What Is Human Geography PDF

# What Is Human Geography? ## Geography, Inquiry, and Seeing The Light - Can you find your hometown or city on this image of the Earth at night? - Bigger cities and more urbanized or built-up areas shine the brightest. - Japan appears very brightly lit because the country is highly urbanized and h...

# What Is Human Geography? ## Geography, Inquiry, and Seeing The Light - Can you find your hometown or city on this image of the Earth at night? - Bigger cities and more urbanized or built-up areas shine the brightest. - Japan appears very brightly lit because the country is highly urbanized and has a high density of commercial and industrial activity. - Try to find the trans-Siberian railroad in Russia or interstates in the United States to see how night lights reveal human activity. - Why do the spaces of illumination vary from one continent to another? - What inferences can you make about well-lit places and settlement patterns, wealth, or environmental modification? - Geographers ask these and similar kinds of questions. - Embedded within such questions are concepts relating to location, place, space, region, scale, distribution, and interconnectedness. - Thus, geographical inquiry has its roots in a fundamental curiosity about the world. - How-ever, there is more to geographical inquiry than simply asking questions. - Geographers also step back when studying a topic or phenomenon and examine relationships between data in order to generate new insights about how the world works. - In this way, geographical inquiry and analysis contribute to the development of geographical theory-knowledge that advances our understanding of the social, spatial, regional, and ecological facets of our world. - Simply stated, this book is designed to introduce you to geographical inquiry and theory through a perspective that emphasizes people and the spatial variation in their activities around the world. - This chapter introduces human geography and illustrates how geographers approach their work, including some of the tools they use. ## Chapter Outline - **Introducing Human Geography** - Where Geographers Click: Careers in Geography - Nature and Culture - Cultural Landscapes and Regions - **Thinking Like a Human Geographer** - Place - Space - Spatial Diffusion - Spatial Interaction and Globalization - Geographic Scale - What a Geographer Sees: Cartographic Scale - **Geographical Tools** - Remote Sensing - Global Positioning System - Geographic Information Systems ## Learning Objectives 1. Describe the scope of geography and its main branches of study. 2. Outline four geographical approaches to the relationship between nature and culture. 3. Explain how geographers study landscapes and regions. ## Introducing Human Geography - Geography is a fascinating field that encourages exploration and discovery. - Geography majors go places in their careers, and they also have a lot of fun in the process. - Geography is a discipline that encourages people to find a topic or region they are passionate about and explore its many different dimensions. - Some examples of geography careers include music geographers, sports geographers, and medical geographers. - Some nongeographers rather naively thought that globalization would make geography irrelevant. - Globalization, they claimed, made the world smaller, more accessible, and therefore, easier to know and understand. - Meanwhile, geographers politely noted that globalization was not a new phenomenon and that geography had, to the contrary, taken on even greater relevance. - For example, understanding the consequences of global climate change for different countries, agricultural production, and coastal populations demands geographic awareness. - Similarly, we cannot solve the problem of poverty until we know better its geographic dimensions-where it occurs, how spatially extensive it is, whom it affects, and how it is related to access to resources, such as land, water, and housing. - Globalization has moved geography to center stage. - Simultaneously, improvements and innovations in technology have expanded the geographer's toolbox. - These new tools include ways of acquiring data about the Earth with improved GPS receivers, higher resolution satellite imagery, and new ways of visualizing this information with virtual globes such as Google Earth ## Where Geographers Click: Careers in Geography - **Human Geography**: a branch of geography centered on the study of people, places, spatial variation in human activities, and the relationship between people and the environment. ## Thinking Like a Human Geographer - **Place**: A locality distinguished by specific physical and social characteristics. Each place can be identified by its absolute location, site, and situation. - **Site**: The physical characteristics of a place, such as its topography, vegetation, and water resources. - **Situation**: The geographic context of a place, including its political, economic, social, or other characteristics. ## The Scope of Geography: The Two Main Branches - **Physical Geography**: focuses on environmental dynamics, such as the study of water quality, soil erosion, and forest management. - **Human Geography**: focuses on social dynamics, such as the study of economic development, language diffusion, and ethnic identity. ## The Scope of Geography: Three Broad Areas of Emphasis 1. **Physical Geography**: focuses on the study of alpine soils, landscapes, and environments. 2. **Human Geography**: focuses on tourism trends and patterns of trade as well as business location data. 3. **Human Geography**: focuses on interconnectedness of people and the environment. ## Nature and Culture - What do the words nature and culture mean to you? - At first, they seem straightforward, but the longer you think about them the more you realize that they both have a variety of different meanings. - **Nature**: can refer to the intrinsic qualities of a person or to the outdoors. - **Culture**: can refer to taste in the fine arts or to customary beliefs and practices. - Geographer Noel Castree calls nature "a promiscuous concept." - Very broadly speaking, **nature** is the physical environment and is external to people and does not include them. - **People**: because of their capacity for intellectual and moral development, are the bearers of culture and it is culture that distinguishes people from nature. - When understood in this way, these concepts yield a dualistic framework that sets nature and culture in opposition to one another. - This **nature-culture dualism** has had a significant impact on ways of thinking about social difference. - During the 18th century, some European scholars used this distinction between nature and culture to argue that it was the human capacity for culture that made people superior to nature. - This line of reasoning was subsequently extended and used to rank societies. - So, for example, non-Westerners were seen as being closer to nature than so-called civilized and cultured Westerners, and therefore inferior. - Although the origins of these ideas are difficult to unravel, they matter because the way we see human societies in relation to nature and to one another affects not just how we use the environment but also how we interact with others. - Today, many geographers and other social scientists reject the **nature-culture dualism** because of the way it separates nature from culture. - These scholars stress instead that people-in spite of their capacity for culture-are very much a part of nature. - This perspective is central to **cultural ecology**, an important subfield within human geography that studies the relationship between people and the natural environment. ## How to Conceptualize the Relationship Between People and Nature - **Environmental Determinism**: The position that natural factors control the development of human physiological and mental qualities. - This approach traced the intellectual roots of environmental determinism in Western thought to the ancient Greeks, who speculated that human diversity resulted from both climatic and locational factors. - Examples of this approach include plateau environments seeming to produce people who were docile; people with the sharpest minds came from temperate areas rather than hot, humid environments or extremely cold climates. - **Possibilism**: The view that people use their creativity to decide how to respond to the conditions or constraints of a particular natural environment. - **Humans as Modifiers of the Earth**: rejects environmental determinism and emphasizes instead human impacts, specifically the ability of people to modify their surroundings. - **The Earth as a Dynamic, Integrated System**: sees people as intricately connected with the natural world. - Two key principles sum up this approach: - The Earth functions as a system made up of diverse components that interact in complex ways. - The Earth is constantly changing as a result of natural and human-induced events. - Today many geographers and other scientists agree that the extent of human impact on Earth systems has been so profound that we now live in the Anthropocene, or the new age of humankind. - In this view, people are understood to be modifiers of the Earth, but on a level much greater than ever before because the impacts of human activity on the environment are now global. ## Cultural Landscapes and Regions - **Cultural Landscape**: a rich repository of information about cultural beliefs and practices. - **Regional analysis**: involves studying the distinctiveness of regions. - **Formal Region**: an area that possesses one or more unifying physical or cultural traits. - **Functional Region**: an area unified by a specific economic, political, or social activity. - Each functional region has at least one node, usually the business, office, or entity that coordinates the activity. - **Perceptual Region**: derives from people's sense of identity and attachment to different areas. The borders of perceptual regions tend to be highly variable since people often have very personal reasons for perceiving an area a certain way. ## Culture: A Social Creation - The concept of **culture** is an abstract concept, not a material item or collection of cultural traits. - Culture as a system of shared beliefs and practices is dynamic rather than fixed. - It is a complex system that is shaped by people and, in return, influences them. - The concept of culture is contested, as illustrated by "culture wars." - Culture is a complex system where the relationship between people and culture is dynamic. - Culture shapes people, and people, in turn, create and express culture. - It is important to note that the visible and tangible expressions of culture are important, but they need to be understood in their dynamic context-in relation to prevailing economic, social, political, and other factors. - The concept of culture as a way of life fails to recognize other crucial aspects of culture. ## Spatial Variation and Spatial Association - **Spatial Variation**: the degree to which phenomena share similar distributions. - **Spatial Association**: indicates that two or more phenomena share similar distributions. - **Spatial Diffusion**: The movement of a phenomenon, such as an innovation, information, or an epidemic, across space and over time. - There are four main types of spatial diffusion: - **Relocation Diffusion**: migration is the most common type of relocation diffusion. - **Contagious Diffusion**: spreads randomly from one person to another. - **Hierarchical Diffusion**: occurs in a top-down or rank-order manner. - **Stimulus Diffusion**: Occurs when the spread of an idea, a practice, or other phenomenon prompts a new idea or innovation. ## Spatial Interaction and Globalization - **Spatial Interaction**: the connections and relations that develop among places and regions as a result of the movement of people, goods, or information. - **Globalization**: the greater interconnectedness and interdependence of people and places around the world. - There are three factors that influence spatial interaction: - **Complementarity** - **Transferability** - **Intervening Opportunities** ## Time-Space Convergence - **Time-Space Convergence**: is a process of reducing the friction of distance. - Technological advancements in transportation and communication have made it possible to reduce the friction of distance. ## Geographic Scale - Two classes of geographic scales exist: - **Map or Cartographic Scale** - **Observational or Methodological Scale** - **Map or cartographic scale**: expresses the ratio of distances on the map to distances on the Earth. - **Observational or methodological scale**: refers to the level(s) of analysis used in a specific project or study. - **Scale** also applies to **Personal Space**. ## Geographic Tools - We can see the world through the lens of geographic tools, such as remote sensing, GPS, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). - **Remote Sensing**: using instruments to detect Earth-related phenomena and to provide information about them. - **Global Positioning System (GPS)** uses a constellation of artificial satellites, radio signals, and receivers to determine the absolute location of people, places, or features on Earth. - **Geographic Information System (GIS)** is a combination of hardware and software that enables the input, management, analysis, and visualization of georeferenced data. - There are several criticisms of GIS: - You need to purchase the necessary hardware and software to use a GIS. - GIS reinforces one power divide in society such that only those individuals and institutions that have the requisite financial resources can purchase and use GIS. - GIS promotes a detached and strongly Western view of the world. ## The Future of Geographic Tools - Geographical tools will continue to evolve and help us visualize the world in new ways. ## Key Terms - **Actor-Network Theory** 5 - **Complementarity** 13 - **Cultural Ecology** 4 - **Cultural Landscape** 5 - **Culture** 6 - **Distance Decay** 15 - **Distribution** 11 - **Environmental Determinism** 4 - **Formal Region** 6 - **Functional Region** 6 - **Geographic Information System (GIS)** 21 - **Geographic Scale** 17 - **Global Positioning System (GPS)** 18 - **Globalization** 13 - **Human Geography** 2 - **Intervening Opportunity** 13 - **Nature** 4 - **Nature-Culture Dualism** 4 - **Perceptual Region** 6 - **Place** 8 - **Possibilism** 5 - **Regional Analysis** 6 - **Remote Sensing** 18 - **Site** 8 - **Situation** 8 - **Space** 10 - **Spatial Association** 11 - **Spatial Diffusion** 11 - **Spatial Interaction** 13 - **Spatial Variation** 10 - **Sustainability** 6 - **Time-Space Convergence** 17 - **Transferability** 13 ## Critical and Creative Thinking Questions 1. Applying what you have learned about diffusion, is it feasible to close borders between countries when an epidemic appears to be intensifying and becoming global in scale? 2. Do national parks and protected areas reflect a nature-culture dualism? Explain your reasoning. 3. Do you agree with the actor-network theory? Discuss your answer. 4. Propose a GIS project and identify the spatial and attribute data you would need to conduct it. 5. Plan a research project that would enable you to cartographically depict the boundaries of a perceptual region. 6. Keep a geographical diary in which you record the times and the places you go during a week. (You can also do this by collecting waypoints if you have a GPS-enabled cell phone or other GPS receiver.) Use the Internet to find a suitable base map and plot out your time-space paths, using this figure as an example. If you know how, you could even make a mash-up and include photos of your favorite places.