GEOG 1F90 Lecture Notes - Human Geography, Spatial Analysis, Statistical Hypothesis Testing
Relations between human beings and land
-
Regional studies
-
Spatial analysis
-
Three Themes that are central to Human Geography:
Focus on the evolution of the human world with reference to people, their cultures,
and physical environments
○
Interested in landscape both for what it is and for what it means to live in it
○
The human world is never ever changing product of the activities of human beings, as
individuals and as group members, working within human and institutional frameworks to
modify pre-existing physical conditions
-
Interested in how people shape their environment and to what purposes these shapes are
formed
-
Humans and Land/ Environment
Referred to as regions
○
Contemporary human geography considers regions at a wide range of scales- from
local to global
○
Human geography reveals the importance of place in all aspects of our lives
○
To facilitate the task of writing about the wold, human geographers often divide larger
areas into smaller areas that exhibit a degree of unity
-
Examines the changes in environments
-
Regional Studies
Theory construction
▪
Models
▪
Hypothesis testing
▪
Using quantitative methods
▪
Typically a geographer uses a spatial analysis approach to tackle this question
through:
○
Secondary goal is to often identity secondary alternative locational patterns that
might be more efficient and more equitable
▪
Primary goal is to explain locational regularities
○
Understanding the human world requires that we explain location (why things are where
they are)
-
Spatial Analysis
Because human geography studies human beings, it has close toes with social sciences such
as history, economics, anthropology, sociology, psychology and political studies
-
The central subject matter of human geography is human behavior as it affect the earth's
surface
-
"what is where, why there, and why care/" (Gritzner, 2002)
-
People think about things differently even regarding the exact same phenomenon
-
Why "Human" Geography?
Writing about the human world to increase our understanding of it
-
"geography is the only subject that asks you to look at the world and try to make sense of
it"
-
Tries to look at inequalities
-
TRYING TO MAKE SENCE OF THE WORLD
-
The Goal of Human Geography
Housing
○
That one place has different themes
-
What do you see?
Week 2- What do Geographers Do?: Location, Location,
Locaion
GEOG 1F90 Page 1
Document Summary
Three themes that are central to human geography: The human world is never ever changing product of the activities of human beings, as individuals and as group members, working within human and institutional frameworks to modify pre-existing physical conditions. Focus on the evolution of the human world with reference to people, their cultures, and physical environments. Interested in landscape both for what it is and for what it means to live in it. Interested in how people shape their environment and to what purposes these shapes are formed. To facilitate the task of writing about the wold, human geographers often divide larger areas into smaller areas that exhibit a degree of unity. Contemporary human geography considers regions at a wide range of scales- from local to global. Human geography reveals the importance of place in all aspects of our lives. Understanding the human world requires that we explain location (why things are where they are)
