Human Geography

1. Human Geography

2. What is Human Geography? • Geography is the science of place and space. • Geographers ask: • Where are things located? • Why things are located where they are? • How places differ from one another? • How people interact with the environment?

3. Example of Differences: Hurricane Katrina • Physical geographers - focus on how hurricanes form, storm surges, etc. • Human Geographers - focus on the levees that failed, effects on the population, and the economic implications.

4. Human Geography • The study of where humans — their activities and institutions such as ethnic groups, cities, and industries — are located and why they are there. • Italso examines interactions of humans with their environments.

5. Human Geography • It is also concerned with the spatial aspects of human existence • How people and their activity are distributed in space • How they use and perceive space • How they create and sustain the places that make up the earth's surface. • Human geographers work in the fields of urban and regional planning, transportation, marketing, real estate, tourism, and international business.

6. The Five Themes of the Spatial Perspective • Human-Environment Interaction • Location • Place • Region • Movement

7. Human-Environment Interaction • How human activities affect their environment and how environmental changes impact human life. • Positive and negative effects of interaction

8. Location • Where something is on the earth and the effects that position has on human life. • Absolute and Relative Location

9. Place • Combination of physical and cultural attributes that give each location on the earth its individual identity • Components: • Religion • Language • Politics • Artwork

10. Sense of Place • Feelings evoked by people as a result of certain experiences and memories associated with a particular place. • Questions to ask: • Do all places have a sense of place? • Are some better than others? Do some places have a stronger sense of place than others? • What makes places more memorable than others? • What environments do you remember best? Examples? • Physical factors versus experiential factors.

11. Region • Spatial units that share some similar characteristics • Understanding a region allows us to make sense of information about places

12. Types of Regions • Formal Region • A type of region marked by a certain degree of similarity. Examples: a country linked by government, a climate region, a religious region. • Functional Region • Defined by the places affected by the movement of something from its source to other places. Examples: airline routes, area affected by a disease. • Perceptual Region • A region that only exists as a conceptualization or an idea and not as a physically demarcated entity, e.g. in the US, “the South” and “ the Mid-Atlantic region”

13. Movement • Analysis of the movement occurring in space • Information • People • Goods • Other phenomena

14. Evolution of Human Geography • Technology has evolved the study of humanity • The internet allows for instant access to data, information, and processes from anywhere • Globalization • Allows specific aspects of culture to easily travel across the globe • Becoming increasingly important to human geography as it is

15. GPS and GIS • Global Positioning Systems (GPS) allows geographers to monitor all of Earth from a distance and gather data • Provides location and time information anywhere on Earth • Remotely sensed images can be incorporated into a map • Geographic Information Systems (GIS) compares spatial data by creating digitized representations of the environment, combining layers of spatial data and creating maps in which patterns and processes are superimposed. • Used to analyze data • Example: Google Earth/Google Maps

16. Areas of Study in Human Geography • Population/Migration • Cultural • Political • Urban • Economic (Industrial) Development • Agriculture and Rural Land Use