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This chapter explores the main questions in geography - where and why - and introduces spatial analysis. It covers the study of geographic phenomena in terms of their arrangement, the keys to spatial analysis, location, distance, space, and accessibility.
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Chapter 1: part 2 Spatial Analysis
Where? Why? • The two main questions in geography: • To answer where? • maps • To answer why? • Processes of spatial interaction and diffusion • Spatial Analysis • Study of many geographic phenomena can be approached in terms of their arrangement as points, lines, areas, or surfaces • Keys to spatial analysis: • Location • Distance • Space • Accessibility • Spatial interaction
Location • Humans possess a strong sense of place • Feeling for features that contribute to the distinctiveness of a particular spot on Earth • Hometown • Vacation destination • Describing the features of a place or region is an essential building block for geographers • Geographer’s describe a feature’s place on Earth by identifying its location • The position that something occupies on Earth • Four ways to identify location: • Place name • Site • Situation • Mathematical location
Place • Place • Definition: • A specific point on Earth distinguished by a particular characteristic • Every place occupies a unique location, or position, on Earth’s surface • Geographers describe a feature’s place on Earth by identifying its location • Toponyms (place names) • Definition: • Name given to a place on Earth • Most straightforward way to describe a location • Might be named for a person, tied to religion, physical features, etc. • Ashburn’s explanation
Relative Location • Site • Refers to physical attributes of a location • Terrain, soil, vegetation, water sources • Situation • Refers to the location of a place relative to other places and human activities • Accessibility to routeways • Nearness to population centers
Site • Definition: • Physical character of a place • Site factors include things like: • Landforms, climate, vegetation types, availability of water, soil quality, minerals, and even wildlife. • Site factors are essential in selecting locations for settlements historically • Humans can modify site • Example: • Manhattan is twice as large as it was when bought in 1626. • How? Portions of the East River and Hudson river filled with sunken ships and refuse • Recently: Battery Park City, 142- acre site
Situation • Situation is the location of a place relative to other places • Important for two reasons: • Finding an unfamiliar place • Understanding its importance • Reason #1: • Can compare an unfamiliar location with a familiar one. • Example: • Directions: “It’s down off Ryan Road, take a left at Loudoun County Parkway and a left at the 1st light.” • Reasons #2: • Many locations are important because they are accessible to other places. • Example: Singapore • Has become center of trading and distribution of goods for much of Southeast Asia • Located near the straight of Malacca, a major passageway between the China Sea and Indian Ocean.
Mathematical - Absolute Location • Latitude • Refers to the angular distance of a point on Earth’s surface measured in degrees, minutes, and seconds north or south of the Equator • Lines of latitude that run parallel to the equator are called parallels • The equator has a value of 0 degrees • Longitude • Refers to the angular distance of a point on Earth’s surface, measured in degrees, minutes, and seconds east or west from the prime meridian • The prime meridian is the line that passes through both poles and through Greenwich, England • Prime meridian has a value of 0 degrees • Lines of longitude, called meridians, run from the north pole to the south pole • Practice quiz
Distance • Absolute physical measure • Kilometers • Miles • Relative measure • Expressed in terms of time, effort, or cost • Distance can be in eye of the beholder • Cognitive distance • Distance that people perceive as existing in a given situation • Based on personal judgments about the degree of spatial separation between points
Distance • Central theme in geography • Once the 1st “law of geography” • Tobler’s law • everything is related to everything else, but nearer things are more related than distant things (i.e. distance itself hinders interaction). • Leads to distance decay: contact between two places decreases as distance increases • Friction of distance • Reflection of the time and cost of overcoming distance • Time-Distance Decay • Distance decay describes the rate at which a particular activity or phenomena diminishes with increasing distance • The farther people have to travel the less likely they are to do so • i.e. contact diminishes with increasing distance and eventually disappears
Space • Most fundamental skill that geographers possess to understand the arrangement of objects across surfaces of the earth • Geographers think about the arrangement of people and activities found in space and try to understand why those people and activities are distributed across space as they are
Space • Space can be measured in absolute, relative, and cognitive terms • Absolute space • Mathematical space described through points, lines, areas, planes, and configurations whose relationships can be fixed through mathematical reasoning • Topological space • Defined by the connections between, or connectivity of, particular points in space • Measured in nature and degree of connectivity between locations • Relative space • Can take the form of socioeconomic space or of experiential or cultural space • Can be described in terms of site and situations, routes, regions, and distribution patterns • Spatial relationships are fixed measures of time, cost, profit, production, and physical distance • Cognitive space • Defined and measured in terms of people’s values, feelings, beliefs, and perceptions about locations, districts, and regions • Can be described, therefore, in terms of behavioral space- • Landmarks, paths, environments, and spatial layouts • Mental maps!!!!!!!
Distribution and Spatial Interaction • Everything occupies a unique space on earth • Distribution: • arrangement of a feature in space • Three main properties of distribution: • Density • Concentration • pattern • Density: frequency something occurs • Arithmetic Density: total # of objects in an area (i.e. pop density – 340/sq km) • Physiological Density: # of persons per unit of area suitable agriculture (i.e. can country feed itself?) • Concentration: extent of a feature’s spread over space • Clustered: Objects close together • Dispersed: objects relatively far apart • NOT THE SAME AS DENSITY • Pattern: geometric arrangement of objects in space • Land Ordinance of 1785 (grid)
Density and Concentration of Baseball Teams, 1952–2000 The changing distribution of North American baseball teams illustrates the differences between density and concentration.
Accessibility • Generally defined in relative location • The opportunity for contact or interaction from a given point or location in relation to other locations • Implies proximity, or nearness, to something • Connectivity • Important aspect of accessibility • Contact and interaction are dependent on channels of communication and transportation • Example: commercial airlines • Cities that operate as hubs are most accessible • Accessibility often a function of economic, cultural, and social factors
Spatial Interaction • Used by geographers as shorthand for all kinds of movement and flows involving human activity • Four basic concepts: • Complementarity • Transferability • Intervening opportunities • Diffusion
Complementarity • AKA we need each other • For spatial interaction to occur between two places there must be demand in one place and a supply that matches, or compliments it, in the other • Complementarity can be the result of several factors • Variation in physical environments and resource endowments from place to place • Internal division of labor that derives from the evolution of the world’s economic systems • Specialization and economies of scale
Transferability • AKA: cost involved in moving goods from one place to another • Function of two things: • Costs of moving a particular item, measured in real money and/or time • the ability of the item to bear these costs. • High transferability rate • Computer microchips • Easy to handle • Transport costs are minimal in proportion to their value • Low transferability rate • Computer monitors • Fragile • Lower value by weight and volume • Transferability varies over time • Successive innovations in transportation and communications • Waves of infrastructure development • Time-space convergence • The rate at which places move closer together in travel or communication costs • Results from a decrease in the friction of distance as space-adjusting technologies have brought places closer together over time • Global and local • Shrinking of space has important implications
Space-Time Compression 1492–1962 The times required to cross the Atlantic, or orbit the Earth, illustrate how transport improvements have shrunk the world.
Intervening Opportunity • More important in determining volume and pattern of movements and flows • Size and relative importance are important aspects • PRINCIPLE OF INTERVENING OPPORTUNITY: • Spatial interaction between an origin and a destination will be proportional to the number of opportunities at that destination an inversely proportional to the number of opportunities at alternative destinations
DIFFUSION • Process in which phenomenon (disease, trends, technology, etc.) spread from one place to another over time • Hearth: place of origination • Diffusion happens quickly today w/ modern technology, communication, transportation
Spatial Diffusion • The way things spread through space and over time • One of the most important aspects of spatial interaction • Crucial to understanding geographic change • Diffusion occurs as a function of geographic statistical probability
Types of Diffusion • Relocation Diffusion • The spread of an idea through physical movement of people from one place to another • Languages • Money systems • Aids • Expansion diffusion • “snowballing process” • develops in hearth- remains strong and spreads • Example: an agricultural innovation among members of local farming community • Example: Islam • Three types of Expansion diffusion • Hierarchical • Contagious • Stimulus
Types of Expansion Diffusion • Hierarchical: idea spread from persons or nodes of authority or power • Also called cascade diffusion • A phenomenon can be diffused from one location to another without necessarily spreading to people or places in between. • Example: a fashion trend from large metro area to smaller cities, towns, and rural settlements • Example: Rap music – came from West Africa, adopted on East Coast, morphed in Philly into Hip-Hop, spread into urban areas and then dispersed. • Contagious: rapid, widespread diffusion throughout population • Like a disease- Cholera • Example: hula-hoop, spread quickly in 1950’s, literally contagious (hearth: Cali) • Stimulus: spread of underlying principle, even though characteristic itself failed to diffuse • Indirectly promote changes, ideas, innovation • Example: Europeans grew wheat, went to America, no wheat but corn, started growing corn like wheat. • the adoption leads to something new.
Diffusion of Culture and Economy • In global culture and economy, transportation and communications systems rapidly diffuse raw materials, goods, services, and capital from nodes of origin to other regions. • Three core hearth regions: • North America • New York • Western Europe • London • Japan • Tokyo • Africa, Asia, Latin America • 3/4ths world population, almost all population growth • On “periphery” • Gap in regions called “uneven development”
Regions • Regional studies: • each region has its own distinctive landscape that results from a unique combination of social relationships and physical processes. • important to the principle: people are the most important agents of change of Earth’s surface • Regions are the equivalent of scientific classification for geographers • Regions are determined through the cultural landscape • Three types of regions: • Formal • Functional (nodal) • Perceptual
Formal Regions • Also a uniform or homogenous region. • Shares one or more distinctive characteristics • Could be cultural, economic, environmental • Example: Montana • Has recognized boundaries and shares a common set of laws • Formal regions help explain broad global or national patterns such as variations in religions and levels of economic development.
Functional Regions • Nodal region, it is organized around a node or focal point. • Used to display information about economic areas • Example: circulation of a newspaper
Formal and Functional Regions The state of Iowa is an example of a formal region; the areas of influence of various television stations are examples of functional regions.
Perceptual region • vernacular region, is a place that people believe exists as part of their cultural identity. • Example: the “south” • How do you know you are in the south? • waffle house? • grits? • sweet tea?
Vernacular Regions A number of factors are often used to define the South as a vernacular region, each of which identifies somewhat different boundaries.
Regionalization • Sectionalism • Feelings that develop into an extreme devotion to regional interests and customs • Irredentism • Assertion by the government of a country that a minority living outside its formal border belongs to it historically and culturally. • Often leads to war • Ex. Serbs in Croatia • Regionalism • Used to describe situations in which different religious or ethnic groups with distinctive identities co-exist within the same state boundaries, often concentrated within a particular region and sharing strong feelings of collective identity. • Often ethnic groups who aims for autonomy from a national state • Ex. Serbs in Croatia
Future Geographies • Places and regions are in constant state of change • Today, because of a globalized economy and globalized telecommunications and transportation networks, places have become more interdependent