HUMAN GEOGRAPHY
• Human Geography is defined in a relatively narrow-sense, human geography is concerned with a study of human occupancies of the earth.
• It includes a study of ethnic composition of populations, the process of evolution of various occupations and settlements, human adaptations in different parts of world, etc.
Population Geography
• "Population geography is a division of human geography that focuses on how the migration, distribution, and growth of population is affected by the nature of a place."
• Population growth and distribution are the chief components of its subject matter.
• This branch also studies ethnic, social and linguistic composition of population besides theories and laws concerned with population growth and mobility, etc.
• Population geography can essentially be split into two categories: demography and spatial demography.
• Demography is the measurement of human characteristics, including not only basic statistics on race, age, and gender, but also measurements of education, housing, income, and employment.
• Demography also encompasses characteristics of a specific area, like population density, crime rate, and unemployment rate.
• Generally, populations grow over an extended period of time.
• To effectively analyze population growth, geographers use a variety of measurements:
• Crude Birth Rate (CBR) measures all live births per 1000 people.
• Crude Death Rate (CDR) measures all deaths per 1000 people.
• In this case, the age or cause of death does not matter.
• The Rate of Natural Increase (RNI) is calculated by subtracting the Crude Death Rate from the Crude Birth Rate (CBR – CDR = RNI)
• TFR (Total Fertility Rate) measures the number of children a woman is potentially able to have.
• These four measurements provide valuable data to population geographers as to why populations grow or decline in specific time periods.
Effects of overpopulation
Depletion of natural resources
• The depletion of resources can also lead to air, water, soil and noise pollution.
• It might also lead to deforestation and vicariously the destruction of various ecosystems on both land and in the water.
Species extinction
• This refers to both the population that becomes overpopulated as well as the surrounding species that might be affected by their overpopulation.
High infant and child mortality rates
• This is not to imply that the adult population will not be effected by overpopulation but instead that the effects on the child and infant populations will be exacerbated by poverty.
• This concept is evidenced by the decreasing trend of child and infant mortalities as the wealth trend increases.
Increased prevalence of epidemics and pandemics
Overcrowding, malnutrition, and inadequate health care all combine to create a breeding ground for disease.
Malnutrition
Malnutrition is the act of being under nourished not underfed, the common misconception is that there is not enough food but in reality there is a lack of balanced diet.
• Lower life expectancy.
• Unhygienic living conditions.
• Elevated crime rates – Desperate times call for desperate measures. War is merely a nationwide escalation of this elevated crime rate.
• As noted earlier, population geography as an independent sub-field of human geography is a comparatively recent phenomenon.
• In the expression ‘population geography’, the term ‘population’ signifies the subject matter and ‘geography’ refers to the perspective of investigation.
• Thus, population geography can be interpreted as the study of population in spatial perspective.
• Etymologically, population geography implies the investigation into human covering of the earth and its various facets with reference to the physical and cultural environment.
• Broadly speaking, the concerns of population geography, according to Trewartha, can be grouped into three categories:
➢ A historical account of population
➢ Dynamics of number, size, distribution and growth patterns
➢ Qualities of population and their regional distribution.
• To conclude, the main concern of population geography revolves around the following three aspects of human population.
• Size and distribution, including the rural-urban distribution of population.
• Population dynamics – past and present trends in growth and its spatial manifestation; components of population change, viz., fertility, mortality and migration.
• Population composition and structure. They include a set of demographic characteristics, social characteristics, and economic characteristics.
• Population geography studies systems and structures—the forms of settlement in relation to the spatial nature of production, the characteristics of the geographical environment, the economic-geographical condition of population employment, and population migrations.
• Together with differences in the natural growth of population, migrations determine the course of territorial redistribution of population.
• A prominent place is given to the classification and typology of populated points.
• Under the planned socialist economy, the practical tasks of population geography include quantitative and qualitative assessment of labor resources and a search for the forms of settlement most responsive to the requirements of production and the cultural and domestic needs of the population.
• A study of the conditions of habitation in different natural-geographic regions reveals the connections between population geography and medical geography.
• Research on ethnography and the economics of labor is closely associated, and sometimes intertwined, with population geography.
Cultural Geography
• Cultural geography is the study of the many cultural aspects found throughout the world and how they relate to the spaces and places where they originate and then travel as people continually move across various areas. • It focuses on describing and analyzing the ways language, religion, economy, government and other cultural phenomenon vary or remain constant from one place to another.
Evolution of Culture
• Culture is a unique possession of man.
• It is one of the distinguishing traits of human society.
• Culture does not exist in the sub-human level.
• Only man is born and brought up in a Cultural environment.
• Culture is the unique quality of man that separates him from the lower animals.
• Culture is the major way in which human beings adapt to their environments.
• Culture is the way of life of a group of people, the complex of shared concepts and patterns of learning behavior handed down from one generation to the next through the means of language and imitation.
• Accumulation of thoughts values and objects; it is the social heritage acquired by us from proceeding generations through learning, as distinguished from the biological heritage which is passed on to us automatically through the genes.
Characteristics of culture
• The characteristics of the culture are continuous and cumulative.
• It is consistent and integrated.
• It is adaptive and dynamic.
• It is gratifying and it varies from society to society.
• The culture is super organic ideational.
Themes in Cultural Geography
Culture Region
• A formal or functional region within which common cultural characteristics prevail.
• A nuclear area within which an advanced and distinctive set of culture traits, ideas, and technologies develops and from which there is diffusion of those characteristics and the cultural landscape features they imply. •
A culture region is a portion of Earth’s surface that has common cultural elements.
• Identifying and mapping culture regions are significant tasks because they show us where particular culture traits or cultural communities are located.
• Culture regions, like cultures themselves, display considerable variety.
• For starters, any number of cultural components may be used to define culture regions.
• Culture regions can be found in urban, suburban, or rural settings. Many cities contain ethnic neighborhoods. Basically, these are urban culture regions whose borders are defined by the locations of specific cultural communities.
Cultural Diffusion
• The process of spread of a feature or trend from one place to another over time.
Relocation diffusion
• The spread of an idea through physical movement of people from one place to another.
Cultural Ecology
• Cultural ecology is the study of human adaptations to social and physical environments.
• Human adaptation refers to both biological and cultural processes that enable a population to survive and reproduce within a given or changing environment.
Cultural Integration
• Cultural integration is a form of cultural exchange in which one group assumes the beliefs, practices and rituals of another group without sacrificing the characteristics of its own culture.
Cultural landscape
• A cultural landscape is defined as "a geographic area, including both cultural and natural resources and the wildlife or domestic animals therein, associated with a historic event, activity, or person or exhibiting other cultural or aesthetic values."
• Cultural landscapes can range from thousands of acres of rural tracts of land to a small homestead with a front yard of less than one acre.
• Like historic buildings and districts, these special places reveal aspects of our country's origins and development through their form and features and the ways they were used.
• Cultural landscapes also reveal much about our evolving relationship with the natural world.
Historic landscape
• It includes residential gardens and community parks, scenic highways, rural communities, institutional grounds, cemeteries, battlefields and zoological gardens.
• They are composed of a number of character-defining features which, individually or collectively contribute to the landscape's physical appearance as they have evolved over time.
• In addition to vegetation and topography, cultural landscapes may include water features, such as ponds, streams, and fountains; circulation features, such as roads, paths, steps, and walls; buildings; and furnishings, including fences, benches, lights and sculptural objects.
Historic Designed Landscape
• A landscape that was consciously designed or laid out by a landscape architect, master gardener, architect, or horticulturist according to design principles, or an amateur gardener working in a recognized style or tradition.
• The landscape may be associated with a significant person(s), trend, or event in landscape architecture; or illustrate an important development in the theory and practice of landscape architecture.
• Aesthetic values play a significant role in designed landscapes
Historic Vernacular Landscape
• A landscape that evolved through uses by the people whose activities or occupancy shaped that landscape.
• Through social or cultural attitudes of an individual, family or a community, the landscape reflects the physical, biological, and cultural character of those everyday lives.
• Function plays a significant role in vernacular landscapes.
• They can be a single property such as a farm or a collection of properties such as a district of historic farms along a river valley.
Historic Site
• A landscape significant for its association with a historic event, activity, or person.
Ethnographic Landscape
• A landscape containing a variety of natural and cultural resources that associated people define as heritage resources. Settlement Geography
• Evolution of human settlements, their environmental correlates and persons constitute the subject matter of this branch of geography.
• Besides studying the spatial distribution of settlements, it also studies the internal organization and circulation patterns within settlements.
• Settlement geography is further subdivided into urban geography and rural geography.
• Urban Geography - Urban geography is a branch of human geography concerned with various aspects of cities. • An urban geographer's main role is to emphasize location and space and study the spatial processes that create patterns observed in urban areas.
• In general, a rural area or countryside is a geographic area that is located outside towns and cities.
• Whatever is not urban is considered “rural."
• Typical rural areas have a low population density and small settlements.
• Agricultural areas are commonly rural, though, so are others such as forests.
Political Geography
• Another branch spawned by human geography, political geography is concerned with the political organization of space and the role of geographical plates in this organization.
• An important theme in political geography is geopolitics.
• It is concerned with assigning and evaluating political significance of various areas according to their geographical attributes.
• Electrical Geography is a newly emerged specialization of political geography.
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