Intro to Human Geography
Objectives!
• Be able to explain what geography is and why it is
relevant.
• Identify the difference between physical and
human geography.
• Identify and explain the basic theories about the
relationship between people and their
environment.
• Understand what culture and cultural ecology is.
What is Geography?
• Geographers ask where things are and why –
it is a spatial science.
• We are concerned with globalization and local
diversity, and the tension between them.
• Complex discipline with a human and physical
division.
Why is Geography Important?
Culture
• Two aspects:
– What people care about
• Beliefs, values, and customs
– What people take care of
• Earning a living; obtaining food,
clothing, and shelter
Culture
1. A social creation.
2. It changes! Culture is dynamic.
3. It’s a complex system. We practice our
culture through our interactions with others
at the same time that we are impacted it.
Natural Processes
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Climate
Vegetation
Soil
Landforms
These four features are
important for understanding
human activities
What’s the Relationship Between
People and the Environment?
• Cultural Ecology - The geographic study of
human–environment relationships
1) Environmental determinism – the
environment causes human development
• Actor-Network Theory
2) Possibilism – people have the ability to
adjust to their environment
But Wait, We Change the Earth
too..
3) Humans as Modifiers
• Take natural landscapes and turn them into
cultural landscapes.
English Landscape by Capability
Brown
The Cultural Landscape
• A unique combination of social relationships and
physical processes
• Carl Sauer
• Each region = a distinctive landscape
• People = the most important agents of change to
Earth’s surface
http://www.panoramio.com/map/
Integrated Systems
4) People + Earth = integrated
– The Earth is a system that has different parts
that interact
– Humans and nature cause changes in the
operations of the Earth-system
Objective
• Get familiar with the five key geographic
concepts, and start to apply them to real life.
Main Concepts
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Place
Space
Diffusion
Spatial Interaction
Scale
Place: Unique Location of a Feature
• Location
– Place names
• Toponyms
– Site – physical characteristics of a place
– Situation – location of a place relative
to other places & political, economic,
social context
– Mathematical location (lat and long)
A place is a specific point on Earth.
Take a moment and jot down a description of a place you are from using
the terms site and situation.
Map of Washington State
Types of Regions –
Regional Analysis
• Formal (uniform) regions
– Examples: voting districts, states (Virginia), English-speaking
world, Bread Basket of the US, tropical climate zones
• Functional (nodal) regions
– Examples: the circulation area of a
newspaper, bus service areas, police
service area
• Perceptual (vernacular) regions
– Examples: the American South,
Pacific Northwest, everywhere people
love the Huskies
Formal Regions
Functional Regions
Television Markets of the U.S.
King County Wastewater Service Area
Vernacular (Perceptual) Regions
Lewis Historical Society
• Think back to the place you are from—what
regions is your home part of?
Spatial Association
• Regions are useful because we can use them
explore the correlations of events to places.
• Regions can encompass an area of widely varying
scales, from a small to a large portion. ex.,
geographers study local politics or international
politics.
• Depending on the scale of the region, different
conclusions may be drawn about a region’s
characteristics.
Spatial Association
• Examples:
– Prevalence of HIV/AIDS
– Impact of Sandy on 2012 Presidential Election
– Relationship of Unemployment to Population
Change
– Plague in the United States
Space
• Absolute vs. Relative space
• Distribution—three features
– Density – frequency with which something occurs
in space.
– Concentration – a feature’s spread over space.
Clustered? Dispersed?
– Pattern –arrangement of objects in space.
Geometric? Irregular?
Spatial Variation
• The changes in the distribution of a
phenomenon from one place or region to
another.
Spatial Interaction
Refers to the connections that develop between
places, for example: transportation &
communication.
What is globalization?
Our text discusses two types
of globalization:
Economic and cultural
Spatial Interaction
– Complementarity – when a place can supply what
another place needs
– Transferability – cost of moving a good and the
profitability of moving that good
– Intervening Opportunities – when there are places
that can supply a good cheaper than other places
Spatial Interaction
People, ideas,
commodities move
between places.
• Distance decay
- Tapering off of a process, pattern or event over a
distance.
- “Everything is related to everything else, but near
things are more related than distant things.”
Diffusion
• The process by which a characteristic spreads across
space and over time---but doesn’t mean it stays the
same!
• Hearth = place from which an innovation originates
• Types of diffusion
– Relocation
– Expansion
• Three types: hierarchical, contagious, stimulus
Connections
Time Space
Convergence –
reduction in time it
takes for
something to reach
another place.
Globalization
doesn’t change
actual distance, but
it can make places
seem closer.
Scale
Way of depicting the world in a reduced form.
Two Kinds:
• Cartographic scale : expresses ratio of distance
on map to Earth.
• Observational / methodological scale – levels
of analysis.
– Local, regional, national, international scales
Where Are You From?
• How is the place you are from connected to
other places---what is the spatial interaction
like?
Review
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What is geography?
Why is geography relevant?
Place: site, situation, mathematical location
Regions: types of regions
Cultural landscape, culture and cultural ecology
Scale
Globalization
Space – Ways features are distributed and
arranged, terms used to describe them
• Connections: Spatial interaction, diffusion