Transcript Geographic Concepts: Region

Geographical Concepts
UNIT 1: GEOGRAPHY: ITS NATURE & PERSPECTIVES
What is geography?
• Coined by Eratosthenes
• Geo= earth
• Graphy= the study of, to write
Studying Human Geography
• Study of Geography
• Study of the earth as created by natural forces and
modified by human action
• Physical Geography
• Deals with the Earth’s natural processes and their
outcomes.
• Concerned with climate, weather patterns, landforms,
soil formation, and plant and animal ecology
Studying Human Geography
• Human Geography
• Deals with spatial organization of human activities and
with people’s relationships to their environments.
• Covers a wide variety of phenomena
• Example: agricultural production and food security,
population change, ecology of human diseases, resource
management, environmental pollution, regional
planning, and symbolism of places and landscapes
“War forces people to learn geography”
-example: Russian invasion of Georgia
• Geography and your community:
• Water supply
• Pollution
• Growth management
• Housing
Example:
Loudoun Water
• Look at environment/ water conservation
How does this connect to Ashburn?
How affect you everyday?
https://www.youtube.com/watc
h?v=pRVVZlGb7oc
https://www.youtube.com/watc
h?v=QpEFjWbXog0
5 Themes of Geography
• Location
• Region
• Place
• Movement
• Human Environment
Interaction
• Absolute Location: a point or place on map using
coordinates of latitude (degrees N or S of the Equator)
and longitude (degrees E or W of the Prime Meridian)
• Absolute Location is written in notation or exact coordinates
(degrees, minutes and seconds)
• New York City’s Absolute Location= 40°, 42’, 51” N latitude,
and 74°, 0’ 23” W longitude
Geographic Concepts: Location
• Location: Concerned with analyzing where something is
on earth and the effects that position has on human life
Session
2
• Relative Location: location described in relation to
places around it…We live about 50 miles outside of
Washington D.C.
• Site: the physical characteristics of a place…Miami’s site
includes beaches, tropical climate, etc.
• Situation: interrelatedness with other places… Shanghai’s
situation near the East China sea makes it an important port
Geographic Concepts: Location
• Location: Concerned with analyzing where something is
on earth and the effects that position has on human life
Session
2
Site
The site is the actual location
of a settlement on the earth and
is composed of the physical
characteristics of the landscape
specific to the area.
Site factors include things like
landforms (i.e. is the area
protected by mountains or is
there a natural harbor present?),
climate, vegetation types,
availability of water, soil quality,
minerals, and even wildlife.
The equator sits
at 0° latitude
The poles sit at 90° latitude
Time zones are
divided in 15
degree
longitudinal
zones
Geographic Concepts: Location
Prime Meridian run through
Greenwich, UK at 0° Longitude
on the opposite side is the
international dateline
Session
2
Situation
Limitations?
Situation is defined as the location of a place relative to its
surroundings and other places.
Factors include: accessibility of the location, the extent of a
place's connections with another, and how close an area may be
to raw materials if they are not located specifically on the site.
Though its site has made living in the nation challenging, Bhutan's
situation has allowed it to maintain its policies of isolation as well as its
own highly separated and traditionally religious culture.
STOP
• Discuss the
difference between
site and situation.
• As a group, come up
with site and
situation description
for Washington DC.
• There are three distinct categories of
regions
• Formal
• Functional
• Vernacular
Geographic Concepts: Region
• Region: Large area with some unifying
social or physical character
• People, environment, & activities in a
region share similarities and differ in
some way from other regions
Session
2
• U.S., U.K, Australia, etc. are all within the
same linguistic region…when you stop
hearing English you are out of the region
• Regional boundaries differ based on
the type of formal region…
• Cultural regions tend to have
abstract/fuzzy borders
• Political regions are finite and welldefined
• Environmental regions are
transitional
• Boundary between to environmental
regions (biomes) is called an
ecotone…i.e. the Sahel zone in Africa
Geographic Concepts: Region
• Formal Regions: Defined by some
homogeneous or uniform
characteristic
Session
2
Geographic Concepts: Region
• Functional Regions: service coming out of a node or central
place (newspaper, radio station, hospital)
• Nodal regions are measured often from a market area (city) and
its area of influence
• The American South: country music, religious, uneducated, southern
accents, etc.
• California: surfers, celebrities, etc.
• Vernacular regions can be unfounded, but can also be a point of pride for
residents living in that region
Geographic Concepts: Region
• Vernacular/Perceptual Region: is based upon the perception of
a collective mental map of a region’s population
Geographic Concepts: Place
• Place: the space given distinction by human activity and is
given a toponym (name of a place)
• i.e. the space is a mountain range, the place is the name of
that range, or the ski resort located there
Session
2
Place
Place refers to all of the human
and physical attributes in a
location
Human attributes of place include:
religions, languages, political
organizations, clothing, and artwork
present in a location
Physical attributes include:
Climate, terrain, and natural resources
Human and physical traits in a
location give it a “sense of identity”
Movement
 Movement of information,
people, goods, and other
phenomena
• Spatial interaction
 Analyzing how places
interact with each other
• Absolute Distance: exact distance (Euclidean Distance)
measured between point A and B…it is 50.1 miles from
Purcellville to Washington D.C.
• Relative Distance:
• Friction of Distance (Tobler’s 1st Law of
Geography): everything is related to everything
else, but nearer things are more related than
distant things (i.e. distance itself hinders
interaction).
• Distance Decay: Contact between two places
decreases as distance increases. Example: sound at
a concert decreases as you walk away from the
stage
Geographic Concepts: Distance
• Distance: is measured in both absolute and
relative terms similar to location.
Geographic Concepts: Distance
• Space Time Compression: Decreased time
between two places due to improved
travel methods & technology
• Driving to NYC and flying to NYC is the
same distance, but have different time
constraints.
• Time or money to travel there
Human Environment Interaction
 Describes how human activities
affect their environment & how
environmental changes impact
human life
 Cultural ecology
 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.
Consider the following:
• As a group, think about • How sensitive should
the following in terms of humans be? Let’s
discuss:
Human-Environment
Interaction:
• 2 models:
•
•
•
•
Climate
Vegetation
Landforms
Are humans causing more
change to these
environmental features,
or are they affecting more
change to humans?
• Netherlands
• South Florida
• Anywhere in Virginia?
• http://climateagenda.minie
nm.nl/