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68 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Representation of a real-world phenomenon at a certain level of reduction or generalization.
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Scale
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The basic spatial unit in our world regionalization scheme. Each realm is defined in terms of a synthesis of its total human geography--a composite of its leading cultural, economic, historical, political, and appropriate environmental features.
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Geographic Realm
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An area of spatial change where the peripheries of two adjacent realms or regions join; marked by a gradual shift (rather than a sharp break) in the characteristics that distinguish these neighboring geographic entities from one another.
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Transition Zone
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The geographic study of regions and regional distinctions.
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Regional Concept
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The position or place of a certain item on the surface of the Earth as expressed in degrees, minutes, and seconds of latitude, 00 to 900 north or south of the equator, and longitude, 00 to 1800 east or west of the prime meridian passing through Greenwich, England (a suburb of London).
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Absolute Location
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The regional position or situation of a place relative to the position of other places. Distance, accessibility, and connectivity affect relative location.
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Relative Location
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A type of region marked by a certain degree of homogeneity in one or more phenomena; also called uniform region or homogeneous region.
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Formal Region
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Literally, “country behind”, a term that applies to surrounding area served by an urban center. That center is the focus of goods and services produced for its hinterland and is its dominant urban influence as well. In the case of a port city, the hinterland also includes the inland area whose trade flows through that port.
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Hinterland
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A region marked less by its sameness than its dynamic internal structure; because it usually focuses on a central node, also called “nodal region” or “focal region”.
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Functional Region
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The slow movement of continents controlled by the processes associated with plate tectonics.
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Continental Drift
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Plates are bonded portions of the Earth’s mantle and crust, averaging 60 miles (100 km) in thickness. More than a dozen such plates exist, most of continental proportions, and they are in motion. Where they meet one slides under the other, crumpling the surface crust and producing significant volcanic and earthquake activity; a major mountain-building force.
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Tectonic Plate
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(Pleistocene Epoch) Recent period of geologic time that spans the rise of humankind, beginning about 2 million years ago. Marked by “glaciations” (repeated advances of continental ice sheets) and milder “interglaciations” (ice sheet contractions). Although the last 10,000 years are known as the Holocene Epoch, Pleistocene-like conditions seem to be continuing and we are most probably now living through now living through another Pleistocene interglaciation; thus the glaciers likely will return.
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Glaciation
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The process of desert expansion into neighboring steppelands as a result of human degradation of fragile semi-arid environments.
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Desertification
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The way people have arranged themselves in geographic space. One of human geography’s most essential expressions because it represents the sum total of the adjustments that a population has made to its natural, cultural, and economic environments
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Population Distribution
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The forms and artifacts sequentially placed on the natural landscape by the activities of various human occupants. By this progressive imprinting of the human presence, the physical (natural) landscape is modified into the cultural landscape, forming an interacting unity between the two.
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Cultural Landscape
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A politically organized territory that is administered by a sovereign government and is recognized by a significant portion of the international community. A state must also contain a permanent resident population, an organized economy, and a functioning internal circulation system.
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State
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In geography, a term several connotations. “Core” refers to the center, heart, or focus. The core area of nation-state is constituted by the national heartland, the largest population cluster, the most productive region, and the part of the country with the greatest centrality and accessibility—probably containing the capital city as well.
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Core Area
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the contrasting spatial characteristics of, and linkages between, the have (core) and have-not (periphery) components of a national or regional system.
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Core-Periphery Relationships
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The gradual reduction of regional contrasts at the world scale, resulting from increasing international cultural, economic and political exchanges.
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Globalization
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The half of the globe that contains the greatest amount of land surface, centered on Western Europe. In geomorphology can also refer to the position of the African continent, which lies central to the world’s landmasses.
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Land Hemisphere
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Literally means landscape description, but commonly refers to the total physical geography of a place; includes all of the natural features on the Earth’s surface, including landforms, climate, soils, vegetation, and soils.
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Physiography
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The foundations of a society: urban centers, transport networks, communications, energy distribution systems, farms, factories, mines, and such facilities as schools, hospitals, postal services, and police and armed forces.
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Infrastructure
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A hallmark of Europe’s economic geography that later spread to many other parts of the world, whereby particular people in particular places concentrate on the production of particular goods services.
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Local Functional Specialization
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An idealized representation of reality built to demonstrate its most important properties. A spatial model focuses on a geographical dimension of the real world, such as the von Thunen model that explains agricultural location patterns in a commercial economy.
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Model
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The term applied to the social and economic changes in agriculture, commerce, and especially manufacturing and urbanization that resulted from technological innovations and specialization in the late-eighteenth-century Europe.
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Industrial Revolution
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A country whose population posses a substantial degree of cultural homogeneity and unity. The ideal form to which most nations and states aspire—a political unit wherein the territorial state coincides with the area settled by a certain national group or people.
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Nation-State
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Legally a term encompassing all the citizens of a state, it also has other connotations. Most definitions now tend to refer to a group of tightly-knit people possessing bonds of language, ethnicity, religion, and other shared cultural attributes. Such homogeneity actually prevails within very few states.
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Nation
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forces that tend to divide a society, state, or nation (ex. racism)
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Centrifugal Forces
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forces that tend to unite a society, state, or nation (ex. National pride)
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Centripetal Forces
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The major world language family that dominates the European geographic realm. This language family is also the most widely dispersed globally, and about half of humankind speaks one of its languages.
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Indo-European Languages
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within two regions, through an exchange of raw materials and/or finished products, can specifically satisfy each other’s demands.
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Complementarity
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The capacity to move a good from one place to another at a bearable cost; the ease with which a commodity may be transported.
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Transferability
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In trade or migration flows, the presences of a nearer opportunity that greatly diminishes the attractiveness of sites farther away.
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Intervening Opportunity
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A country’s largest city—ranking atop the urban hierarchy—most expressive of the national culture and usually (but not always) the capital city as well. (the primate city for NC would most likely be Charlotte which is NOT the capital…just as New York is DEFINITELY the primate city of New York State yet it is not the capital of the state).
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Primate City
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A venture involving three or more states—political, economic, and/or cultural cooperation to promote shared objectives. The European Union is one such organization.
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Supranational
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The process whereby regions within a state demand and gain political strength and growing autonomy at the expense of the central government.
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Devolution
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The internal location attributes of an urban center, including its local spatial organization and physical setting.
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Site
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The external locational attributes of an urban center; its relative location or regional position with reference to other non-local places.
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Situation
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A location along a transport route where goods must be transferred from one carrier to another. In a port, the cargoes of oceangoing ships are unloaded and put on trains, trucks, and perhaps smaller river boats for inland distribution.
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Break-of-Bulk Point
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A place, usually a port city, where goods are imported, stored, and transshipped; a break-of-bulk point.
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Entrepot
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Region caught between stronger, colliding external cultural-political forces, under persistent stress, and often fragmented by aggressive rivals. Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia are classic examples.
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Shatter Belt
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The fragmentation of a region into smaller, often hostile political unites. (perhaps in reference to imperialism and/or colonization—my thoughts)
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Balkanization
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A piece of territory that is surrounded by another political unit of which it is not a part. (sounds like a smaller country within a country)
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Enclave
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A policy of cultural extension and potential political expansion by a state aimed at a community of its nationals living in a neighboring state.
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Irredentism
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The long-term conditions (over at least 30 years) of aggregate weather over a region, summarized by averages and measures of variability; a synthesis of the succession of weather events we have learned to expect at any given location.
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Climate
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The immediate and short-term conditions of the atmosphere that impinge on daily human activities.
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Weather
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The variation of the continental effect on air temperatures in the interior portions of the world’s landmasses. The greater the distance from the moderating influence of an ocean, the greater the extreme in summer and winter temperatures. Continental interiors also tend to be dry when the distance from oceanic moisture sources becomes considerable.
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Contenentality
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The treeless plain that lies along the Artic shore in northernmost Russia and Canada, whose vegetation consists of mosses, lichens, and certain hardy grasses.
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Tundra
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The subarctic, mostly coniferous, snowforest that blankets northern Russia and Canada south of the tundra that lines the Artic shore.
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Taiga
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Permanently frozen water in the near-surface soil and bedrock of cold environments, producing the effect of completely frozen ground. Surface can thaw during brief warm season.
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Permafrost
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Capital city positioned in actually or potentially contested territory, usually near an international border; it confirms the state’s determination to maintain its presence in the region in contention.
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Forward Capital
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Rule by an autonomous power over a subordinate and alien people and place. Although often established and maintained through political structures, colonialism also creates unequal cultural and economic relations. Because of the magnitude and impact of the European colonial thrust of the last few centuries, the term is generally understood to refer to that particular colonial endeavor.
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Colonialism
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The drive toward the creation and expansion of a colonial empire and, once established, its perpetuation.
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Imperialism
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Demographic resettlement policies pursued by the central planners of the Soviet Empire, whereby ethnic Russians were encouraged to emigrate from the Russian Republic to the 14 non-Russian republics of the U.S.S.R.
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Russification
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a political framework wherein a central government represents the various subnational entities within a nation-state and the like—yet allows these various entities to retain their own identities and to have their own laws, policies, and customs in certain spheres.
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Federation
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The reorganization of a country’s agriculture under communism that involves the expropriation of private holdings and their incorporation into relatively large-scale units, which are farmed and administered cooperatively by those who live there.
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Collectivization
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The various degenerative effects of distance on human spatial structures and interactions.
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Distance Decay
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A society in which two or more population groups, each practicing its own culture, live adjacent to one another without mixing inside a single state.
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Cultural Pluralism
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A region within which there prevails substantial natural-landscape homogeneity, expressed by a certain degree of uniformity in surface relief, climate, vegetation, and soils.
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Physiographic Province
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The relative dryness in areas downwind of mountain ranges caused by orographic precipitation (?), wherein moist air masses are forced to deposit most of their water content as they cross the highlands.
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Rain/Shadow Effect
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The idea that migration flows are simultaneously stimulated by conditions in the source area, which tend to drive people away, and by the perceived attractiveness of the destination.
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Push/Pull Factors in Migration
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The popular name given to the southern tier of the United States, which is anchored by the mega-states of California, Texas and Florida. Its warmer climate, superior recreational opportunities, and other amenities have been attracting large numbers of relocating people and activities since the 1960s; broader definitions of the Sunbelt also include much of the western U.S., particularly Colorado and the coastal Pacific Northwest (ie. Washinton and Oregon)
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Sunbelt
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North America;s near-rectangular Core Region, whose corners are Boston, Milwaukee, St. Louis and Baltimore. Dominated the industrial geography of the U.S. and Canada during the industrial age; still a formidable economic powerhouse that remains the realm’s geographic heart.
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American Manufacturing Belt
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The emerging cultural-geographic framework of the United States, dominated by the fragmentation of specialized social groups into homogenous communities of interest marked not only by income, race, and ethnicity but also by age, occupational status, and lifestyle. The result is an increasingly heterogeneous social-spatial complex, which resembles an intricate mosaic composed of myriad uniform—but separate tiles.
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Mosaic Culture
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The energy resources of coal, natural gas, and petroleum (oil), so named collectively because they were formed by the geologic compression and transformation of tiny plant and animal organisms.
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Fossil Fuels
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The savings that accrue from large-scale production wherein the unit cost of manufacturing decreases as the level of operation enlarges. Supermarkets operate on this principle and are able to charge lower prices than small grocery stores.
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Economies of Scale
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Emerging economy, in the United States and a handful of other highly advanced countries, as traditional industry is increasingly eclipsed by a higher-technology productive complex dominated by services, information-related, and managerial activities.
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Postindustrialism
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The habitable portions of the Earth’s surface where permanent human settlements have arisen.
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Ecumene
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