Place was defined at the beginning of the chapter as a specific point on Earth distinguished by a particular characteristic. Every place occupies a unique location, or position, on Earth’s surface. Although each place on Earth is in some respects unique, in other respects it is similar to other places. The interplay between the uniqueness of each place and the similarities among places lies at the heart of geographic inquiry into why things are found where they are.
II Key Issue 1.2: Why is Every Place Unique?
A. Place: A Unique Location
Place Names—toponym
2. Site—physical character of a place
3. Situation—relative location of a place
4. Absolute location—geographic coordinates
B Region: A Unique Area
Cultural Landscape—a combination of cultural, economic, and physical features that identify a place
2. Formal Region—uniform region, shares one or more common characteristics
3. Functional Region—nodal region, region organized around a node or point
4. Vernacular Region—perceptual region, an area people believe exists
C Regions: Geography & Culture
Culture—body of customary beliefs, material traits, and social forms constituting the distinct tradition of a group
a. Geography & Culture: What People Care About—ideas, values, beliefs
b. Geography & Culture: What People Take Care Of—material culture, food, clothing, shelter 2 . Spatial association—distribution of one feature is related to the distribution of another feature
Key Issue 2: Why Is Every Place Unique?
Place: A Unique Location An essential aspect of geography is the process of describing the features of a place. Through these descriptions, similarities, differences, and changes across Earth may be explained by geographers. The component parts, or features, that make each place on Earth distinct may be examined to assist in these descriptions. A feature’s place on the Earth may be identified by its location, the position that something occupies on Earth’s surface.
Place Names A place name, or toponym, is the most common way of describing a location. Many uninhabited places are even named. Place names sometimes reflect the cultural history of a place, and a change in place name is often culturally motivated. Examining changes in place name geography is a useful insight into the changing cultural context of a place. The Board of Geographical Names was established in the late nineteenth century to be the final arbiter of names on U.S. maps. In recent years, the board has been especially concerned with removing offensive place names.
Site The term site refers to the physical characteristics of a place. Important site characteristics include climate, water sources, topography, soil, vegetation, latitude, and elevation. The combination of physical features gives each place a distinctive character. People disagree on the attributes of a good location for settlement. What is considered a good site depends on cultural values.
Situation The term situation describes a place in terms of its location relative to other places. Understanding situation can help locate an unfamiliar place in terms of known places, or it can help explain the significance of a place. We give directions to people by referring to the situation of a place. We identify important buildings, streets, and other landmarks to direct people to the desired location. In contrast, absolute location never changes and uses geographic coordinates to identify a place’s location.
Region: A Unique Area An area of Earth defined by one or more distinctive characteristics is a region. A particular place can be included in more than one region, depending on the criteria used to define the region. Regions can be defined at a variety of scales—from localities within a state to several neighboring counties. A region gains uniqueness from possessing not a single human or an environmental characteristic but a combination of them.
The cultural landscape is a recurrent theme throughout this text. It represents the total sum of cultural, economic, and features of the physical environment that combine to create distinctive landscapes across Earth. Sauer defined the cultural landscape, “Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result.”
A formal region, also called a uniform region, is a region with a predominant or universal characteristic. Formal regions commonly have well-defined boundaries. The shared feature could be a cultural value such as a common language or an environmental property such as climate. In a formal region, the selected characteristic is present throughout the region. Some formal regions are easy to identify, such as countries or local government units. A characteristic may just be predominant rather than universal. For example, the North American wheat belt is a formal region in which wheat is the most commonly grown crop, but other crops are grown there as well.
A functional region, also known as a nodal region, is defined by an area of use or influence of some feature. Often used in economic geography, functional regions have “fuzzy” boundaries as the influence of the central feature decreases over distance. The functional region is organized around a focal point. A good example of a functional region is the reception area of a television station. A television station’s signal is the strongest at the center of its service area and becomes weaker at the edge and eventually can no longer be distinguished. At some distance from the center, more people are watching a station originating in another city. That place is the boundary between functional regions of two TV market areas.
A vernacular region, or perceptual region, is the most ambiguously defined as they rely on a mental conception of a place as belonging to a common region for complex cultural reasons. Such regions emerge from people’s informal sense of place rather than scientific models developed through geographic thought. A vernacular region is closely associated with an individual’s (his or her) mental map, which is an internal representation of a portion of Earth’s surface. A mental map depicts what an individual knows about a place, containing personal impressions of what is in the place and where the place is located.
Geography and Culture One of the defining characteristics of a region that helps geographers identify regions is culture. Culture is a body of customary beliefs, material traits, and social forms that together constitutes the distinct tradition of a group of people. The word culture originates from the Latin cultus, meaning “to care for.” Culture is a complex concept, comprising two different meanings: to care about (to adore or worship something) and to take care of (to nurse or look after something). Geographers use both of these aspects of the concept of culture to examine the uniqueness of regions throughout the world.
Geography and Culture: What People Care About Important cultural values derive from a group’s language, religion, and ethnicity. These three cultural traits are both an excellent way of identifying the location of a culture and the principal means by which cultural values become distributed around the world. These cultural traits are covered in detail in Chapters 5, 6, and 7.
Geography and Culture: What People Take Care Of Another element of culture of interest to geographers is production of material wealth—the food, clothing, and shelter that humans need to survive and thrive. All people consume food, wear clothing, and build shelter, but different cultural groups obtain their wealth in different ways. Various characteristics—such as per capita income, literacy rates, and TVs per capita—distinguish developed regions and developing ones. Most people in developing countries are engaged in agriculture, whereas most people in developed countries earn a living through performing services in exchange for wages. These concepts are discussed in Chapters 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13.
Spatial Association A region is defined through its unique combination of features. In defining and analyzing regions, geographers look for factors with similar distributions. Spatial association arises if the distribution of one feature located within a region is related to the distribution of another feature.
1.2 Key Terms
Absolute distance
Describing how far a distance is quantitative units of distance (miles, kilometers, etc.)
Absolute location
Describing where something is using the exact site on an objective coordinate system
Cultural Landscape
The visible changes that humans make to the environment including buildings, crops, and signs
Formal region
A region that is based quantitative data data (that can be documented or measured) - all government areas are this because they share a government
Friction of distance
A metaphor that explains that effort must be used to overcome distance
Functional region
A region based around a node or focal point - terrestrial radio broadcasts are an example of this
Location
The position of anything on Earth's surface.
Pattern
The geometric or regular arrangement of something in a particular area.
Place
A specific point on Earth, distinguished by a particular characteristic.
Relative distance
Describing the distance between locations using qualitative terms or non-traditional measurements of distance (one hour north of)
Relative location
Describing the position of a place as compared to (or relative to!) another landmark
Site
The physical character of a place
Situation (or relative location)
The location of a place relative to another place.
Spatial
It's not as complicated as it sounds - a fancy word for describing how things are organized in space
Spatial distribution
Arrangement of a phenomenon across the Earth's surface
Spatial Interaction
The flow of goods, people, or information among places, in response to localized supply and demand
Toponym
A place name
Vernacular region (or perceptual region)
An area that shares a common qualitative characteristic, it's only a region because people believe it's a region