Human Geography PDF

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO HUMAN GEOGRAPHY INTRODUCTION Geography is the study of where things are located on the earth’s surface and the reasons for the location. The word geography was invented by the ancient Greek scholar Eratosthenes based on two Greek words. “Geo” which means, Earth and “Graphy” m...

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO HUMAN GEOGRAPHY INTRODUCTION Geography is the study of where things are located on the earth’s surface and the reasons for the location. The word geography was invented by the ancient Greek scholar Eratosthenes based on two Greek words. “Geo” which means, Earth and “Graphy” means, to write. It is therefore the study of the earth and its lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena. Geography is about occurrence of events in space and over a period of time. It can therefore be defined as the spatio-temporal analysis of earth’s features. HUMAN GEOGRAPHY Human geography involves the study of people and their activities and structures, whether economic, social, cultural or political in their spatial contexts Human geography also encompasses the ways in which people interact with the natural environment. Human geography began to emerge as a distinct subject area within geography as a whole towards the end of the 19th century. The early studies of human beings in relationship to places tended to follow one of two approaches. The first was through regional geography and the second was through environmental determinism. SCOPE OF HUMAN GEOGRAPHY Human geography is that part of geography involving the study of people and their activities and structures, whether economic, social cultural or political in their spatial contexts. It also seeks to understand the reasons for the spatial distribution of people and their activities. Human Geography is built around five key concerns: location, place, interactions between people and the environment, movement, and region. Location: How are human activities distributed across the face of the earth? Location is the position of anything on the earth’s surface. Location helps to answer the basic questions “Where is it” or “Where are things located?” Human beings and human activities (for example industry, agriculture, cities, political boundaries, and populations) are rarely scattered randomly over the earth’s surface. Human geographers believe that there is an order to the uneven ways in which human beings have inhabited the planet. Place: Place describes the physical and human characteristics of a location that give meaning to and set it apart from other locations. What is it like in particular locations? Human geographers are also interested in finding out what locations are actually like to live and work in and to visit. How have human beings converted this or that patch of the earth’s surface into a home? Human geographers examine how human culture (population, economy, government, race, religion, 1 ethnicity, class, gender, language, and so on) develops differently in different places. They believe that human beings attach emotions, significances, and values to places and in so doing turn empty locations and environments into intensely meaningful places. They use the idea of the cultural landscape to capture the ways in which human cultures etch their imprints onto the face of the earth. Human/Environment Interaction: What is the relationship between humans and their environment? In making earth home, human beings necessarily enter into relationships with the natural environment. Human geographers examine how societies use natural resources (for example, soils, water, oil, and minerals), how in so doing they often pollute the environment (for example, effect climate change, poison rivers, and salinate soils), and how natural hazards (such as earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, and droughts) can become social, political, economic, and cultural disasters. Movement: How and why are places connected with one another? Societies are increasingly becoming interconnected with one another, meaning that it makes sense to study places only in relation to the wider networks in which they are enmeshed. Human geographers use the idea of diffusion to track the spread of humans and their activities and ideas from a particular origin or a hearth. Relocation diffusion refers to the physical relocation of people (migrants, refugees, and tourists), pollutants, trade, capital, disease, and aid, from a central hearth. Expansion diffusion refers to the spread of an idea, piece of information, or culture from one place to another. HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF HUMAN GEOGRAPHY GEOGRAPHY BEFORE THE 19TH CENTURY In this section, we will follow the steps of the founders of geography from its cradle. The ancient Greeks made the first major contribution to the development of geography. Scholarly writers produced topographical description of places in the known world discussing both natural conditions and the culture and the way of life of the people who lived there. The best known of these was Herodotus. He was first and foremost a historian, in fact the father of history. He placed historical events in geographic settings with explanations. Eratosthenes invented the word geography. Romans such as Strabo continued with the development of geography. His study Geographica is a classic piece of work, very important in geography. The Middle ages were a dark period for the development of science in Europe. Arab geographers such as Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) established the foundation in historical geography. The Chinese used co-ordinates and triangulations to produce beautiful maps of China and neighbouring countries. The Renaissance brought about a renewed in geographical knowledge of ancient times towards the 19th century. This was a time the first geography departments were beginning to open in universities and geographers were looking to establish the discipline as a reputable academic discipline with distinct approach and methodology. In particular they were seeking to overcome the geography’s image as being through its identification with exploration merely the handmaid 2 of imperial expansion and repository of traveler’s tales that hindered its acceptance as an academic discipline for most of the previous centuries. GEOGRAPHY AFTER THE 19TH CENTURY Our focus on this section is on geography bordering the period after the 19th century. The early studies of human beings in relationship to places tended to follow one of two approaches. The first was through regional approach, which though distinct from human geography was very closely associated with it in the early years. Regional geographers sought to identify regions with a character of their own that would distinguish it from other regions, and to study the factors giving rise to such regional variations. Regional geography examines the differences and similarities among the various regions of the earth, especially the combinations of physical and cultural features that make each region unique For many geographers, like Richard Hartshorne in the United States, the development of regional geography was important because it provides a uniquely geographical object of study. It also provided a framework synthesizing the study of human and physical aspects of geography, without imputing any directionality. For these and various reasons, regional geography in a variety of guises formed the basis of most geographical teaching, particularly in Europe, during the first half of the 20th century. The second approach developed by some early geographers notably in the United States was environmental determinism or simply determinism. The physical environment played an important role in regional geography, for example the soil and climate obviously the type of agriculture practiced, while the presence of large coal deposits might have an important effect on the location of industrial activity. Determinist however elevated the role of the environment to the dominant one. Influenced particularly by the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin, they argued that physical conditions determined the activities not only carried out by people but the nature of the people themselves. The German geographer Friedrich Ratzel is considered to have originated the idea of environmental determinism but it was taken further by several American geographers, notably Ellen Churchill Semple and Ellsworth Huntington, who argued that the physical environment affected the character of people as well. From such arguments, they and others, derived a number of essentially racist conclusions about peoples from different parts of the world. In Europe the leading geographers largely rejected determinism. Nonetheless, the influence of the environment remained very important. Geographers such as Paul Vida de la Blache, an influential figure in regional and human geography in France, or H. J. Fleure in Britain evolved the concept of environmental possibilism. By Possibilism they meant that the environment constraints human activities without determining them, while in return, human beings affect the physical environment. 3 The debate between possibilists and determinists was one of the principal characteristics of human geography throughout the decades of the century. However, by the 1940s, for a variety of reasons, including lack of academic riguor and the rise of Nazism in Germany, which utilized deterministic arguments, environmental determinism had been discredited. Notes In European history, the Middle Ages, or Medieval period, lasted from the 5th to the 15th century. It began with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. Early Medieval Period (Also known as Dark Ages)- 5th-13th Century Late Medieval Period (also known as Renaissance) -14th -16th Century Geography in the 20th Century During the first half of the 20th century, separate studies of the physical and human aspects of regions had led to the development of systematic geography. Systematic geography focuses on individual phenomena and looks at its spatial variation in all parts of the globe It involved the development of sub-disciplines in within geography so that for example economic, social and political geography began to form areas of study in their own right. As the various sub-disciplines of human geography evolved they also sub-divided into industrial and agricultural geography. However, even though different specializations were occurring, the essential elements of geography remained much the same and during the 1930s and early post- war years: there was a period of some stability in the evolution of the subject. This stability gradually disintegrated in the 1950s as there were attempts to uplift geography’s low reputation into a scientific discipline. Criticisms were increasingly leveled at regional geography for being based purely on description and focusing on the unique aspects of regions at 4 the expense of developing general theories. The systematic branches of human geography had made more attempts to develop useful generalizations but were still seen as not having academic respectability of other social sciences like economics or psychology. In particular, it was felt, human geography was being hampered by lack of scientific theoretical basis. This criticism led to the rise of a new approach to human geography that rapidly came to be the dominant methodology. The main characteristics of this approach were influenced by logical positivism, a philosophical approach that identify knowledge with science and which emphasize empiricism and verifiability. The resultant methodology, largely borrowed from other disciplines, involves using models (simplified versions of reality) and statistical analysis to test the verified hypotheses with the aim of establishing universal laws and being able to predict, in the ways that, say, physics has laws and can predict events subject to those laws. Secondly, the focus of the new methodology was location. In this sense, location refers to the position of phenomena in space and the interactions between them. Hence, this approach to human geography came to be known as locational analysis or spatial analysis. Because of the central importance models and mathematical techniques in the new methodology, the description is not strictly accurate. In contrast to earlier approaches to human geography, locational analysis ignored the natural environment. In the models constructed to simplify the complexities of real life and allow underlying processes to be analyzed and understood, the earth was considered to be uniform, that is, flat and with no differentiating features to make one part of the surface more attractive for human activities than another. Such an area is known as an isotropic plain. Most of the initial work utilizing such models was carried out in the United States, where locational analysis was spearheaded. It was largely inspired by the work of earlier researchers, few of whom were geographers and most of whom were German: their work was first translated into English at this time. The most influential of the model developed by these early researchers include: the agricultural land use model proposed by German landowner Johann Heinrich Von Thunen as far back as 1826: the urban development model first developed by the American geographer E.D. Burgees in 1924 and the subsequent modification to it by Homer Hoyt (1939) and Harris and Ullman (1945): and the central place theory of settlement location developed by the German economist Walter Christaller in 1933, and the similar but more complex model developed by the German economist August Losch in 1940. Although many researchers in locational analysis tended to focus at first on empirical work to refine and provide exemplars of the above models, much original work of Torsten Hagerstrand in Sweden on diffusion theory and that of Peter Haggett in Britain on central place theory and systems of analysis. Although physical geographers also adopted modelling and quantitative techniques at this time, the focus of human geography on locational analysis meant that, the long standing trend towards separation of the two aspects of geography, which regional geography had attempted to overcome was celebrated. For the first time human geography became divorced from the physical environment. The separation was most marked in the United States, but was also to be found in Europe notably the United Kingdom. 5 Even so, many geographers especially human geographers, felt that the new approach provided the discipline with a unique field of study capable of replacing regional geography as a spatial science. The methodology for spatial science was shared with other science, and it was therefore as rigorous as they were but the spatial element that geography could be distinguished from them in a way that, say, an earlier transport geographer could not readily be distinguished from a transport economist. The use of models in geography was initially criticized because of the absence of any environmental element. A more telling criticism of locational analysis models, however, relates to their dependence on the totally “rational being”, whose decision are entirely determined by economic rationality (see economics, history of neoclassical economics). Thus the least-cost journey is always taken; the cheapest goods or service is always purchased. Unlike environmental factors, which were ignored, the rational being was an essential ingredient of locational analysis. One criticism of locational model was the development of new approaches known as behavioural geography, which emphasized the nature of the decision-making process and the role of the decision maker. The identification of individual preferences values and indeed prejudices assumed great importance in attempts to understand location. Such studies gained greatest prominence in investigation of industrial location but were not confined to this area. Criticism of locational analysis, however, continued mainly because it was too scientific and impersonal. Even within behavioral geography the place, their feeling and their aspirations was not a consideration. At the same time during the later 1960s and into the 1970s in the world at large the growth of the civil right movement, feminism, and greater attention was being paid to inequalities in life and to what came to be known as social justice. The influence of these development so many, particularly young, human geographers led to changes in evolution of the discipline that continued to the present. 6