Human Geography

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Human Geography

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- Study of the spatial organization of human activity and of people’s relationships with their environments
- Geography is Greek for ‘earth writing/describing’.

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Basic concepts for human geography

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- Location
- Place
- Region
- Distance
- Scale

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What is Location?

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Nominal
 The name of a place
Absolute
 Precise e.g. latitude (around) and longitude (top to bottom, meridians).

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Site

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Physical attributes of a location – terrain, soil, etc.

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Situation

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Location of a place relative to other places and human activities.

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Cognitive Images

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Psychological representations of locations that are created from peoples individual ideas and impressions.

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What is Place?

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A concept with two levels of meaning:
o An objective location that has both uniqueness and interdependence with other places.
o A subjective social and cultural construct – somewhere that has personal meaning for individuals or groups.

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Place Making

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Any activity, deliberate or unintentional, that enables space to acquire meaning.

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Regional Geography

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The study of the ways in which unique combinations of environmental and human factors produce territories with distinctive landscapes and cultural attributes.

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Region

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A larger-sized territory that encompasses many places, all or most of which share similar attributes or combination of attributes in comparison with the attributes of places elsewhere.
o Used to distinguish one area from another.
o Distinguished on basis of characteristics, or attributes.
o Minimize variation of attributes within boundaries and maximize it between themselves and their neighbouring regions.

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Formal Regions

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Uniform in terms of specific criteria (Canadian Shield).

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Functional Regions

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Functions as unit organized by transport routes focused on a dominant city.

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Vernacular Regions

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Local region as identified by region’s own inhabitants.

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Remote Sensing

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The collection of information about parts of earth’s surface by means of aerial photography or satellite imagery designed to record data on visible, infrared, and microwave sensor systems. Then describe the data through visualization or representation.

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Models

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Often described as a theory or concept, a model is best thought of as ‘a simplification of reality’ designed to help generalize our understanding of a particular process or set of phenomena; it can take the form of a diagram, equation, or simple verbal statement (such as a law), and may be used as a summary of past and present behaviour or to predict future events.

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Absolute Distance

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Physical measure – Km, Miles, etc.

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Relative Distance

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Expressed in terms of time, effort, or cost.
o Friction of Distance – Deterrent or inhibiting effect of distance on human activity.
o Distance-Decay Function – Rate at which a particular activity diminishes with increasing distance.
o Utility – The usefulness of a specific place or location to a particular person or group.

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Cognitive Distance

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Distance that people perceive to exist in a given situation.