Concern For Geography Research Articles

The Nature of Geography and Its Perspectives in AP® Human Geography

ABSTRACTAP Human Geography students need to develop an understanding of what it means to examine the world around them from a geographic perspective. Focusing attention on geography's concern with spatial relationships, place characteristics, and geographic context helps student appreciate the nature of the discipline and the insights it offers. These core geographic concerns should be woven into discussions of the various topics covered in AP Human Geography. Drawing on GIS and related geospatial technologies can facilitate that effort—demonstrating the power and potential of geographical modes of thinking and analysis.

WINTER-CITIES AND MOOD DISORDER: OBSERVATIONS FROM EUROPEAN CITY-FORM AT THE END OF LITTLE ICE AGE

1. Introduction In The morphology of (1925) Carl O. Sauer had introduced the notion of cultural landscape as the imposition of culture upon nature. Defined by the shared myths, beliefs and behavioral standards, Sauer's cultural landscape is manifest in human intervention in natural landscape. Technology, as one of the more important aspects of culture, has been changing our lived space, primarily through considerations of expediency related to the human body, while bodily experiences have been changing accordingly and, in turn, have often driven advances of technological change. Landscapes modified by human action, as an aspect of culture, thus impact culture itself, whereby the feedback interaction between culture and landscape as a progression in time, defines much of the history of civilization. In a later geographic inquiry extending Sauer's notion into psychoanalytic aspects of landscape, David Lowenthal had pointed to environmental causes to behavior as well as judgment (Lowenthal 1994). Calls for the emphasis of phenomenology of lived experience as a primary humanistic concern in geography have been made in recent years from several quarters (e.g. Simonsen 2013). A decade after Sauer's essay Walter Benjamin, considered still today the foremost exponent of humanism in urban thought, put forward the notion of continuous and mutual impact between the built environment and humans within it. In his psychoanalytic survey of urban edifices and spaces of Paris and Berlin in the early twentieth century, the Arcades Project (1933/1999), Benjamin argued that the composite of city and the minds within it ought to be seen as a force behind the rise of modernity. While Benjamin's Arcades Project addressed the interaction between the urban environment and minds within it, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, some thirty years later, in his phenomenology of lived space focused on the link between the built environment and the body (1962:440). Yi-fu Tuan, more recently, made a note of a cerebral impact reflected in geomantic myth in the East, as a projection of generic pattern of parts reflected in a larger whole within the environment (Tuan 2001: 100). And without the need to draw on simplistic views of environmental determinism, Gilbert LaFreniere has provided a comprehensive overview of the history of environmental change as it had influenced the emergence, as well as the decline of civilizations, not to mention the reverse impact of modernity on the environment (2008:41-72, 261-300). In an inadvertent affirmation of the more specific outlook of mind-city interaction, Erwin Panofsky (1957) showed that a factual impact of the built environment upon mind is evident in the case of Gothic architecture and scholastic thought. Panofsky's observation relates not only to the architecture of gothic edifices as the source of impact upon mind, but mainly also to the structure of monastic spaces, i.e. to the logic and expediency in the configuration of buildings, and voids within and between buildings. Panofsky's example, however, is important for yet another reason: high scholasticism marks the eve of the Little Ice Age (LIA) in northern Europe. A less-known, but well-documented example of city-form impact upon mind, during the LIA in northern Europe, is the case of early application of geometry to scientific reasoning, by Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) in Prague. Based on astronomical observations of the orbit of Mars made by his mentor, the astronomer Tycho Brahe, Kepler made a discovery that modified the Copernican conjecture of planetary motion round the sun, confirming its fundamentals. But prior to his discovery, for years Kepler was unsuccessful in fitting circular circumference, as assumed by Copernicus, or any other curve to the planetary orbit of Mars round the Sun. It was only in 1608 that it dawned on him that the orbit is elliptical, and Tycho's observational record had confirmed this. …

Produciendo lugares: Industria cinematográfica e imaginario espacial

and cinematography are two disciplines little related in spite of possessing some common elements. This work tries to approach the treatment of place - an eminently geographical category - on the part of the cinematography. After a brief reference to the theories that from the economic and social geography or from the new cultural geography concern the notion of place, the article analyzes its integration as one more input in the production system of movies. Under this context the study will approach the way in which the cinematographic industry has considered the geographical place for the production of its movies, giving a special attention to the factors that determine his choice as a shooting location and, therefore, his incorporation to the category of movie place. Along the whole article a decisive importance is granted to the cinematographic industry as a producer, distributer and inciter to the consumption of the movie places; this the motive by which, in the last epigraph, differences are established between the above mentioned places and the geographical ones, and simultaneously carries out a critical analysis of his consumption.

Carceral Geography and the Spatialities of Prison Visiting: Visitation, Recidivism, and Hyperincarceration

Geography, as a disciplinary lens, brings a valuable perspective to the study of the carceral, and carceral geography's concern for the spatial could provide a new explanatory perspective to the consideration of some accepted tenets within criminology, whilst at the same time offering a productive and useful ‘grounding’ of contemporary geographies of emotion and affect. In the context of hyperincarceration and the carceral continuum of recidivism and repeated reimprisonment, this paper considers the long-observed relationship between prison visitation and reduced recidivism, posits prison visiting rooms as underresearched carceral spaces, and develops theoretical and methodological innovations which nuance the understanding of prison visiting.

Geographical Perspectives on Children's Perception of the Environment and Education

The aim of this paper is to systematize the study of children from a geographical viewpoint and to identify new perspectives in children's perception of the environment and education.From the 1960s to the 1970s, studies of children in geography began with the introduction of a behavioral approach into geographical studies. Summing up the findings of the 1960s and 1970s, the area perceived by children, their action space, and the increase in perception of their environment as they grow older.In 1979, Roger Hart argued that various constraints could explain children activities and children's life space was thus re-interpreted from the viewpoint of these constraints.From the 1980s to the 1990s, the gender approach and postmodern geography developed. Gender geography's concern with children is that children are born and brought up by women, and that gender roles determined children's spatial activity range. Postmodern geography's concern is with children as others and the objection to the image of childhood made by modern society.Until the 1990s, children's geography explained and interpreted children from an individual perspective. From the 1990s, children's behavior has been explained in relation to their socioeconomic and educational context.The future direction which these studies should be taken, based on an empirical approach, is as follows: (1) more consideration should be given to children's living experience in the environment or in places; (2) children's life space and perceptional environment from a socioeconomic and educational context should be examined.

Defining a contemporary landscape approach: concluding thoughts

In the above papers, two of the participants begin by quoting the cultural geographer Carl Sauer. From my perspective, the recognition given to Sauer by DUNNING and his colleagues as well as GARTNER is timely and important, since it reminds us that the long-term interplay between humans and their environments has long been a central concern in geography as well as archaeology. My comments here endeavour to reflect upon and address that general theme towards framing a coherent landscape approach in archaeology. In so doing, space does not also allow for a detailed commentary on each of the articles that compose this section. For my own principal study region (Oaxaca, Mexico], 29 years have passed since Ronald Spores’ (1969) seminal publication in which he outlined the prehispanic construction of fama-bordo agricultural systems in the Mixteca Alta in the Oaxaca highlands. The use of the lama-bordos required intentional stimulation of erosion. Stone and rubble dikes were constructed and designed to trap water and eroding soils as they descended the natural drainage channels that extended from mountains to the valley floor during heavy summer rains. These stone dikes were 1 to 4 m high and could be tens (even hundreds) of metres long. Following several years of runoff, the lama-bordo terrace systems accumulated sufficient soil to form level and rather fertile plots that returned significant yields. Spores also noted that the lamabordo systems appear to have remained productive during the later part of the prehispanic sequence, as long as the terrace walls were kept in place and carefully maintained. However, with post-contact demographic collapse and changes in tribute patterns, work and land-use patterns were disrupted. The continual labour necessary to rebuild and maintain these agrarian features was lost and massive unchecked erosion precipitated, which was hastened by grazing and the intentional removal of the natural vegetation. The heavy erosion that today still scars the Nochixtlhn Valley and other parts of the Mixteca Alta was the consequence. In many senses, Spores’ (1969) classic arti

Intellectual of Empire: Eric Dutton and Hegemony in British Africa

This essay examines the career of Eric Dutton in five British African colonies from 1919 to 1952, with case studies of his work in Lusaka and Zanzibar. In analyzing Dutton's career, I use a Gramscian conception of the role of intellectuals in creating colonial hegemony, against the backdrop of recent research on the relationship of geography to colonial discourse. Dutton worked and corresponded with key players in Britain's African empire. He was a major force behind early urban-planning programs in East and Central Africa and author of four geographical books. Permanently disabled by war wounds, he was also permanently infatuated with the moral rightness of British imperial culture. A concern for geography's professional relationship with, and the geographical legacy of, colonialism has emerged in recent scholarship on Africa, largely through studies of travel writing, fiction, and nineteenth- or early twentieth-century exploration geography. Later scholar-officials like Dutton sought to apply their knowledge to the shaping of spaces to serve the Empire's direct and immediate needs in Africa, even while trying to win the hearts and minds of its subject peoples. Around Timothy Mitchell's (1988) concept of “enframing,” I build an analysis of the spatial projects with which Dutton is most associated and show how Lusaka and Zanzibar were enframed by his plans. Through his publications and correspondences, as well as his seemingly omnipresent service, Dutton has an important legacy that has neither been articulated nor analyzed, one which points to the importance of contextualized biography for analyses of colonial discourse. I argue here for seeing Dutton as an intellectual in the service of colonial hegemony and its enframing spatial discourse, although the character of his agency exemplifies why that attempted hegemony failed.

Concern for Geography: A Selection of the Work of Professor W. G. V. Balchin

Concern for Geography: A Selection of the Work of Professor W. G. V. Balchin

The Concept of Shape in Geography

S HAPE has always been of concern in geography. Indeed, many geographical features such as deltas, oxbow lakes, and island chains are named from their distinctive shapes or forms, and shape has been found to be extremely useful for describing towns, trade areas, and political units. Although shape has been primarily used in geography as a descriptive device, it has also been of value as an analytical tool. But it is in the related disciplines, such as the biological sciences and mineralogy, that shape has been productive of theories.' However, lack of adequate methods for measuring shape has restricted its widespread use. Two methods of measurement have now been developed and are presented here, together with a review of some of the more pertinent articles concerned with shape or form and an example of the application of shape in urban geography. It is hoped that the study will lead to further applications of shape in solving gogeraphical problems.