A language used among speakers of different languages for the purposes of trade and commerce. - Pidgin Language: When parts of two or more languages are combined in a simplified structure and vocabulary. - Creole Language: A language that began as a pidgin language but was later adopted as the mother tongue by a people in place of the original language.
Toponymy: The study of place names. - Post-colonial Toponyms: Changes in place names after independence (e.g., Bombay to Mumbai). - Memorial Toponyms: Names intended to honor a person or event (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd). - Commodified Toponyms: Buying/selling naming rights (e.g., Staples Center).
Geography of Religion
Classifications: - Monotheistic Religion: Belief system in which one supreme being is revered as creator and arbiter of all that exists in the universe. - Polytheistic Religion: Belief system in which multiple deities are revered as creators and arbiters of all that exists in the universe. - Animistic Religion: The belief that inanimate objects, such as hills, trees, rocks, rivers, and other elements of the natural landscape, possess souls and can help or hinder human efforts on Earth. - Universalizing Religion: A religion that attempts to appeal to all people, not just those living in a particular location (e.g., Christianity, Islam, Buddhism). - Ethnic Religion: A religion with a relatively concentrated spatial distribution whose principles are likely to be based on the physical characteristics of the particular location in which its adherents are concentrated (e.g., Judaism, Hinduism).
Major Religions: - Hinduism: One of the oldest religions, based on the Caste System and karma; concentrated in India. - Buddhism: Founded by Siddhartha Gautama; splintered from Hinduism; focus on enlightenment. - Judaism: Monotheistic ethnic religion; features Diaspora (spatial dispersion of a group) and Zionism (movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine). - Christianity: Universalizing monotheistic religion based on the teachings of Jesus. - Islam: Monotheistic religion based on the Quran; involves the Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca). - Sikhism: Monotheistic religion founded in northern India, combining elements of Hinduism and Islam.
Spatial and Social Aspects: - Secularism: The idea that ethical and moral standards should be formulated and adhered to for life on Earth, not to accommodate the prescriptions of a deity and promises of a comfortable afterlife. - Sacred Sites: Places or spaces people infuse with religious meaning. - Interfaith Boundaries: Boundaries between the world's major faiths. - Intrafaith Boundaries: Boundaries within a single major faith (e.g., Catholic vs. Protestant in Northern Ireland). - Religious Fundamentalism: Religious movement whose objectives are to return to the foundations of the faith and to influence state policy. - Religious Extremism: Religious fundamentalism carried to the point of violence. - Jihad: A personal or collective struggle on the part of Muslims to live up to the religious standards set by the Qu'ran.
Political Geography
Definitions: - State: A politically organized territory that is administered by a sovereign government and is recognized by a significant portion of the international community. - Nation: A tightly knit group of people possessing bonds of language, ethnicity, religion, and other shared cultural attributes. - Nation-state: A country whose population possesses a substantial degree of cultural homogeneity and unity. - Stateless Nation: A nation that does not have a state (e.g., Kurds, Palestinians). - Sovereignty: A principle of international law that embodies the exercise of government power over a population and territory. - Territoriality: In political geography, a country's or more local community's sense of property and attachment toward its territory, as expressed by its determination to keep it inviolable and strongly defended.
Geopolitical Theories: - Mercantilism: Promotion of commercialism and trade to enrich the state. - World-Systems Theory (Wallerstein): Proposes that social change in the developing world is inextricably linked to the economic activities of the developed world. Divided into Core, Periphery, and Semi-periphery. - Heartland Theory (Mackinder): Geopolitical hypothesis that any political power based in the heart of Eurasia could eventually gain enough strength to eventually dominate the entire world. - Rimland Theory (Spykman): Countered Heartland Theory by suggesting that the sea-bordering margins of Eurasia (the Rimland) held the key to world domination.
Boundaries and Governance: - Centripetal Forces: Forces that tend to unify a country — such as widespread commitment to a national culture, shared ideological objectives, and a common faith. - Centrifugal Forces: Forces that tend to divide a country — such as internal religious, linguistic, ethnic, or ideological differences. - Unitary Government: A centralized government and administration that exercises power equally over all parts of the state. - Federal Government: A central government where the total territory is divided into self-governing sub-units (e.g., states or provinces). - Devolution: The process whereby regions within a state demand and gain political strength and growing autonomy at the expense of the central government. - Gerrymandering: Redistricting for advantage, or the practice of dividing areas into electoral districts to give one political party an unfair advantage. - Boundary Types: - Geometric Boundary: Political boundary defined and delimited as a straight line or arc. - Physical-Political Boundary: Political boundary defined and delimited by a prominent physical feature in the natural landscape — such as a river or the crest ridges of a mountain range. - Genetic Classifications: - Antecedent: Existed before the cultural landscape emerged. - Subsequent: Developed with the cultural landscape. - Superimposed: Forced on an existing cultural landscape by outside powers (e.g., borders in Africa). - Relict: A boundary that no longer functions but can still be seen on the cultural landscape (e.g., Berlin Wall).
Supranationalism: A venture involving three or more nation-states involving formal political, economic, and/or cultural cooperation to promote shared objectives (e.g., UN, EU, NAFTA, OPEC).
Urban Geography
Urban Foundations: - First Urban Revolution: The innovation of the city, which occurred independently in five separate hearths: Mesopotamia, Nile River Valley, Indus River Valley, Huang He and Wei River Valleys, and Mesoamerica (and Peru). - Agricultural Surplus: Agricultural production in excess of that which the producer needs for his or her own sustenance and that of his or her family and which is then available for consumption by others. - Social Stratification: One of two components, together with agricultural surplus, which enables the formation of cities; the differentiation of society into classes based on wealth, power, production, and prestige. - Site: The internal physical attributes of a place. - Situation: The external locational attributes of a place; its relative location or regional position with reference to other non-local places.
Hierarchy and Structure: - Rank-Size Rule: In a model urban hierarchy, the idea that the population of a city or town will be inversely proportional to its rank in the hierarchy (e.g., if the largest city is million, the second largest is million, the third is million). - Primate City: A country's largest city—ranking atop the urban hierarchy—most expressive of the national culture and usually the capital city as well. - Central Place Theory (Christaller): Theory that explains the distribution of services, based on the fact that settlements serve as centers of market areas for services; uses hexagonal hinterlands. Employs Threshold (minimum market needed to keep a service in business) and Range (maximum distance people are willing to travel to use a service).
City Models: - Concentric Zone Model (Burgess): A structural model of the American central city that suggests the existence of five concentric land-use rings arranged around a common center (CBD). - Sector Model (Hoyt): Focuses on residential patterns explaining where the wealthy in a city choose to live. He argued that the city grows outward from the center, so a low-rent area could extend all the way from the CBD to the city's outer edge, creating zones which are shaped like a pie-piece. - Multiple Nuclei Model (Harris and Ullman): Recognizes that the CBD is losing its dominant position as the nucleus of the urban area. Several nuclei shape the city. - Griffin-Ford Model (Latin American City): Combines elements of Latin American culture and globalization by combining radial sectors and concentric zones. Includes a thriving CBD with a commercial spine. - McGee Model (Southeast Asian City): A model showing similar land-use patterns among the medium-sized cities of Southeast Asia; based on the port zone.
Modern Urban Issues: - Urban Sprawl: Unrestricted growth in many American urban areas of housing, commercial development, and roads over large expanses of land, with little concern for urban planning. - Gentrification: The rehabilitation of deteriorated, often abandoned, housing of low-income inner-city residents. - Redlining: A discriminatory real estate practice in North America in which members of minority groups are prevented from obtaining money to purchase homes or property in predominantly white neighborhoods. - Blockbusting: Rapid change in the racial composition of residential blocks in American cities that occurs when real estate agents and others stir up fears of neighborhood decline after encouraging people of color to move to previously white neighborhoods. - New Urbanism: Outlined by a group of architects, urban planners, and developers from over countries, an urban design that calls for development, urban revitalization, and suburban reforms that create walkable neighborhoods with a diversity of housing and jobs.
Development and Economic Geography
Measures and Models: - GNP (Gross National Product): The total value of all goods and services produced by a country's economy in a given year. - GDP (Gross Domestic Product): The total value of all goods and services produced within a country during a given year. - GNI (Gross National Income): Calculates the monetary worth of what is produced within a country plus income received from investments outside the country. - Dependency Ratio: The number of people under age and over age compared to the number of people active in the labor force. - Rostow’s Modernization Model: Maintains that all countries go through five stages of development: () Traditional, () Preconditions to takeoff, () Takeoff, () Drive to maturity, and () High mass consumption.
Economic Sectors: - Primary: Extraction of raw materials (agriculture, mining). - Secondary: Processing and manufacturing of raw materials. - Tertiary: Provision of services (retail, banking). - Quaternary: Information services, research, and management. - Quinary: High-level decision-making (CEOs, government leaders).
International Trade and Finance: - Neocolonialism: The entrenchment of the colonial order, such as trade and investment, under a new guise. - Structural Adjustment Loans: Loans granted by international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to countries in the periphery and the semi-periphery in exchange for certain economic and governmental reforms in that country. - Export Processing Zones (EPZ): Established by many countries in the periphery and semi-periphery where they offer favorable tax, regulatory, and trade arrangements to attract foreign trade and investment (e.g., Maquiladoras in Mexico, SEZs in China). - Microcredit Programs: Programs that provide small loans to poor people, especially women, to encourage development of small businesses.
Agriculture and Land Use
Foundations and Revolutions: - Root Crops: Crops that are reproduced by cultivating either the roots or cuttings from the plants (e.g., cassava, yams, sweet potatoes). - Seed Crops: Crop that is reproduced by cultivating the seeds of the plants (e.g., grains). - First Agricultural Revolution: Dating back years, achieved plant domestication and animal domestication. - Second Agricultural Revolution: Benefited from the Industrial Revolution; improved methods of cultivation, harvesting, and storage of farm produce. - Third Agricultural Revolution (Green Revolution): Currently in progress, development of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and high-yield seeds to increase food production.
Von Thunen Model: A model that explains the location of agricultural activities in a commercial, profit-making economy. A process of spatial competition allocates various farming activities into rings around a central market city, with profit capability the determining force in how far a crop locates from the market.
Cadastral Systems (Surveying): - Rectangular Survey System: Also called Township and Range system; used by the US Land Ordinance of to divide land into a grid. - Metes and Bounds: Natural features were used to demarcate irregular parcels of land. - Long-lot Survey System: Distinct regional approach to land division found in parts of Canada and Louisiana, where land is divided into narrow parcels stretching back from rivers, roads, or canals.
Global Agricultural Systems: - Subsistence Agriculture: Self-sufficient agriculture that is small scale and low technology and emphasizes food production for local consumption, not for trade. - Shifting Cultivation: Movement of farmers from one field to another (also known as Slash-and-burn or Swidden). - Monoculture: Dependence on a single agricultural commodity. - Agribusiness: General term for the businesses that provide the vast array of goods and services that support the agriculture industry. - Livestock Ranching: The raising of domesticated animals for the production of meat and byproducts. - Mediterranean Agriculture: Specialized farming that occurs only in areas where the dry-summer Mediterranean climate prevails (grapes, olives, citrus).
Industry, Globalization, and the Environment
Industrial Theories: - Weber’s Least Cost Theory: Model according to which the location of manufacturing establishments is determined by the minimization of three critical expenses: labor, transportation, and agglomeration. - Hotelling’s Locational Interdependence: Suggests competitors, in trying to maximize sales, will seek to limit each other's territory and eventually locate adjacent to each other in the center of their collective customer base. - Losch’s Zone of Profitability: Firms will identify a zone where income exceeds costs.
Production Patterns: - Fordist: A highly organized and specialized system for organizing industrial production and labor. Named after automobile producer Henry Ford, Fordist production features assembly-line production of standardized components for mass consumption. - Post-Fordist: World economic system characterized by a more flexible set of production practices in which goods are not mass-produced; instead, production has been accelerated and dispersed around the globe by multinational companies. - Just-in-time Delivery: Method of inventory management made possible by efficient transportation and communication systems, whereby companies keep on hand just what they need for near-term production, planning that what they need for longer-term production will arrive when needed.
Environmental Geography: - Anthropocene: Geologic epoch defined by the dominant influence of human activities on Earth's systems and climate. - Greenhouse Effect: The heating of Earth's surface as short-wave solar energy passes through the atmosphere, is transparent to it, but is absorbed as long-wave terrestrial radiation by environmental gasses (, ). - Global Environmental Protocols: - Montreal Protocol: International agreement to phase out CFCs (Chlorofluorocarbons) to protect the ozone layer. - Kyoto Protocol: Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. - Vienna Convention: For the protection of the ozone layer. - Renewable vs Nonrenewable Resources: Renewable resources can be regenerated (solar, wind); nonrenewable resources are present in finite amounts (fossil fuels). - Sustainable Development: Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Globalization Networks: - Washington Consensus: A set of economic policy prescriptions considered to constitute the "standard" reform package promoted for crisis-wracked developing countries. - Digital Divide: The gap between those who have ready access to computers and the internet, and those who do not. - Vertical/Horizontal Integration: Vertical integration is ownership by the same firm of a number of companies that exist at separate stages of the production process. Horizontal integration is ownership by the same firm of a number of companies that exist at the same level of the production process.