Human Geography

The study of the spatial organization of human activity and of people's relationships with their environments

Increasing interconnectedness of different parts of the world through common processes of economic, environmental, political, and cultural change

Capacity to understand changing patterns, changing processes, and changing relationships among people, places, and regions

Historical relationship between the present activities associated with a place and the past experiences of that place

• Many things already noticed/familiar
• Geographical path dependency
• Ancillary linkages
• Cultural landscapes

• Shaping places and regions
• Cumulative causation
• Demographic transition
• Globalization

Usefulness of a specific place or location to a particular person or group

Doctrine holding that human activities are controlled by the environment

Focus of geographical study

All aspects of a particular region or territory

• Specific geographic setting with distinctive physical, social, and cultural attributes
• Settings for daily lives, influencing values attitudes beliefs, physical well-being, and collective memory

• Move beyond the same political jurisdiction, involving a change of residence-- either as emigration or immigration
• Geographical movement of population
• Some degree of permanence
• Crossing a political boundary

• Events and conditions that impel an individual to move from a location
• War
• Crime
• Environmental degradation
• Job loss
• Political change

• Forces of attraction that influence migrants to move to a particular location
• Amenities/Aesthetics
• Employment
• Safety
• Religious freedom

• International <--> Internal
• Regional <--> Local

Voluntary <--> Involuntary

Permanent <--> Temporary

• Adopted at independence designed to sustain plantation economy
• Maintain flow of migrants from poorer north with pull factors of higher incomes and better conditions

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• Settlers
• From frostbelt to sunbelt

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Refugees- over 10 million a year

• Internally displaced persons
• Native people

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• Individuals who migrate temporarily to take up jobs in other countries
• Important element of economic strategy for developing countries
• Length of stay challenges host governments
• - Schooling
• - Taxes
• - Citizenship

• Law of the soil
• If you were born in America, you're an American citizen

• Law of the blood
• No matter if you were born in Germany, if your parents aren't German, then you're not

Crude density

Physical and Social/Historical Characteristics affect this

• Pyramids
• Tells us important information about economies

• Total fertility rate
• Infant mortality rate
• Life expectancy
• Crude birth rate
• Crude death rate
• Replacement-level fertility

• Water
• Soil
• Climate/Weather

• Trade patterns
• Religion
• Availability of technology
• Social/political decisions
• War

Total number of people divided by the total land area

Measure of the economic impact of the young and old on the more economically productive members of the population

Ratio of the number of live births in a single year for every thousand people in the population

The number of deaths in a single year for every thousand people in the population

Difference between the crude birth rate and the crude death rate, which is the surplus of births relative to deaths

Difference between the crude death rate and the rude birth rate, which is the deficit of births relative to deaths

Average number of children a woman will have throughout the years that demographers have identified as her childbearing years, approximately ages 15-49

Annual number of deaths of infants under 1 year of age compared to the total number of live births for that same year

Average number of years a newborn infant can expect to live

• Replacement of high birth and death rates by low birth and death rates
• Look at table!!

• Epidemics
• Food supplies

• Nutrition
• Sanitation
• Public health
• Medecine

• Educational status of women rising
• Delayed marriages
• Birth control

Impose high tariffs on foreign imports of same goods

• In return for loans, borrowing countries must restructure economies in line with neoliberal economics - eg. market liberalization
• • Deregulate banking sectors
• • Removingtradebarriers
• • Privatize natural resources and government industries
• • Devalue currencies
• • Balance budgets
• • Pass legislation to encourage foreign investment
• • Build up export economies

• Reduction in the role and budget of government, including reduced subsidies and the privatization of formerly publicly owned and operated concerns, such as utilities
• Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan argued that protectionism and state-owned industries perpetuated dependency
• Lower barriers to trade, would foster free trade
• Poor countries strongly encouraged/required to: Devalue currency to encourage exports
• Privatize state-owned industries
• Compete for foreign investment
• Social as well as economic reform
• Open up previously government supplied services to private companies, like education and prison

• Argues that Modernization Theory does not account for historical geographical context of dependency of peripheral regions (late starters) on industrialized core countries (early starters)
• Examples:
• - Protectionism
• - State-owned industries
• - Bottom up development with focus on human welfare

• Suggested that countries passed through 5 stages of economic development
• 1- Traditional Society
• 2- Transitional Stage
• 3- Take Off
• 4- Drive to Maturity
• 5- High Mass Consumption

Subsistence, barter, and agriculture

Specialization, surpluses, and infrastructure

Industrialization, growing investment, regional growth, and political change

Diversification, innovation, less reliance on imports, and investments

Consumer oriented, durable goods flourish, service sector becomes dominant

• Mass production
• Specialization
• Substitution of capitals and machines for human labor

Rostow's model of economic development

Principle whereby places and regions specialize in activities for which they have the greatest advantage in productivity relative to other regions- or for which they have the least disadvantages

• Expressed as a ratio
• Large scale
• Medium-small
• Small scale

• Way that things spread through space and over time
• Very rarely random
• Highlights important geographic relationships

Precise measurement of location (x, y, z)

• Topological space
• Map of Marta

Spatial impressions, mental maps

Physical attributes of a location—its terrain, its soil, vegetation, and water sources, for example

• Location of a place relative to other places and human activities
• 80 miles from Atlanta, near raw materials, far from job opportunities

• The rate at which a particular activity or process diminishes with increasing distance
• Usually decreases with distance

• Deterrent or inhibiting effect of distance on human activity
• Time and cost of overcoming distance

The opportunity for contact or interaction from a given point or location, in relation to other locations

• Movement and flows involving human activity
• Flow of goods, people, information between places

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A situated representation of some part of the world or milieu

• All aspects of the cultural or physical environment
• Includes: Cognitive space, cultural symbols, ideas, practices

• Regions that dominate trade, control the most advanced technologies, and have high levels of productivity within diversified economies
• Dominated by secondary sector activities

Regions that are able to exploit peripheral regions but are themselves exploited and dominated by core regions

Regions with undeveloped or narrowly specialized economies with low levels of productivity, and economically and politically weak

Society with a single cultural base and a reciprocal social economy

Minisystems that have been absorbed into a common political system while retaining their fundamental cultural differences

Interdependent system of countries linked by economic and political competition

Geographic settings where new practices have developed and from which they have subsequently spread

• The physical settlement of a new territory of people from a colonizing state
• Expanding resource base needed to support growing populations

The establishment and maintenance of political and legal domination by a state over a separate and alien society

Tendency for productivity to decline, after a certain point, with the continued application of capital and/or labor to a given resource base

Extension of the power of a nation through direct or indirect control of the economic and political life of other territories

• Specialization, by countries, in particular products for export
• Specialization of people, regions, and economies in certain kinds of economic activities

Narrowly specialized economies dominated by primary sector activities

Economic activities that deal with the handling and processing of knowledge and information

Economic activities involving the sale and exchange of goods and services

• Post WWI economy needed workers
• Guest worker programs 1st drew from poor
• countries of Europe (Italy, Croatia, Spain, Greece) 1961 Agreement between Germany and Turkey
• Largest guestworker population
• 1/3 of foreign-born population
• Workers expected to leave, but instability in Turkey encouraged workers to stay

Incubate and sponsor key growth industries

An interdependent system of countries linked by political and economic competition: core, semi-periphery, periphery

• Societies with single cultural base
• Several agricultural hearth areas
• Geographical settings for emergence and spread of new practices
• Higher density settlements -> Social hierarchies -> Specialization in crafts -> Barter and trade -> Hydraulic societies -> Conditions for emergence of world empires -> Redistributive/tributary social economies
• Reciprocal
• Social economy

• A group of mini-systems absorbed into common political system
• Redistributive/tributary
• Social economy

An interdependent system of countries linked by political and economic competition

Used to dominate colonies and trade routes

• Birth of Capitalism
• Points to foreign trade as source of country’s enrichment
• - Exploration for raw materials
• - Value added in manufacturing

What affects the intensification of the core

Colonies became dependent on core provision of...

A graphical representation of the milieu

• Relative size is preserved
• Shape is distorted

Size and shape partially distorted

• Shapes are preserved
• Relative size is distorted

• Cannot accurately reproduce SIZE, SHAPE and DISTANCE for a globe
• Trade offs must be made

• Plat maps
• City maps
• Parks
• 7 1⁄2’ quadrangles
• Map ratio is not always noted, but altered in
• reproduction
• Objects are LARGE

• World
• United States
• Hemisphere
• Continents
• Map ratio is not always noted, but altered in
• reproduction
• Objects are SMALL

• A doctrine that holds that human activities are determined, or controlled, by the physical attributes of geographic settings.
• Example- Civilization and economic development made possible in Europe by invigorating climate.
• - Considered over-simplistic

• Are ways of looking at the world
• Set priorities about what is important to study and what isn’t
• Develop and borrow concepts, definitions, tools, and theories from one another
• Set standards for what makes research rigorous or persuasive
• Are evolving social systems
• Overlap

Creation of distinctive landscapes and regions

• Rise of positivism, using scientific method to test hypotheses and build universal theories and laws
• – Scientific statements must derive from verifiable observations
• – Same methods apply to both human and natural sciences

• Particular social processes, their spatial constitution and outcomes
• Processes are inter-related by:
• Population, Cultural, Economic, Political, Urban

Latitude/ longitude

USPLS, Metes and Bounds

• Place name or association
• Addresses

Physical units of measure

• Time, effort or cost
• “three cigarettes by donkey”

• Perceived
• “Are we there yet?"

• Alternative origin or destination
• Affects the volume and pattern of movements and flows