Do Now:

• We all live in the same region now, but how are we different from each other.

• How are we connected?

Aim: Why are geographers concerned with scale and

connectedness?

Has two meanings in geography:1.The distance on a map compared to the distance on the Earth2.The spatial extent of something.

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

What is Scale?

• Phenomena found at one scale are usually influenced by what is happening at other scales.

• Level of detail and patterns change as the scale changes

©

Why is Scale Important?

• A formal region has a shared cultural or physical trait. Example: French-speaking region of Europe

• Shares similar characteristics.

• Can be political, climate regions or landforms.

Regions

© Barbara Weightman

Examples of Formal Regions

• States- Texas, Florida, South Carolina, etc.• Countries- US, Mexico, Canada• Cities- Austin, Dallas, Houston

The area of town where the wealthiest people live.

• The Sahara Desert of Africa. * All Formal Regions are based on MEASURABLE

data!!!

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Formal Region(Uniform/Homogenous Region)

• Defined by a particular set of activities or interactions that occur within them that DISTINGUISH it from surrounding areas.

• Have a focal point. • Surrounding areas linked by transportation and

communication systems.Ex: the City of Chicago

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Functional Regions

Perceptual Regions

• Are defined by people’s feelings and attitudes about an area.

• More likely to change over time.• Frequently based upon stereotypes, as

people's definitions of perceptual regions are influenced by travel, media, reading, films, and conversations.

Concept Caching: Paris, France

Perceptual Regions in the United States

•Cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky identified 12 major perceptual regions on a series of maps in “North America’s Vernacular Regions.”

What do you think of when I say…

• Southern California• The South• New York City• The Middle East

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.



Now you try it…

• For each state what whether its formal functional or regional:

1.State of Texas2.Amazon River3.Sun Belt4.Country of Brazil5.Chinatown

Guest Field Note “Located in a predominately African American neighborhood in Montgomery, Alabama, the street intersection of Jeff Davis and Rosa Parks is symbolic of the debates and disputes in the American South over how the past is to be commemorated on the region’s landscape. The Civil War and civil rights movement are the two most important events in the history of the region.”

Montgomery, Alabama

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

15

SPACE: Distribution

• How are things arranged? • Where are they located? • Important Concepts:

• DENSITY• CONCENTRATION• PATTERN

DISTRIBUTION:Density and Concentration

• Density: “How many per?”• Concentration: • “How spread out?”• Major League Baseball• Density

• 1952: 16 teams• 2012: 30 teams

• Concentration• 1952: All Eastern US• 2012: Most regions of the US

and in Canada

16

1952

2012

DISTRIBUTION: Patterns

17West Nile Virus, 2012

Regional Integration of Culture

• Geographers consider culture when figuring out why a region is distinctive.

• What is Culture?• What people care about (customary ideas, beliefs, values)

• Culture is an all-encompassing term that identifies not only the whole tangible lifestyle of peoples but also their prevailing values and beliefs.

• Cultural geographers identify a single attribute of a culture as a culture trait.

What is Culture?

• Culture complex: More than one culture may exhibit a particular culture trait, but each consists of a discrete combination of traits.

• A cultural hearth is an area where cultural traits develop and from which cultural traits diffuse.

Culture

21

CONNECTIONS• How are places and regions connected? How do they interact?• Important Concepts:

• SPATIAL INTERACTION• Networks, transportation systems, distance decay• Cultural diversity• Space-time compression

• DIFFUSION• Relocation Diffusion• Expansion Diffusion

– Hierarchical (through a social or physical hierarchy)– Contagious (from person to person)– Stimulus (spread of an underlying idea)

CONNECTIONS: Spatial Interaction

22Sources: http://www.aviationexplorer.com/us_airways_airlines.htm; http://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/948/674/System0211_101web,0.pdf

US Airways route map

CONNECTIONS: Spatial Interaction

23Sources: http://www.aviationexplorer.com/us_airways_airlines.htm; http://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/948/674/System0211_101web,0.pdf

AMTRAK route map

CONNECTIONS: Diffusion

24

• Relocation diffusion• Physical movement, across space

– people migrate, taking their culture with them.

• Expansion diffusion• Ideas spread through a

population.• Hierarchical – spreading

through a hierarchy of people or places.

• Contagious – spreading through contact, like a disease, from person to person.

• Stimulus – spread of an underlying idea, even when the actual idea doesn’t diffuse.

• Expansion diffusion: when an innovation or idea develops in a hearth and remains strong there while also spreading outward.

• Ex: Islam• Contagious diffusion: a form of

expansion diffusion in which nearly all adjacent individuals and places are affected.

• Ex: Virus

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Types of Diffusion

• Hierarchical diffusion is a pattern in which the main channel of diffusion is some segment of those who are susceptible to (or adopting) what is being diffused.

• Ex: Crocs footwear.• Stimulus diffusion: Not all ideas can be

readily and directly adopted by a receiving population; yet, these ideas can still have an impact.

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Types of Diffusion

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Relocation Diffusion•Occurs most frequently through migration•Involves the actual movement of individuals who have already adopted the idea or innovation, and who carry it to a new, perhaps distant, locale, where they proceed to disseminate it

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Why Are Geographers Concerned with Scale and

Connectedness?

Once you think about different types of diffusion, you will be tempted to figure out what kinds of diffusion are taking place for all sorts of goods, ideas, or diseases. Please remember that any good, idea, or disease can diffuse in more than one way. Choose a good, idea, or disease as an example and describe how it diffused from its hearth across the globe, referring to at least three different types of diffusion.

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Aim: What are geographic concepts, and how are they

used in answering geographic questions?

.

• Examples: place, relative location, mental map, perceptual region, diffusion, cultural landscape.

• Geographers use fieldwork, remote sensing, GIS, GPS, and qualitative and quantitative techniques to explore linkages among people and places and to explain differences across people, places, scales, and times.

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Geographic Concepts

• Holds that human behavior, individually and collectively, is strongly affected by, even controlled or determined by, the physical environment.

• Geographers argued that the natural environment merely serves to limit the range of choices available to a culture.

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Environmental Determinism

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• The doctrine that the choices that a society makes depend on what its members need and on what technology is available to them.

• Cultural ecology has been supplemented by interest in political ecology.

Possibilism

• Cultural ecology: an area of inquiry concerned with culture as a system of adaptation to and alteration of environment

• Political ecology: an area of inquiry concerned with the environmental consequences of dominant political economic arrangements and understandings

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Cultural and Political Ecology

• Encompasses many subdisciplines, including political geography, economic geography, population geography, and urban geography.

• Human geography also encompasses cultural geography, which can be seen as a perspective on human geography as much as a component of it.

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Todays Human Geography

Choose a geographic concept introduced in this chapter. Think about something that is of personal interest to you (music, literature, politics, science, sports), and consider how whatever you have chosen could be studied from a geographical perspective. Think about space and location, landscape, and place. Write a geographic question that could be the foundation of a geographic study of the item you have chosen.

© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Additional ResourcesCareers in Geography

www.aag.orghttp://www.bls.gov/opub/ooq/2005/spring/art01.pdf

Geocachingwww.geocaching.org

Globalization and Geographywww.lut.ac.uk/gawc/rb/rb40.html

John Snow and His Work on Cholerahttp://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow.htmlState of Food Insecurity in the World

www.fao.orgWorld Hungerwww.wfp.orgGoogle Earth

www.googleearth.com© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.