Human Geography

Define Human Geography and Describe the Value of Thinking Geographically.

Geography is the study of the spaces and places people create on the ground and in their minds, and the ways in which people use and shape the environment. The field of human geography focuses on how we organize ourselves and our activities in space; how we are connected to one another and the environment; how we make places and how those places in turn shape our lives; and how we think about and organize ourselves locally and globally.

Human geography includes the subdisciplines of political geography, economic geography, population geography, and urban geography. Human geography also includes cultural geography, which is both part of human geography and also its own approach to all aspects of human geography. Cultural geography looks at the ways culture, including religion, language, and ethnicity are distributed and affect human geography. Cultural geography also examines how culture affects our understanding of topics addressed in human geography. Cultural geography can be thought of both as a component of human geography and a perspective on human geography.

How People Make Geography

People have a bigger impact on the world now than at any point in history. In 1900, the world had 1 billion people. The fastest ways to travel were steamships, railroads, and horse and buggy. Now, nearly 8 billion people can cross the globe in a matter of days, with most having easy access to automobiles, high-speed railroads, airplanes, and ships.

Traveling long distances in short times and communicating instantly have globalized the world. An idea can spread across the world and connect people from different places within minutes. Globalization is a set of processes that are increasing interactions, deepening relationships, and accelerating connectedness across country borders. It includes the movement of money, the migration of people, the flow of ideas, and the making and trading of goods. You might think of globalization as a blanket covering the world and making every place the same, but that is not the case. Differences from place to place matter. An idea or innovation may spread around the world, but people will interpret or change that idea depending on their own experiences and the particular characteristics of individual places. Globalization creates connections when 2 billion people can read the same tweet at the same time, but it also creates divisions because those 2 billion people can interpret the tweet hundreds of different ways, and many other billions will never see the tweet.

It is important to recognize that a globalized process has different impacts in different places because no two places are the same. Moreover, whenever we look at something at one scale, we always try to think about how processes that exist at other scales may affect what we are studying (see the discussion of scale later in this chapter).

This course will come back again and again to globalization because of the profound impacts it has had on the human geography. As geographers Ron Johnston, Peter Taylor, and Michael Watts (2002) explain, “Whatever your opinion may be, any intellectual engagement with social change in the twenty-first century has to address this concept seriously, and assess its capacity to explain the world we currently inhabit.” We integrate the concept of globalization into our discussion of human geography because processes at the global scale, processes that are not unique to local places or confined by national borders, are clearly changing people, places, and cultures.

Consider the issue of hunger. On its face, the world’s hunger problem might seem easily solvable. Take the total annual food production in the world, divide it by the world’s population, and you have enough food for everyone. Yet 11 percent of the world’s population is hungry or chronically undernourished. Of the 815 million undernourished people globally, the vast majority are women and children, who have little money and even less power.

This map shows how food consumption is currently distributed—unevenly. Comparing the two maps shows that the wealthier countries also are the best fed, whereas Africa has numerous countries in the highest categories of hunger and undernourishment.

World Undernourishment. Undernourishment rates are higher in Africa and Asia than in North America and Europe. The World Food Program estimates that just under one billion people worldwide are malnourished, with the highest rates in Africa, South America, and Asia.

Map 1 World Undernourishment. Undernourishment rates are higher in Africa and Asia than in North America and Europe. The World Food Program estimates that just under one billion people worldwide are malnourished, with the highest rates in Africa, South America, and Asia.

Map 2 World Undernourishment. Undernourishment rates are higher in Africa and Asia than in North America and Europe. The World Food Program estimates that just under one billion people worldwide are malnourished, with the highest rates in Africa, South America, and Asia.

Map 3 Arable (Farmable) Land. The percent of arable (farmable) land varies by country. South Asia and eastern Europe have the highest rates. Arable land tells us potential for agriculture, but it does not necessarily correlate with nourishment or undernourishment. Countries with limited arable land and higher incomes, like Japan and Norway, import the food needed to feed their population.

Take the case of the east African country of Kenya. It has enough farmable land to feed its population, but the most productive land in the western highlands is used to produce coffee and tea instead of foods for local consumption. Foreign corporations own the coffee and tea plantations, and they sell the crops abroad. While the foreign income from selling coffee and tea helps the trade balance and economy of Kenya as a whole, small farmers in Kenya face challenges. Small farms in the lowlands have been subdivided to the point that many are too small to be productive farms. Kenya has a gendered legal system that disempowers women, who make up most of the country’s agricultural labor force, which makes it nearly impossible for small farmers who are women to create, invest in land and technology and grow their production. In the northeast, Kenyan farmers have suffered through severe droughts, diseases attacking their herds, and conflict in neighboring Somalia.

Solving one of the Kenya’s problems often raises another. If Kenyans converted the most productive farmlands to growing crops for local markets and local consumption, how would lower income families afford the crops that were grown? What would happen to the rest of Kenya’s economy and the government itself if there were significantly less export revenue from tea and coffee? If Kenya lost its export revenue, how could the country pay the loans it owes to global financial and development institutions?

Answering each of these questions requires thinking geographically because the answers are rooted in the characteristics of places and the connections those places have to other places. Geographers often use on-the-ground fieldwork to gain insights into such questions. Geographers have a long tradition of fieldwork. We go out in the field and see what people are doing, we talk to people and observe how their actions and reactions vary across space, and we develop maps and other visualizations that help us situate and analyze what we learn. We, the authors, have countless field experiences, and we share many with you to help you understand the diversity of people and the influences shaping the development of places.

Addressing major global problems such as hunger or inequality is complicated in our interconnected world. Any solution will play out differently from place to place, and how things play out will have regional and global consequences over time. Our goals in this book are to help you make connections among people and places, enable you to recognize patterns and processes in human geography, give you an appreciation for the uniqueness of place, and teach you to think geographically.

The Value of Thinking Geographically

Place locations are to geography what dates are to history. History is not merely about memorizing dates. To understand history is to appreciate how events, circumstances, and ideas came together at particular times to produce certain outcomes. Knowledge of history, of how different people created and experienced events that have developed over time, is critical to understanding who we are and where we are going.

Understanding change across space is equally important to understanding change over time. The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that we need disciplines focused not only on particular concrete attributes of the world around us (such as economics and sociology), but also on time (history) and space (geography). The disciplines of history and geography have intellectual cores defined by their perspectives as opposed to a particular subject of study. The spatial perspective that human geographers bring to studying the world offers a particular way of looking at a multitude of phenomena, ranging from political elections and urban slums to race and migration.

Because the spatial perspective gives insight across a broad range of topics, human geographers have careers as location analysts, urban planners, diplomats, remote sensing analysts, geographic information scientists, area specialists, travel consultants, political analysts, intelligence officers, cartographers, educators, soil scientists, transportation planners, park rangers, and environmental consultants. All of these careers and more are open to geographers because each of these fields requires a spatial perspective to understand people and places.

What is AP Human Geography?

Oftentimes, students and parents struggle with understanding what the “human” part of AP Human Geography is. Students feel like they have an elementary understanding of geography and geography skills. Therefore, it is important to break down each part of the course title to help students understand what they will be learning in class. Thus far, we have covered the “AP” part of the title. Let’s move to the final word, “Geography,” next.

Geography is the systematic study of the spatial patterns of all phenomena on or near the Earth’s surface. Its primary methodology is spatial analysis, which asks two basic questions: Where are things located? (spatial), and Why are they located where they are? (analysis—why there). Historians use time as their foundation, think chronologically, and ask “when” and “why”; geographers use space as their foundation, think spatially, and ask “where” and “why there.”

Geography is not history, though both courses are related to each other and historical information “serves to enrich analysis of the impacts of phenomena such as globalization, colonialism, and human–environment relationships on places, regions, cultural landscapes, and patterns of interaction.”

The primary tools of geography are maps, charts, and photographs due to geography’s focus on “where” and “why there.” However, geography is truly a twenty-first-century discipline, with geospatial technologies including geographic information systems (GIS), satellite navigation systems, remote sensing, and online mapping and visualization playing a major role in presenting data and displaying information. Remember, geography is a spatial discipline, which means it will look at different variables and how they are organized in space. Then geographers ask, “Where is it?” and “Why is it there?”

Human geography is one of the major divisions of geography; the spatial analysis of human population and its cultures, activities, and landscapes. Instead of presenting geography through a regional perspective, human geography covers thematic topics such as population growth, migration patterns, language distribution, and economic differences. Therefore, students in AP® Human Geography will analyze a theme such as population growth in the world and ask the two fundamental questions of the course “where is it” and “why is it there”.

According to the College Board, “The content is presented thematically rather than regionally and is organized around the discipline’s main subfields: economic geography, cultural geography, political geography, and urban geography. The approach is spatial and problem oriented. Case studies are drawn from all world regions, with an emphasis on understanding the world in which we live today.”

Human geography thus provides the foundation for understanding fundamental similarities and differences between people culturally, politically, economically, and socially through a spatial perspective. Human geographers look at where something occurs, search for patterns, and span most of the other social studies disciplines to answer the why there question.

Questions of Human Geography

Where is population growing? Where are people migrating? Why there?

Where are different languages spoken? Why are they spoken there?

Where are different religions practiced? Where is there religious conflict? Why there?

Where do people live in the United States? Why do so many people live in the suburbs? Why do more people live on the coasts throughout the world?

Where are textile mills (clothing manufacturers) located in the world today? Why are they there? Where were textile mills in the United States? Why did they leave the United States? Where are new factories locating in the United States? Why there?

According to the College Board, The goal for the course is for students to become more geoliterate, more engaged in contemporary global issues, and more informed about multicultural viewpoints. They will develop skills in approaching problems geographically, using maps and geospatial technologies, thinking critically about texts and graphic images, interpreting cultural landscapes, and applying geographic concepts such as scale, region, diffusion, interdependence, and spatial interaction, among others. Students will see geography as a discipline relevant to the world in which they live; as a source of ideas for identifying, clarifying, and solving problems at various scales; and as a key component of building global citizenship and environmental stewardship.