Human geography, also known as anthropogeography, is a branch of geography that studies how people interact with habitats. It focuses on the spatial relationships between human communities, cultures, economies, people, lifestyles, and their environments. Examples include patterns like urban sprawl and urban redevelopment. It looks at how social interactions connect with the environment using both qualitative (descriptive) and quantitative (numerical) methods. This multidisciplinary field draws from sociology, anthropology, economics, and environmental science, helping build a more complete understanding of how human activity shapes the spaces we live in.
History
The Royal Geographical Society was founded in England in 1830. The first professor of geography in the United Kingdom was appointed in 1883, and the first major geographical intellect to emerge in the UK was Halford John Mackinder, appointed professor of geography at the London School of Economics in 1922. The National Geographic Society was founded in the United States in 1888 and began publication of the National Geographic magazine, which became, and continues to be, a great popularizer of geographic information. The society has long supported geographic research and education.
The Association of American Geographers was founded in 1904 and was renamed the American Association of Geographers in 2016 to reflect the increasingly international character of its membership. One of the first examples of geographic methods being used for purposes other than describing and theorizing the physical properties of the Earth is John Snow's map of the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak. Though Snow was primarily a physician and a pioneer of epidemiology rather than a geographer, his map is probably one of the earliest examples of health geography. The now-fairly-distinct differences between the subfields of physical and human geography emerged later. The connection between the physical and human properties of geography is most apparent in the theory of environmental determinism, popularized in the 19th century by Carl Ritter and others, and it has close links to the field of evolutionary biology of the time. Environmental determinism is the theory that people's physical, mental, and moral habits are directly due to the influence of their natural environment. However, by the mid-19th century, environmental determinism was under attack for lacking methodological rigor associated with modern science, and later as a means to justify racism and imperialism. A similar concern with both human and physical aspects is apparent during the later 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, focused on regional geography. The goal of regional geography was to delineate space into regions and then to understand and describe the unique characteristics of each region in both human and physical terms. With links to possibilism and cultural ecology, some of the same notions of the environment's causal effect on society and culture remain in environmental determinism. By the 1960s, however, the quantitative revolution led to strong criticism of regional geography. Due to a perceived lack of scientific rigor in an overly descriptive nature of the discipline, and a continued separation of geography from its two subfields of physical and human geography and from geology, geographers in the mid-20th century began to apply statistical and mathematical models to solve spatial problems. Much of the development during the quantitative revolution is now apparent in the use of geographic information systems; the use of statistics, spatial modeling, and positivist approaches is still important to many branches of human geography. Well-known geographers from this period are Fred K. Schaefer, Waldo Tobler, William Garrison, Peter Haggett, Richard J. Chorley, William Bunge, and Torsten Hägerstrand. From the 1970s, many critiques of the positivism now associated with geography emerged. Known as 'critical geography,' these critiques signaled another turning point in the discipline. Behavioral geography emerged over time as a means of understanding how people perceived spaces and places and made locational decisions. The more influential 'radical geography' emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. It draws heavily on Marxist theory and techniques and is associated with geographers such as David Harvey and Richard Peet. Radical geographers seek to say meaningful things about problems recognized through quantitative methods, provide explanations rather than descriptions, put forward alternatives and solutions, and be politically engaged, rather than using the detachment associated with positivists. (The detachment and objectivity of the quantitative revolution was itself critiqued by radical geographers as being a tool of capital). Radical geography and the links to Marxism and related theories remain an important part of contemporary human geography (See: Antipode). Critical geography also saw the introduction of 'humanistic geography', associated with the work of Yi-Fu Tuan, which advocated a much more qualitative approach to methodology. The changes under critical geography have led to contemporary approaches in the discipline, such as feminist geography, new cultural geography, settlement geography, and the engagement with postmodern and post-structural theories and philosophies.
Fields The primary fields of study in human geography focus on the core fields of:
Cultures Cultural geography is the study of cultural products and norms – their variation across spaces and places, as well as their relations. It focuses on describing and analyzing the ways language, religion, economy, government, and other cultural phenomena vary or remain constant from one place to another and on explaining how humans function spatially.
Subfields include: Social geography, Animal geographies, Language geography, Sexuality and space, Children's geographies, and Religion and geography.
Development
Development geography is the study of the Earth's geography with reference to the standard of living and the quality of life of its human inhabitants, the study of the location, distribution, and spatial organization of economic activities across the Earth. The researcher's methodological approach strongly influences the subject matter investigated.
Economies
Economic geography examines relationships between human economic systems, states, and other factors, and the biophysical environment.
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