Human Geography: The Basics

Andrew Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136307188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Human Geography: The Basics is a concise introduction to the study of the role that humankind plays in shaping the world around us. Whether it's environmental concerns, the cities we live in or the globalization of the economy, these are issues which affect us all. This book introduces these topics and more including:

• global environment issues and development
• cities, firms and regions
• migration, immigration and asylum
• landscape, culture and identity
• travel, mobility and tourism
• agriculture and food.

Featuring an overview of theory, end of chapter summaries, case study boxes, further reading lists and a glossary, this book is the ideal introduction for anybody new to the study of human geography.

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS HUMAN GEOGRAPHY?

The academic subject of geography has had a mixture of fortunes throughout its history. The ancient Greeks saw geographical knowledge as one of the leading forms of scholarship, and the birth of modern geography placed it at the forefront of expanding Western empires in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, geographers were also at the forefront of ideas in a darker phase of history in the 20th century and caught up in ideologies leading to the First and Second World Wars. In the latter part of the 20th century, the subject also lost status. After the Second World War, some questioned the coherence of a subject that spanned the natural science of physical geography and the social science of human geography. Harvard University actually closed its geography department in 1948, more or less for just this reason. Moreover, in the English-speaking world, the later 20th century saw geography lampooned in popular culture as backward-looking, all about the names of capital cities, rivers and drawing maps. By the 1970s, comedians on television and film gained laughs from stereotypes of ‘geography teachers’, perhaps based on caricatures of teachers boring students with facts about far-flung places. In British culture, BBC comedies such as The Goodies and later Blackadder (now endlessly repeated on cable channels worldwide) portrayed geography teachers as objects of ridicule. In North America, portrayals have tended more often to be of a dull subject that just wasn’t cool.

However, in the 21st century, geography as a whole, and human geography as a part of that, has enjoyed a far-reaching rejuvenation. In the last 30 years, the subject has enjoyed renewed interest and popularity, and influential people beyond the academic world have once again started to echo the 17th century philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) in proclaiming geography to be one of the most useful and important of subjects. Rather than being perceived as a weakness, being both a natural and social science is once again increasingly seen as a strength. There are several reasons for this renewal. In part it is to do with a significant evolution of what human geographers study and how they now go about theorizing the social world. It is also to do with how the world has changed, most notably as we live in a world that in the early 21st century in one way or another is increasingly globalized. At the time of writing this book, the current president of the Royal Geographical Society in London is in fact the former Monty Python comedian, now famed global traveller, Michael Palin. It is perhaps symbolic of the reversal in the subject’s fortunes that such a high-profile figure should invest energy in championing the subject of geography. Undoubtedly, this reversal in geography’s fortunes reflects a wider recognition that many of the current and ‘big’ challenges that face the world today are well addressed by the subject: globalization, climate change, sustainability, economic development or poverty reduction. Yet it is also about a reinvigoration of the theoretical ideas in the half of the discipline that this book deals with: human geography.

In that respect – dealing with half rather than a whole subject – this book is unique in The Basics series. To understand geography in its entirety, you may well want to invest in the companion volume Physical Geography: The Basics. But human and physical geography are also inextricably linked through geography’s long interest in the relation between the social and natural worlds and the ways that many issues – most notably that of our environment – require knowledge and understanding of both.

So what is human geography, and what is all about? Human geography is concerned with all aspects of human society on Earth, but in particular adopts a spatial approach. If any one distinguishing feature marks the subject out from other social science subjects, it is this concern to think spatially about the social world. In that respect, human geographers share an interest in an enormous range of topics that are also the concern of other social science disciplines. What makes their perspective different, however, is what many thinkers in the subject call a ‘geographical imagination’. Human geographers think about how things exists in space, how features of the social world change across spaces and the difference that places make to the nature of human existence. They are also concerned with the unevenness of human existence in space and between different places. This rests on a basic philosophical viewpoint that everything that happens in human life occurs in a certain space and time. Geographers often use the clever epithet that all social life, one way or another, ‘takes place’. That is, everything in human life has to happen somewhere, and that somewhere (along with its relations to a lot of somewhere elses) matters a lot in terms of what actually happens.

Human geography is therefore all about understanding why the spatial nature of ‘social things’ matter. Differences between places shape how the nature of how things develop. Economic geographers, for example, have long argued that certain industries develop in certain cities or regions for reasons related to the specific nature of those places as well as to their position in relation to other places. In previous centuries, iron and steel industries grew up in Western Europe in places that were close to natural deposits of iron ore and in proximity to fuels for smelting like coal. By the 20th century, being close to these raw materials was no longer important but industries persisted in those places because by then a suitably skilled workforce were living in them and other related activities like shipbuilding had started near by. Examples would be north-east England in the UK, or the northern coast of Germany around the Rhine. In the 21st century, however, cheap labour and the demand for steel in developing countries in Asia and elsewhere have increasingly led to the relocation of these industries to new regions of the world such as the southern provinces of China and South Korea.

Likewise, political geographers see the development of certain governments and political institutions in a country as inseparable from the past development of societies in those particular parts of the world. Bolivian politics is very different from Thai politics for a whole myriad of reasons related to the very different locations of these nation-states on the planet’s surface, and to the long history and relationships with other places these societies have had. In today’s world, where there has been much debate about the globalization of human life on Earth, the patterns of relationships across spaces and places that human geographers have sought to analyse have become increasingly complicated. Equally cultural geographers have long associated the nature of different cultures with – in one way or another – people living in certain places and in certain ways over long periods of time, although in modern times globalization has made this much more complex and difficult.

So human geography then is a very broad subject in terms of topics of analysis but one characterized by a very distinctive emphasis on the nature and significance of space and location. In writing this book I want to try to convince you that it is one of the most useful subjects anyone can study, and that it offers a unique and very powerful approach for understanding the big issues that face everyone on planet Earth in the 21st century. Not to play down the specific strengths of other subjects, human geographers certainly see the world differently from, say, sociologists, economists or political scientists. The philosophical concern with space provides an overall concern with issues that are often dealt with separately in other subjects. This holistic approach to understanding the social world is often seen as a major distinguishing strength. The reason is fairly straightforward: the social world is a complicated and messy thing that requires an understanding of many different aspects in order to see the whole. And you can only get so far in theorizing the world by focusing on one aspect in isolation to the exclusion of others. Economists may focus on markets, political scientists on institutions or sociologists on practices, but human geographers try to look at the relationships between all of these in order to understand what happens in the world. Human geography today is therefore a diverse subject far from the caricatures of geography teachers from earlier decades boring students with factual lists of peoples, places and countries. Hopefully if you are reading this book, your experience of geography in general, and human geography more particularly, is rather different from these caricatures. They exist because it is true that 40 or 50 years ago, the subject of geography was taught rather differently in English-speaking countries, but it is also true that the subject has itself changed quite radically. Before we consider how this has come about, and the sheer diversity of both topics and theoretical ideas in human geography today, it is important to understand the major goals of this book and how it is organized.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK

This book attempts to provide a whistle-stop tour of human geography to give you a broad overview of the subject. It has deliberately not been organized around a list of what are often called sub-disciplines within the subject. Not only would such an approach be tedious, but covering every possible topic in human geography would be impossible. Other books, such as the Dictionary of Human Geography or the online International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography, fulfil such a role, and do a good job. Rather the goal of this book is to give the reader an overview that shows how the many different topics and themes in human geography today relate to each other. With that in mind, the book is organized into six further thematic chapters that try to illustrate the linkages between different but often overlapping sub-disciplines in the subject. In that way, it should give you an understanding of how both economic and political geographers are interested in governments and regulations, or how many questions of environmental change concern not only environmental geographers but also cultural or development geographers.

This thematic tour of the subject begins in the next chapter by considering how human geography has been concerned with the big questions around globalization. This debate in human geography is very closely related to the themes considered in Chapter 3: the question of development and debates about the global environment. Chapter 4 then moves to look at how human geographers have conceptualized the states and nationalism, culture and landscape. In Chapter 5, the themes focus on issues that have been of central interest to urban and economic geographers in considering the large body of work within the subject concerned with cities, regions and industries. Chapter 6 then examines themes of a more social and political nature in considering geographical work on population and demography, migration, mobility and labour. This is followed by an overview in Chapter 7 of how social and cultural geographies have sought to theorize the nature of the body and identities based around gender, ethnicity, race and age. Finally, the book ends with a brief concluding chapter that outlines some of the future directions human geography is likely to develop along as a subject.

However, this thematic approach to providing an overview of human geography still does not avoid the necessity of discussing different sub-disciplines altogether. While the thematic chapters do cut across different areas of the subject, these sub-disciplines have distinctive topics of interest and have often developed around particular theoretical and methodological approaches. The major sub-disciplines and the kinds of topics geographers working in them are interested in are shown in Table 1.1. As you will see, human geography is perhaps more interdisciplinary in its nature than other social science subjects, but it is important to realize it is not a chaotic or incoherent diversity. Before we move on to the thematic chapters, it is therefore relevant to consider in more depth the historical evolution of the subject which led to the emergence of these distinct sub-disciplinary areas and also examine the cross-cutting theoretical ideas that are often brought together when human geographers seek to understand the world today. The remainder of this chapter considers each of these issues in turn.

A (VERY) SHORT HISTORY OF HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

While geography as an academic discipline has a very long history dating back to the Greek civilization, the subject we know today emerged during the 18th and particularly 19th centuries as the study of the Earth’s physical and human features and how those varied between countries and regions. The development of what is now human geography is in particular bound up in the period when Western European countries were expanding their influence across the globe through the development of first colonies and later empires. Geography as a subject was seen as central to understanding the nature of the world. The first society was founded in 1821 in Paris – the Société Géographique de Paris (SGP), with other national geographical societies such as the Royal Geographical Society (founded in London in 1830) following in European countries soon after. Over the century thereafter, the establishment of geography spread worldwide with, for example, the American National Geographic Society being founded in 1888 and the Association of Japanese Geographers in 1925. During the 20th century, the legacy of Western European imperialism led to the further spread of geography as a discipline studied and taught in universities across the globe.

Table 1.1 Human geography and its sub-disciplines

Prior to the 20th century, much of what would be described as human geography took a regional emphasis. Human geography in the 19th century was mostly concerned with examining, mapping and describing the distinctive nature of different societies and cultures of people living in different regions of the globe. It has also been criticized for this direct link to the imperial ambitions of Western European countries. Human geography undoubtedly played its part in acting to support colonialism and the domination of peoples around the world by Western European societies. Geographical knowledge has always been used by political rulers, military leaders and others, sometimes to ill effect. However, in the 20th century, the problematic status of the subject in relation to the politics of the real world is even clearer. Human geography developed beyond a simple descriptive emphasis providing information about different parts of the world, and began to develop theories of how human societies related to each other in space and territory. Chapter 4 of this book considers, for example, how human geographical theories in the early 20th century were caught up in the world wars. The ideas of the British geographer Halford MacKinder (1861–1947) concerning the competition and conflict for territory between the 19th-century European nations certainly informed political ideologies that led to the First World War. Equally, the work of two German human geographers, Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) and Walter Christaller (1893–1969), were made use of by the Nazis in Germany to both justify German territorial expansion and aid the planning of new settlement in countries that had been invaded, such as Poland. It is always hard to judge the past and the intentions of individuals, and these human geographers were not necessarily directly or intentionally involved in the fateful political projects that led to the world wars, but their ideas certainly played a part (Barnes 2011).

Perhaps for this reason the human geography that emerged in the 1950s in Europe and North America moved away from theoretical models and returned to a very regional and descriptive approach. The experience of human geographical theories applied to the real world in the first half of the century had not been a positive one. However, by the 1960s, human geographers increasingly rejected this regional and descriptive approach, once again seeking to develop a theoretical human geography. Their inspiration was a philosophical school of thought in the social sciences known as positivism, which in essence argued that social theories should be developed in the same way as natural science subject such as physics, chemistry and biology. Human geography then took on the methodologies of these subjects, trying to become a spatial science. This involved the development and testing of scientific hypotheses, the aim being to establish factual geographical knowledge about the social world and the way it works through the collection of data. During this period human geographers made increasing use of quantitative methods and statistical analysis, seen to be more rigorous and scientific than past descriptive approaches to the subject.

Yet by the mid-1970s a further wave of criticism within human geography doubted the capacity of this so-called ‘quantitative revolution’ to deliver the truth of the social world. In particular, two critical strands to human geography developed. One came in the form of Marxist human geography that argued (drawing on wider Marxism) that attempting to turn human geography into some kind of pure ‘spatial science’ which could construct objective and neutral facts about the social world was fundamentally misguided. Informed by Marxist political economy, which was concerned with social justice, inequality and the uneven power between groups in society, a new wave of human geography rejected the ideas of positivism and sought to develop a human geography that was engaged with political questions. Geographers such as David Harvey and Edward Soja used Marxist theories to offer new insights into why the world economy produced inequalities of wealth in different places. They were in essence interested in the way capitalism led to uneven economic development. Much of this analy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Overview
• Artist
• Title page
• Copyright page
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• 1. INTRODUCTION
• 2. GLOBALIZATION
• 3. DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT
• 4. STATES, NATIONS AND CULTURE
• 5. CITIES, REGIONS AND INDUSTRIES
• 6. PEOPLE, WORK, AND MOBILITY
• 7. BODIES, PRACTICES AND IDENTITIES
• 8. CONCLUDING OVERVIEW: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY TODAY
• GLOSSARY
• REFERENCES
• INDEX