Fundamental Geography Themes and Concepts
FUNDAMENTAL GEOGRAPHY THEMES AND CONCEPTS
What is GEOGRAPHY?
- Description of the earth.
Knowing when and where you are is part of human consciousness.
- Where are you? What day is it?
In studying and describing the earth, GEOGRAPHY shares certain approaches with HISTORY.
- History explores time contexts (When? & Why?)
- Geography explores spatial contexts (Where is it?, What is it like? Why there?)
- Any event occuring on the earth happens in a particular place and time context.
- Attributes of places experience change, as a rule, and that change occurs through the processes happening at that place (time-component) as well as resulting from interaction among places.
Basic knowledge of placename geography (toponymy) is an important and necessary prerequisite for understanding and applying the spatial perspective; a mode of analysis particular to geography.
- "Placename geography is to more advance geographic studies as learning to read is to studying literature; one cannot interpret the symbolism in poetry without first knowing how to read." (Stanfield, 2002)
Assertion: Most surfers that have been active for five or more years are self-taught spatial analysts and routinely apply what geographers would term "spatial perspective."
PLACE
1. Fundamental unit of analysis in geography
2. Fundamental way in which humans perceive and organize everyday geography, typically assigning names to places.
3. Flexible and inclusive concept used to catalog the attributes and activities on the earth's surface.
> Ill-defined nature causes problems for scientific analysis.
LOCATION
1. Every PLACE has a location.
2. The flexibility/inclusiveness of place definitions makes it necessary to be more precise in answering first question of geography: Where is it?
3. Refinements to location include:
- Absolute / Relative Location
- Site / Situation
ABSOLUTE LOCATION
1. The location of an event or place determined to a level of precision required for the pattern or process under study.
2. The accepted convention for most scientific research is to use the globe gride system that assigns a latitude and longitude to any location on the planet.
3. Boundaries of places can be defined as a ordered set of coordinates. Note that with both points and boundaries places still inherently suffer from some indeterminancy in the accuracy of absolute location.
RELATIVE LOCATION
1. The location of one object or place relative to other places or objects.
- Requires that we first know absolute location
- Relative location derives from pairwise comparisons among a set of objects.
2. W matrix
3. Change of perspective from looking at an place, as an individual, to considering the places connectivity to its environment and to other places.
4. Relative location can reveal power relations.
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SITE
1. Where exactly is the place (absolute location) and what are its physical, cultural, biotic atributes?
2. Describe the site of UCSB and Isle Vista (Google Earth).
SITUATION
1. Descriptive assessment of one place in relation to other places emphasizing processes of physical, cultural, and economic connectivity or interactions.
2. Describe the situation of UCSB and Isle Vista (Google Earth).
DETAIL, RESOLUTION, & SCALE
1. Geography is concerned with finding spatial patterns and explaining those patterns in terms of spatial and non-spatial causes (processes).
2. Question: At what level of spatial detail and at what size of spatial extent will the pattern be visible?
- This is a tremendously important and difficult problem in applied spatial analysis.
- Typically geographers work with something "good enough" or "in the ballpark." The choice will depend on the particular application.
3. The term detail is the easiest way to express this in lay terms. More technical definitions are:
- Resolution: Minimum threshold determining what is relevant detail for the pattern under study.
- Scale: A representative fraction expressing a unit of measure on the map with respect to a unit of measure on the earths surface. The smaller the scale, the larger the extent (given a fixed paper size), and the less detail that can be legibly shown.
> Derives from the cartographic heritage where the map was produced on paper? Why is this problematic when the map is on a computer screen?
4. Example: Coreolis "force"
DISTANCE AND DIRECTION
1. Distance and direction are higher order properties derived from absolute location.
- Location of two different places
- Locations of the same object (person, storm, cargo ship) at two points in time.
2. Relative location (W) is derived from distance.
- Is one object a neighbor, or within the sphere of influence, or another object?
3. Distance is a fundamental organizing concept when understanding spatial processes.
4. Examples: Swell windows; Surf etiquette; Temperature gradients.
RELATIONSHIPS WITHIN AND AMONG PLACES
Attempts to explain patterns of attributes within a place the relationship of attributes among a set of places requires the specification of a model
Ys = f(Xs)
SPATIAL DEPENDENCE
1. Property that ensures near things are alike. Without spatial dependence that world would be incomprehensible and chaotic. Life would be impossible.
2. Under spatial dependence we can explain occurences at one place by looking at what is happening nearby:
Ys = f(Y{S is in N},Xs) where N is the neighborhood.
3. Why does this matter?
SPATIAL HETEROGENEITY
1. Our ability to build models that explain spatial patterns or predict spatial outcomes are (highly) unlikely to hold true everywhere on the earth's surface. Processes unfold differently in different places.
2. Under spatial heterogeneity we might need to adjust our models so that in area 1, Y depends on X, whereas in area 2, Y depends on Z:
Ys = f(Y{S is in N},Xs) where N is the neighborhood, and locations are in area 1.
Ys = f(Y{S is in N},Zs) where N is the neighborhood, and locations are in area 2.
3. Example: Income effect.
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MOVEMENT
Places in the world evolve and devolve. How can we understand the dynamic nature of places? We need concepts and theories that specifically address SPACE-TIME processes.
Gould:
"Man and his works exist in Space and Time - a statement so banal that it hardly seems worth mentioning. But upon closer examination, this truism contains such conceptual richness and intellectual challenge that it forms the core idea of one of Geography's most exciting contemporary fields [1969]. The power of the statement lies in that second conjunction and: we are going to consider Man and his works in both Space and Time. This means that we can no longer think about spatial patterns and relationships in a simple static sense; and we must reject, as geographers and social scientists, and exclusive focus upon the temporal dimension. Man in Space and Time: this is the area of spatial diffusion, where processes are frequently the core of our conern as we try to grapple with problems of spatial dynamics."
SPATIAL DIFFUSION
What is being carried?
How are things carried across space?
Who/What is the carrier?
What kinds of things get in the way?
1. Carriers...
2. Barriers...
Absorbing, Reflecting, and Permeable.