Human Geography: An Introduction PDF

what is human geography?\ \ Michael mercying, have you ever stopped to think about where the more than 8 billion people\ \ live on this earth\ \ and why they choose to live in those places? Or have you thought about the connections between culture and the places\ \ people live?\ \ Have you ever wond...

what is human geography?\ \ Michael mercying, have you ever stopped to think about where the more than 8 billion people\ \ live on this earth\ \ and why they choose to live in those places? Or have you thought about the connections between culture and the places\ \ people live?\ \ Have you ever wondered why some countries use more resources than others, or how the events of one part of the world\ \ connect with others?\ \ These are the types of questions that human geography tries to answer. Human geographical inquiry examines how people are spatially distributed and how people and places interact at its root, human geographical inquiry is all about asking questions, developing deep understanding and interpreting the importance of people places and the interactions between them. This chapter introduces human geography. It explores the concepts that are essential to becoming more literate in geography, and it illustrates the tools that geographers use to communicate spatial information, learning object, 1.1 colorful houses on a mountain cliff, homes and businesses of the village of Manarola cling to the coast. Being geographically aware profoundly changes the way we perceive and experience the world around us. Consider the long term drought conditions affecting California between 2011 and 2017 again in 2018 and in 2022 they are the region\'s longest and harshest on record. Geographers have a unique appreciation and understanding of how environmental conditions, eg weather and climate and human practices, eg agriculture and low density suburban development combine to make some areas more susceptible to adverse environmental conditions, such as a drought, and those that are geographically aware realize that a drought in California has far reaching consequences on people across the United States, Canada and beyond, fruits, nuts and vegetables grown in California are widely exported. So while the drought is happening only in California, its impacts are much broader. Consumers throughout the United States and in Canada, China, Japan and elsewhere, have to pay more at the grocery store for their strawberries, almonds and spinach. At the same time, farmers in Mexico, Peru, Spain and China, among other places, have adjusted their farming practices to try to compete in a changing global market. Geographers see and understand the complex economic connections between widespread regions that globalization has created. Thus they can also see how a drought in California affects everything from the types of crops grown in Peru to the price of almonds in grocery stores in Canada, a bridge over extremely to see other ways geography enhances our ability to understand the world. Compare two maps of the world, figure 1.11\ \ from the beginning of the 20th century and\ \ one from today. These maps look very different. The Earth itself has not changed much, but the division of territory land into countries, and the geopolitical relationships between countries have changed significantly over this period. In 1900 the British Empire\'s political and economic dominance was beginning to decline as the United States stood poised to become the next superpower. Over the course of the 20th century, at least three important trends transformed the map and relationships between the countries that appear on it. Many former colonies, especially in Africa and Asia, gain their independence regional political and economic association such as the European Union, eu emerged alongside the South American Common Market, MERCOSUR and the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, among others. Toward the end of the 20th century, China began rising as a challenger to the century long economic and political dominance of the United States, with its large population and rapid economic growth over the past three decades, China is now the world\'s second largest economy, after the US, and is poised to become the largest by 2030 China\'s military is now the second largest in The world and is more deeply involved in political situations around the globe than ever before a political figure, 1.1 a political map of figure, 1.1 B, political in the early 21st century, to a degree never seen before. People and Places are interconnected through their economies, political institutions, cultural norms, social networks and physical environments, and in many other ways, the combined effects of these three geopolitical changes, decolonization, globalization and the rise and fall of global superpowers are felt throughout the world at all levels. Our awareness of and familiarity with such events and issues enhance our ability to understand our world and our place within it. Expanding our geographic awareness helps us become better global citizens. This textbook introduces you to the issues, concepts and theories of human geography, and it aims to enhance your geographical awareness, to help you understand and develop innovative ideas and solutions to solving the world\'s human and environmental challenges. 1.1 defining human video, one please note the word geography. The word geography is derived from the Greek words geo meaning the earth and graphy meaning to write about or describe. Therefore, the direct translation is to write about the Earth. But geography is not just the description of the earth and a factual understanding of its countries, capitals and natural resources. Geography is much more about explaining the underlying causes of the observed spatial distributions of people, places and natural phenomena in analyzing the significance of those patterns, geography is key to understanding a complex, interconnected world that is changing faster than ever due to globalization. Geography comprises two main branches, physical geography and human geography. Physical Geography focuses on the natural or physical environment and is primarily concerned with the patterns and processes of natural phenomena, such as severe weather, landforms, earthquakes and volcanoes, as well as soil, plant and animal ecology. Therefore, physical geographers are interested in patterns of topography, landforms, processes resulting in different climatic conditions and the impacts of natural hazards such as earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunami. Please note human geography and contrast, focuses on the study of the social, human or built environment. Human Geography is the study of where people and activities are found on the Earth\'s surface and the reasons why they are located where they are. Human Geography includes the study of patterns and processes of human phenomena, such as the development and expansion of urban and rural settlements, food production, patterns of cultural activity, eg, language and religion, population change and\ \ human geography. In contrast, focuses on the study of the social human or built environment. Human Geography is the study of where people and activities are found on the Earth\'s surface and the reasons why they are located where they are. Human Geography includes the study of patterns and processes of human phenomena, such as the development and expansion of urban and rural settlements, food production, patterns of cultural activity, eg, language and religion, population change and geopolitical relations between different countries. Human geographers, therefore, are primarily interested in cities and urban design, economic activity, population health and the interactions between people and the natural environment, while the title of this textbook suggests it is primarily concerned with human geography, the natural environment and how humans interact with that environment, are also often factors that warrant our attention, and they are the primary focus of chapter two. What is where? Why there and why care? It is often very difficult to summarize any discipline with a meaningful one sentence definition. However, in the case of human geography, the American geographer Charles kritzner suggested a useful definition in the form of three closely related questions, what is where? Why there and why care? Britzner, 2002\ \ this concise definition very effectively summarizes the three main forms of geographic inquiry. First, all forms of human geographic inquiry begin with the spatial question, where, fundamentally, we want to describe the location of the phenomenon and the conditions that exist there. Second, once the basic environmental, regional and spatial facts are known, the geographer focuses on understanding or explaining why there this question leads one to question or to try to identify the underlying causes or processes that resolve in the observed patterns. Finally, the third question, Why care draws attention to the pragmatic nature of human geography. Geographic facts matter because they reflect and affect human life. Box, 1.1 this is true of any geographic fact, whether it is something as seemingly mundane as the distance between your home and the nearest convenience store, or something more serious, like the impact of a drought or civil war on people, either locally or more regionally, these three questions and the underlying approaches of description, explanation and interpretation are fundamental to how human geographers and this textbook approach geographic inquiry, examining the stop, what is, why there? Why care? This is one small example of how geographers approach a geographical perspective. One aspect that unites both human and physical geographers is what we refer to as the geographical spatial perspective. This is a few or an approach that is shared by all geographers, all historians, regardless of whether they study political, social or economic history, approach their study of the past with a historical or temporal perspective. It is this shared use of a temporal perspective, where chronology of events is paramount that defines what historians do and the stories they tell, irrespective of their subject area, all historians are interested in the sequencing of past events as a discipline history is not about memorizing dates and facts, but about Using the knowledge of past events to make sense of what happened in the past and understand how that is relevant to today. Similarly, geography is unified in its focus on the arrangement distribution of places and phenomena. In other words, geography is all about how places and phenomena are laid out, organized and arranged on the Earth\'s surface. We can subdivide the interests of human geographers into different areas, such as political, economic, cultural, population, or even environmental but what unifies all these sub disciplines of geography is the common concern about how things vary across the Earth\'s surface. How is population distributed around the world? How do economic activities vary in different parts of the planet? How do cultural practices vary from one location to the next? The View or approach to answering these types of questions is what we call the geographical or spatial perspective. Geographers view phenomena and stop to reflect, inquire or think about their spatial distribution. So while understanding change over time is central to a historian, understanding geographical variation, change over space is key for the geographer, human geography in particular, and geography in general, then, is a discipline defined by its shared perspective. The primary objective of this introductory chapter is to introduce you to the basic or fundamental concepts that human geographers use to better understand our world. These concepts are loosely organized into two sections, space, place and region, which introduces geographic concepts around locations and interaction communication and movement, which introduces ideas around spatial distributions and movement within and between locations, 1.2 concepts, space, place and region many academic disciplines, including geography, use plain language terms or concepts in specialized ways. For example, people commonly use the word element in ways that do not match its specific definition within the discipline of chemistry. In geography, the simple term space, place and region have specific meanings that all geographers and those studying geography need to understand. The following subsections define and describe these key concepts which are crucial to your geographic literacy space as outlined previously, what differentiates geography from other disciplines is its perspective. At the core of this perspective is the concept of space. In this context, space does not refer to outer space. Rather, it refers to the aerial extent of something on the Earth\'s surface. Geographers measure or consider space in two different ways, absolute space and relative space. Absolute space is defined as the amount of space that can objectively be measured with definable boundaries and remain stable over time. For example, the absolute space for a residential home may be defined by its property line. The property line has a fixed location, so the aerial extent of the property is objective and not open to interpretation. In addition, aerial extent can readily be measured, often in units of square meters in urban areas or hectares in rural areas. This conceptualization of space forms the backbone of spatial analysis and map making, themes that are discussed in greater detail later in this chapter. In contrast to absolute space, relative space is subjective and based on a person\'s perception of the space. Relative space is subject to continuous change and to differences in interpretation. Consider, again, a residential home listings of houses or apartments for rent may use subjective words to describe them, cozy, for example, will mean different things to different people. An undergraduate student may find a cozy, 600 square foot apartment, spacious and comfortable, especially compared to a shared dorm room, while a middle aged professional may perceive the same apartment as cramped and small to some degree, as you can see, our understandings of relative space are influenced by how we perceive the world, and this in turn, influences our daily interactions with our immediate environment. The role of perception in shaping our everyday experiences, and the role of perceptual or mental maps in guiding us through our environments are explored next a row of three small sloped houses a man to resident perception. Central to this understanding of relative space is the idea of perception. Geographers recognize that people\'s perceptions of their environment vary depending on their knowledge and experience. For example, the first time you visited your university or college campus, you may have been overwhelmed at the size of the campus and confused about how to travel from place to place. You likely used main roads and paths to travel from one building to another, but as you spent more time on campus, your routes changed. You identified shortcuts through or around buildings. As you spend more time on campus, your perception of the size of the campus and the distance between buildings changes, which influences how you navigate your way through the campus itself does not decrease in size or change in any objective way. Rather, your perception of the campus changes with your experiences. We all know someone, perhaps a parent, grandparent or friend, who takes a particular route between two places that most people would agree is not the fastest or most efficient path, however, that person perceives that route to be the best. This is an example of how people\'s perceptions of their environments, rather than how the environment really is, guide their travel through it mental maps. Have you ever traveled to a new or unfamiliar city or neighborhood and developed a mental image of the space as you traveled in it. Geographers refer to those images as mental perceptual maps. Our mental maps of unfamiliar places are often very different from reality. As our knowledge of or experience with those places increases. So too does the accuracy of those mental maps. We all have mental maps, but some of us can translate those mental maps to physical maps much more accurately and easily than others can. You can test this hypothesis sometime by sketching a map of your school campus, asking your friends to do the same and then comparing your sketches with an official map. If you currently lack the ability to translate your mental maps to physical maps, this does not make you any less of a geographer. This is a skill that many geographers develop over time as they learn to think and look at the space around them in a different way scale geographers study phenomena from a variety of perspectives, from local to global. Geographic scale, or spatial scale is the relationship between the area of the earth being studied and the area of the Earth as a whole. A global scale means that the area being studied closely approximates the entire Earth, whereas local scale means that the geographers focus is on only a small proportion of the Earth, such as a country, city, neighborhood or smaller feature. Of course, there are many variants between these two extreme perspectives, which include Continental, national and regional scales. It is important to examine a phenomenon like population migration using a global perspective or scale as it may involve people moving from North Africa or the Middle East to Europe or North America. Similarly, issues of climate change, globalization or geopolitics are others that may be best assessed at a global scale. Conversely, issues of neighborhood change as a result of gentrification or changes in local political writing, boundaries would best be examined using a local scale. Location. Location is another key concept that is related to space and place, but it is subtly different. Location refers to a particular position within space and on the Earth\'s surface that usually does not change with time. And just like space, location can be described in absolute or relative terms, and also by name. Nominal locations absolute locations typically use a system of reference points to identify a precise location in space. Typically, a location is pinpointed on a global grid system, such as the one that utilizes longitude and latitude relative location. In contrast, refers to the location of one place or site using other locations as a reference point. For example, the location of Edmonton might be identified by its spatial relationship with Calgary. EG, Calgary is 300 kilometers to the south or some other commonly known location. EG, Fort McMurray or Jasper National Park. Nominal locations or toponyms refer to a location by its common name. For example, toponyms may include city names, eg Halifax, beneath neighborhood names, eg Rosedale, Chinatown, or building names, eg the parliament buildings, CN Tower, as discussed in box 1.2 and 1.3 toponyms are sometimes contested, and they can change over time. For example, Calgary was\ \ previously known as mocking sisika, peyote to the Siksika peoples who inhabited the plains adjacent to the Bow River prior to European colonization, examining the issues box one, the beginning, first indige, physical plant, economic event, optimistic, pessimistic, place names that comprise words of controversy. Toponyms are an aerial view of a landscape, the rocky landscape of IKEA, Walmart. In other cases, toponyms have been changed a careful in the news, but place names can have important symbolic symbol in the way we describe a location depends on the perspective and experience of the person or people that we are communicating with. Take the Cabot Tower atop Signal Hill in St John\'s as an example to illustrate situations in which we may want to provide an absolute, relative or nominal location. If you are working at the St John\'s International Airport and an engineer needed the specific location of the Cabot Tower for their flight tracking analyzes, it would be best to provide them with an absolute location of the tower. The location would likely be provided in the form of the global grid coordinates such as latitude and longitude. IE, 47 degrees, 37 07 N, 52 degrees. 45 09, W, providing the engineer with the exact coordinates of the tower is necessary in this case, but not in all cases, as you will see in the two following examples, a painting landed Cabot Cabot Tower, if you are meeting friends who have never been to the Cabot Tower in St John\'s, you might provide them with a relative location. In this case, you could tell them the tower is a top Signal Hill which can be seen from almost anywhere in downtown St John\'s. If you provided your friends with just the latitude and longitude coordinates, you would not be very helpful. In this case, the relative location would likely be one of the best ways to communicate the tower\'s location. Lastly, if you were meeting friends who are familiar with St John\'s, you could simply provide them with the nominal location by saying that you will meet them at the Cabot Tower, the name of the tower itself. In this case, some familiarity with the city and its places is critical to your meeting with your friends. In all three examples, the location of Cabot Tower does not change, but the way you choose to communicate the location, absolute, relative, nominal, changes depending on the experience and spatial knowledge of the person with whom you are communicating sight and situation. Now that we know the different ways to describe a location, we also need to understand two key components of a location, site and situation. Site refers to the physical attributes or characteristics of a location, such as climate, topography, eg, mountainous features and elevation, and it is closely connected to absolute locations. Often, when we think of a particular location, we think about it as being on a particular coast, at a road intersection in a river valley and so on. These are examples of a location site. It is often these site characteristics that give the location a distinctive character. When we think of Vancouver, for example, we think of it located at the mouth of the Fraser River in a harbor protected from the Pacific Ocean by coastal islands at the base of the Pacific Coast mountains, and in a temperate marine climate. Situation, on the other hand, refers to the external connections between a location and other locations, and is thus more aligned with the idea of relative location. A location situation refers to the ways of thinking about cities or towns in terms of their strategic location as either well connected to other locations or comparatively remote and inaccessible. In the case of Vancouver, one of the ways its situation relates to its position is as an access point for the transshipment of goods and people between the interior of Western Canada and the Asia Pacific realm. Place. The term place has a special meaning in human geography. It refers not only to a location, but also to the values or attachments that we associate with that location. We all recognize that some locations are distinctive or more important to us as compared to others. A place therefore is defined as a location that has a particular identity or meaning attached to it, such as our home, neighborhood, school, place of work or place of worship. Many or all of the Earth\'s locations qualify as places as they are important or meaningful locations to someone, this subjectivity is key to the understanding of place. What is important or significant to one person may be insignificant to another. For example, your childhood home, the place where you grew up, is an important location for you and your parents, siblings and friends. It is therefore place. But for much of the rest of the world, your childhood home is not singularly important or noteworthy, and thus is considered simply a location, eg, a house on a street in a city as such, locations are places to some, but not to others. A useful way of thinking about the characteristics of place is to consider the difference between a house and a home, or a city and a community, a house is a physical structure with walls, a roof, plumbing, electricity and so on, whereas a home is where a person or a family lives. Similarly, a city is an entity with streets, buildings, vehicles and people, whereas a community is a group of people within a city who live with and support one another. The distinction lies in the difference between locations and places. Houses and cities are locations, whereas homes and communities are places. Sense of place, the term sense of place builds on our definition of place and refers to our personal or collective attachments to locations on a personal level. Examples of sense of place can be the feelings of nostalgia you might experience when you think of your childhood home, or the reverence you might feel within a place of worship. Typically, sense of place brings up positive feelings, but sense of place can also evoke negative emotions, such as anxiety or dread, our sense of place is often negative about locations where something bad happened to us or to someone we know, such as an examination center, a hospital or an accident site. Sense of place is subjective. Varies from person to person. Can be positive or negative, and can change over time, rather than focusing on personal experience, human geographers tend to think about sense of place as the collective attachments individuals have to places of shared experiences, such as sites of commemoration, reverence and joy. In many cities, there is often public outcry when historic buildings are torn down and replaced by new developments. This is an example of the community having a common or United sense of place, and this collective experience is exactly what preservationists try to conserve, while sense of place is often gained by spending time or having personal experience associated with a place. It is possible to feel a sense of place for a particular location without having ever visited it. Some people describe feeling a sense of place for buildings or key locations that they have never seen in Mecca, Jerusalem, Paris, Niagara Falls and Disneyland, among many others, sacred places, the examples of Mecca and Jerusalem bring forward the concept of sacred places or sacred spaces, which are locations or landscapes particularly esteemed by an individual or a group, usually as the term implies the site is significant for religious reasons, but it is also possible that political or other factors are at the core of the meaning and attachments of these places, the World Trade Center in New York City, the site of the terrorist tragedy of september 11. 2001 is a good example for many of a non religious sacred space. Conversely, many of us can think of spaces or places we encounter every day that have limited or no special quality at all. The term we use to describe these places is placelessness, and it refers to landscapes that are relatively homogeneous or standardized and that are largely interchangeable. Examples include North American suburban residential subdivisions and commercial districts and multinational, commercial, and fast food outlets such as Walmart and McDonald\'s, no matter where we are, these places seem the same two monks stand on the rock.