World geography
Chapter 1
Globalization and World Regions
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Different and similar world
• If you compared places, you would find…
– what the different is.
– what the common is.
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People
匈奴 Xiongnu
日耳曼 Germanic
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Roman Emperor, Leo I
Food
Chinese food
Pasta
Pizza
Italian Food
Japanese
English food (Fired! Fired! Fired!)
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Turkish food (Donser Kebap 沙威瑪)
Landscape
Vancouver
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Taipei City
Different and Changing Worlds
• Political, economic, and social
experience and expectations are rapidly
change nowadays.
• The physical shape of world isn’t change.
• But connecting among people bring
places closer as cooperation, competition,
and conflict with other peoples become
more intense.
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9/11
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9/11
•The 911 event alerted American’s government
“You can not dominate another county
arbitrarily”
•What’s different from Muslims and Americans?
Environment  Society, Economics, Politics
•Oil  Economics  Political Power  Cultural
decline, poverty, belief conflict  reaction
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4 geographic levels to see Earth
• Global
– views from spacecraft show the contrasts
between continental land areas and ocean
waters.
• Major World regions
– are whole or large parts of continents and are
the division used in this text for the regional
chapters.
• Countries
– are the building blocks of major world regions.
• Local regions
– are parts of countries and the places where
many individuals voice their concerns.
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Globalization vs. Localization
• Globalization
– Globalization is increasing level of
interconnections among people throughout
the world.
– The speed and intensity of globalization, in
terms of world trade and the flow of
financial investments, increased markedly in
the 1990s.
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Globalization vs. Localization
• Localization is both response to and the
outcome of globalization.
– On the one hand, global exchanges and flows of
information, ideas, people, money, and technology
move us toward worldwide political solutions,
economic exchanges, cultural attitudes, and
environmental concerns.
– On the other, localization focuses on distinctive
identities of places or people in regions, countries,
or local areas.
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Facets of Globalization
• Increasing connections take place through
intensified flows of ideas, goods, and
people:
– Ideas, technologies, and diseases;
– Goods from many place of manufacture;
– People migrations for work, political asylum,
family consolidation, and long-distance
tourism;
– The spread of images and message through
the media of TV, film, the Internet and print.
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Facets of Localization
• Local voice remain loud in our consciousness
and ensure that global trends are often far
from being fulfilled.
– Political nationalism maintains separation countries
and of groups within countries. Ex. Basque, Aceh
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Facets of Localization
– Despite globalization force, many local customs and
practices preserve local identities. Ex. Pop music
– Changes and intensification of ideologies, especially
religious or political beliefs. Ex. 三民主義
– Religious difference among Christian, Muslim, Jewish,
Buddhist, and Hindu countries continue to be
signification.
– Demonstrators resist the visible economic
penetration of countries around the world by global
media and corporations such as CNN, the Murdoch
group, McDonald’s, Starbuck, Toyota, and Nike.
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Figure 1.3
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Despite of globalization, the World
remained diverse
• Political activity: Countries Act
– 1950-1991 Cold war
– North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) vs. Soviet
Union
– Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) vs.
Communist governments
– Southern Africa Development Coordination (SADCC)
vs. apartheid
– UN become a world-wide level arbitrator
• Inside vs. Outside
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Economic Activities: Global Trends
• The numbers people living on < $1 per day
– 900 m (85%)(1820)1.4 b (30%)(1980) 1.2 b (20%)(2000)
• In the 1990s, the uneven spread of expanding global
economic activities caused group of countries to enter into
or revive regional economic agreements, mainly through
trade.
– European Union (EU)
– North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
– Mercosur (southern South America)
– Association of South East Asian Countries
– South Africa Development conference
• US, the countries of western Europe and Japan Controlled
nearly all the investment, production, and consumption of
goods.
• China, India and Brazil increased their contribution.
• Wealthier people vs. Poorer people
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Cultural Activities: Major Regions,
Local Voice
• One world culture? Did these wiped out the
local cultural difference
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–
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Cocacola-ization of eating and drinking habits
the spread of Western TV, movies, pop music
global markets for some consumer goods
Ex. India
• Western cultural norms
– democracy, individual ,and human rights
– Materialism, consumerism, and superficial value
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Civilizations (World Cultures)
• Figure 1.6
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Environmental issues at varied
scales
• Earth is marked by a variety of natural
environments that create differences among
regions
• Natural environments affects human events at
global, world regional, country, and local scales.
– world regional, country, or local scales: Prediction of
hurricanelike storms, effects of acid rain, and
damage from river floods and volcanic eruptions
– global scale: global warming, El Nino, the ozone hole
over Antarctica, and the destruction of tropical rain
forests
– Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1992), Kyoto, Japan (1997)
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What is geography about?
• Geography is study of
– where and how human and natural feature
and events (political, economic, cultural,
and environmental) are distributed on Earth’s
surface,
– the relationships among them,
– how their distributions change over time,
– and how those features and relationships
affect human lives.
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Subject matter
• The tensions among globalization,
localization, and the continuing
significance of country governments
provide a basis changes and move toward
either greater interdependence or
conflict.
• Thus, geographers compare places and
assess the interactions among them at
different levels of geographic scale.
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Geographic methods
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Location
Place
Human/Environment interaction
Movement
Region
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First, geography is about place
• Place might be a
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–
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Individual place
Small town
Large city
Rural area
Another state
Another country
• Place might be perceived as points on a map or
as large area.
• However, they all have different relationships
to each other in terms of location, direction,
distance, and size.
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Latitude and Longitude
• Figure 1.8
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Distance and Direction
Meridian and parallel is the basic of time, distance and direction
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Map and Scale
Size of Scale Representative Franction (RF)
Large Scale
1:25,000 or larger
Medium Scale
1:1,000,000 to 1:25,000
Small Scale
1:1,000,000 or smaller
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Next, geography is about explaining
the difference among place
• The two basic geographic concepts of place and
location are combined in three main
approaches to geographic information gathering
and explaining
– Regional geography
• A region is a area of Earth’s surface with
similarities within and between defined
areas, or regions, of the world.
– Spatial analysis
– Human-environment relationship
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Regions and Globalization
• Regions are defined by
– A high degree of uniformity
– Limited variability
– More-or-less lasting boundaries
• Regional boundaries may include physical
features, political boundaries, or economic
characteristics.
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Region’s dynamic features
• Regions are also dynamic geographic entities
that have distinctive internal and external flow
patterns of such phenomena as people, goods,
and ideas.
• Nodes are key features of regions, being
specific places from which flows begin or
through which of a set of nodes may define the
boundary of a region.
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Flow feature
• Flows within and among
– regions include population migrations
– information from the media, Internet, or
publications
– movements of money
– technology innovations in manufacturing
process, information processing, or new
transportation modes
– and ideology through political and regions
within world regions
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The flows of geographic levels
• The dynamic elements of such flows
within and among regions affect the
prominence
– of regions within a countries
– of countries within world regions
– of world regions within the global system
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The characteristics of flows
• The variety of these flows is generated by
– path
– speed
– direction and the different relationship to social
structure imposed by governments and other
institutions.
• Breaks or interruptions in the flows may result
in social problem such as
– inequities,
– injustices,
– and underresourced livelihoods at the local level.
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Changes in dynamic regions
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People create regions
Regions shape people’s activities
People remake regions
Regions interact with other regions
Regions are used by those in power
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Major world regions
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Europe
Russia and Neighboring Countries
East Asia
Southern Asia and South Pacific
South Asia
North Africa and Southwestern Asia
Africa South of the Sahara
Latin America
North America
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Figure 1.11
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Development of world regions
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Early history (about 5000 B.C)
Settle Farming
City-State and Empires (2500-1000 B.C.)
Trading Empires and “Classical” Civilizations
(1000 B.C.- A.D.600)
• Disruptions, Migrations, and Feudalism (A.D.
600 - 1450)
• The modern, globalizing world
– Explorations and colonies ( around A.D. 1450)
– Industrialization (mid-1700s)
– Globalization, Countries, and Protectionism (1450early 1800s)
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