INTRODUCTION TO HUMAN

GEOGRAPHY

Chapter 1

What Is 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

•How we make sense of others and

ourselves in our locality, region, and world

Globalization

A set of processes that are

• Increasing interactions

• Deepening relationships

• Heightening interdependence

without regard to country borders

A set of outcomes that are

• Unevenly distributed

• Varying across scales

• Differently manifested throughout the world

Impact of individual, regional, national scales on processes

and outcomes of globalization

What Are Geographic Questions?

• The spatial arrangement of places and phenomena (human and physical)

– How are things organized on Earth? – How do they appear on the landscape? – Where? Why? So what?

• No place “untouched by human hands” or activity • Human organization of communities, nations, networks • Establishment of political, economic, religious, cultural systems

Spatial Distribution

• Spatial distribution and pattern

• Processes that create and sustain a distribution

Map of Cholera Victims

in London’s Soho District

in 1854

Patterns of victim’s homes

and water pump locations

key to the source of the

disease

Five Themes of Geography

• Location

• Human-environment

interaction

• Region

• Place

• Movement

Place

Sense of place: Infusing a

place with meaning and

emotion

Perception of place: Belief

or understanding of

what a place is like,

often based on books,

movies, stories, or

pictures

Where Pennsylvanian

students prefer to live

Where Californian

students prefer to live

Perception

of Place

Movement

Spatial interaction: The

interconnectedness

between places,

depending upon

• Distance

• Accessibility

• Connectivity

Elizabeth J. Leppman

Cultural Landscape

The visible human imprint, the material character of

a place

Religion and

cremation

practices spread

with Hindu

migrants from

India to Kenya

Sequent Occupance

Layers of imprints in a cultural landscape

reflecting years of differing human activity

Apartments in Mumbai, India Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: African,

Arab, German, British, Indian “layers.”

Apartments replaced earlier single-

family houses

Why Do Geographers Use Maps,

and What Do Maps Tell Us? Types of maps

• Reference maps

– Locations of places and geographic features

– Absolute locations

• Thematic maps

– Degree of an attribute

– Pattern of distribution

– Movement

– Relative locations

Reference

Map

Thematic

Map

Location

• Absolute location

– Precise location using a coordinate system

– Latitude and longitude most common

– Measured by geographic positioning systems

(GPS)

• Relative location

– Location in relation to something else

– Changes over time with changing

circumstances

Mental Maps

Maps we carry in our minds of places we

have been and places we have heard of

Activity Spaces

The places we travel to routinely in our

rounds of daily activity

Remote Sensing and GIS

Satellite image Photograph

Hurricane Katrina, 2005: Area of impact

and destruction

Geographic

Information

System (GIS) Computer hardware

and software that

permit storage and

analysis of layers of

spatial data

Why Are Geographers Concerned

with Scale and Connectedness?

• Scale: Territorial extent of something

• Varying scales of observations

– Local

– Regional

– National

– Global

Scale

The Power of Scale

• Influence of processes operating at different scales

• Context of a phenomenon in what is happening at different scales

• Political use of scale to change who is involved or how an issue is perceived

Regions

Formal region: Defined by a common characteristic, whether physical or cultural, present throughout

e.g., German-speaking region of Europe

Functional region: Defined by a set of social, political, or economic activities or interactions

e.g., an urban area, city and suburbs

Regions

Perceptual Region: Ideas in our minds, based on

accumulated knowledge of places and regions,

that define an area of “sameness” or

“connectedness”

Culture

• The whole tangible lifestyle of peoples, but also

their prevailing values and beliefs

• Cultural trait: A single attribute of a culture

• Cultural complex: A combination of traits

• Cultural hearth: Area where a culture began and

from which it spreads

• Independent invention: A culture trait that began

in several places

Diffusion

• The process of the spread of an idea or innovation

from its hearth to other areas

• Factors that slow or prevent diffusion

– Time-distance decay

– Cultural barriers

Types of Diffusion

• Expansion diffusion: Idea

or innovation spreading

outward from the hearth

– Contagious: Spreads to

next available person

– Hierarchical: Spreads to

most linked people or

places first

– Stimulus: Promotes local

experiment or change

Types of Diffusion

• Relocation diffusion:

Movement of individuals who carry

an idea or innovation with them to

a new, perhaps distant locale

: A. B. Murphy : H .J. de Blij

Kenya

Paris, France

What Are Geographic Concepts, and

How Are They Used in Answering

Geographic Questions?

• Ways of seeing the world spatially that

geographers use in answering research questions

• Old approaches to human-environment questions

– Environmental determinism (has been rejected by

almost all geographers)

– Possibilism (less accepted today)

• New approaches to human-environment questions

– Cultural ecology

– Political ecology