Chapter 8Services
Chapter 10Cultural geography–folk and popular culture, language, religion
Chapter 12Humans and the environment–pollution and climate change
Preface
Purpose and organization of the book
This book introduces undergraduate university students and AP human geography high school students to the essential concepts and theories of human geography. While many people think of place-name memorizing geography bees when they sign up for a geography class, in reality it is a subject that helps us understand the organization of human society and its impact on our planet. Each chapter focuses on a key area of human geography, covering essential concepts, and is illustrated with real-world data and examples.
Although many human geography textbooks also cover essential concepts, this one leverages the power of Esri’s ArcGIS® Online, a browser-based geographic information system with interactive maps and data. Unlike most geography textbooks, with static map figures printed in the book, most map figures in this book include a link that enables students and teachers to further explore data, allowing them to examine places of interest in more detail. A student or instructor can view a map in the textbook on, say, level of development, and then open the ArcGIS Online link and click on individual countries to see how life expectancy, education, and income each contribute to its development ranking.
Each chapter also includes ArcGIS Online exercises, posted in the Esri Press group of the Learn ArcGIS organization, where students can apply geographic concepts to real-world map data. Students will interact with and run spatial analysis on datasets from global organizations such as the United Nations and World Bank, national agencies such as the US Census Bureau and Environmental Protection Agency, and private companies such as Esri®. In many cases, exercises are designed so that students can focus on data within their own city or neighborhood, making analysis more directly related to the place in which they live.
Instructors can use these exercises in a variety of ways. In classrooms with computers, exercises can be completed during class hours, with discussions of questions done in small groups or with the entire class. In other cases, instructors can assign the exercises as homework and discuss results later during class time. The wide range of maps included in the exercises also allows instructors to customize their own exercises.
ArcGIS Online accounts
If you have an existing ArcGIS Online account, you can use it to complete the exercises for this book. If you need a new ArcGIS Online account, it’s recommended that you sign up for a free Learn GIS organizational account here: http://learngis.maps.arcgis.com/home/index.html. Some instructors may choose to add students to their campus organizational accounts, where they can set credit limits, add and remove students, and set other parameters. Instructors should contact their campus ArcGIS Online administrator for assistance.
Go to the book resource page at esri.com/Human-Geography for links to access the exercises and data.
Acknowledgments
This book would not be possible without the support of my family, especially my wife Alejandra, who graciously sacrificed weekend and summer family time as I devoted many hours to writing chapters and developing exercises. I would also like to thank Esri staff members Jennifer Bell, Sirisha Karamchedu, Joseph Kerski, Veronica Rojas, and Lauren Scott, among others, who provided essential feedback on this project.
Chapter 1
Introduction
What is geography?
In the news, immigrants risk their lives to reach safety and opportunity in new lands, while some citizens in destination countries worry about losses of jobs and their cultures. In parts of the world, parents struggle to feed multiple children, while in other places employers struggle to fill positions as populations shrink. The decline of manufacturing employment in the developed economies of Europe and North America has devastated many towns and left myriad workers unemployed or with wages well below their previous salaries. At the same time, a burgeoning working class has developed in much of Asia as farmers leave the fields and take up jobs in urban factories. Struggles for political power depend on how voting districts are drawn, while citizens hotly debate the influence of religion in public life and the benefits and challenges of linguistic and ethnic diversity. These topics, and many more, are the subject of human geography. But with that said, what makes geography distinct from other disciplines that also study these issues?
Students often associate geography with identifying countries, cities, rivers, mountains, and other features on a map. Although the ability to find features such as these on a map is of use to geographers, it is not the focus of geography. Geography exists as a distinct academic discipline because of its focus on space, and for this reason, it is considered a spatial science. When geographers use the words space and spatial, it is in the context of geometric space, not outer space. It is concerned with the three-dimensional location of features on the surface of the earth. To put it simply, the key questions that geographers ask are, Where are things located and why are they there?
These questions give geographers a unique understanding of how the world is organized and how human and physical features interact to create unique places and regions. They look at the spatial patterns, or distributions, of everything from plant species to unemployment. Geographers further study the spatial relationship between different phenomena, such as how political attitudes and religious beliefs overlap in particular places. The concepts of origin, diffusion, and spatial interaction are also important elements of geography. The world religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam originated in the Holy Land of the Middle East and then diffused across the globe, transforming societies as they spread to new locations. Finally, geography looks at human-environment interaction, or how humans influence and change the environment, as well as how the environment shapes humans in terms of where we live, what we eat, and much more. By understanding spatial distributions and the processes that drive them, geographers help us understand the world in which we live. This knowledge allows us to make predictions and decisions on how to address a wide range of pressing social and environmental issues. Each of these concepts is discussed in more detail later in this chapter.
Geographic inquiry is thus wide-ranging and focuses on big issues, with the goal of understanding the causes and potential solutions to economic development and employment, food production, urban congestion, population explosions and busts, religious and ethnic conflict, climate change, plant and animal extinctions, and other contemporary challenges (figure 1.1, figure 1.2).
Figure 1.1.The spatial pattern of economic development, such as where industry locates, is one issue explored by geographers. The automobile industry has gone through
