Unit 1 - Patterns and Processes Flashcards
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Built Landscape
An area of land represented by its features and patterns of human occupation and use of natural resources (Changing attribute of a place).
Example: cities, buildings, urban spaces, walkways, roads, parks
Sequent Occupance
The notion that successive societies leave their cultural imprints on a place, each contributing to the cumulative cultural landscape.
Example: The Stonehenge shows that people have lived on Earth for a long time
Cultural Landscape
The making of a natural landscape by a cultural group. This is the essence of how humans interact with nature.
Example: Neighborhoods, parks and open spaces, farms and ranches, sacred place
Arithmetic Density
The total number of people is divided by the total land area.
Example: Arithmetic Density = Total Population / Total Land Area.
Physiological Density
The number of people per unit area of arable land, which is land suitable for agriculture.
Example: The US’ physiological density is 445 per square mile.
Hearth
The region from which innovative ideas originate.
Example: New York City, Los Angeles, and London because these cities produce a large amount of cultural exports that are influential throughout much of the modern world.
Relocation Diffusion
The spread of an idea through physical movement of people from one place to another.
Example: The spread of Christianity by missionaries who travel from their homes directly to faraway places to seek converts.
Expansion Diffusion
The spread of a feature from one place to another in a snowballing process. This can happen by hierarchical, contagious, or stimulus diffusion.
Example: Hollywood films are still popular in the United States but have also spread to Europe and other nations.
Hierarchical Diffusion
The spread of an idea from persons or nodes of authority or power to other persons or places.
Example: Hip-Hop/rap music
Contagious Diffusion
The rapid widespread diffusion of a character throughout the population.
Example: Ideas placed on the internet
Stimulus Diffusion
The spread of an underlying principle, even though a characteristic itself apparently fails to diffuse.
Example: PC & Apple
Absolute Location
Position on Earth’s surface using the coordinate system of longitude and latitude.
Example: Compass
Relative Location
Position on Earth’s surface relative to other features.
Example: To go home I turn near the Starbucks and take a right at Walmart
Environmental Determinism
A 19th- and early 20th-century approach to the study of geography that argued that the general laws sought by human geographers could be found in the physical sciences. Geography was therefore the study of how the physical environment caused human activities.
Site
The physical character of a place; what is found at the location and why it is significant.
Example: Whether an area is protected by mountains or if there is a natural harbor present
Situation
The location of a place relative to other places
Example: San Francisco’s situation being a port of entry on the Pacific coast, adjacent to California’s productive agricultural lands.
Toponym
The name given to a place on Earth.
Example: New York City or Southington, Connecticut
Sense of Place
The emotions someone attaches to an area based on their experiences
Possibilism
The physical environment may limit some human actions, but people have the ability to adjust to their environment.
Example: Flood control in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley and building to withstand hurricanes in Florida.
Formal Region (Uniform)
An area within which everyone shares in common one or more distinctive characteristics. The shared feature could be a cultural value such as a common language, or an environmental climate.
Example: The French-speaking region of Canada, the dairying region of North America, or political boundaries demarcating nations and states.
Functional Region (Nodal)
An area organized around a node or focal point. The characteristic chosen to define a functional region dominates at a central focus or node and diminishes in importance outward.
Example: The circulation area of the New York Times is a functional region and New York is the node.
Vernacular Region (Perceptual)
A place that people believe exists as a part of their cultural identity. Such regions emerge from peoples informal sense of place rather than from scientific models developed through geographic thought. (Often identified using a mental map).
Example: People thinking of sweet tea when they think of “the South
Scale
Representation of a real world phenomenon at a certain level or reduction or generalization. In cartography, the ratio of map distance to ground distance.
Example : 1 inch equals 1 mile” on a map means that one inch on the map represents one mile on Earth’s surface
Distance Decay
The diminishing in importance and eventual disappearance of a phenomenon with increasing distance from its origin. Typically, the farther away one group is from another, the less likely the two groups are to interact.
Example: If you live in a rural area, it’s unlikely that you travel to a bigger city 100 miles even if it offers bigger and better goods and services.
Friction of Distance
Based on the notion that distance usually requires some amount of effort, money, and/or energy to overcome. Because of this “friction,” spatial interactions will tend to take place more often over shorter distances; quantity of interaction will decline with distance.
Example: Two places located a thousand kilometers apart often have less trade with each other than two cities located one hundred kilometers apart
Space-Time Compression
The reduction in the time it takes to diffuse something to a distant place, as a result of improved communications
Example: The emergence and transformation of transport
Geographic Information System (GIS)
A computer that can capture, store, query, analyze, and display geographic information-helps produce more efficient and attractive maps than those drawn by hand.
Example: sites that produce pollution, such as factories, and sites that are sensitive to pollution, such as wetlands and rivers
Global Positioning System
Accurately determines the precise position of something on Earth-helps people navigate from one area to another.
Example: Putting in SHS coordinates to your house.
Equator
The line that goes across the center of the earth and is at 0 degrees latitude- splits the world into the north and south hemisphere.
Latitude
The numbering system used to indicate the location of a parallel, goes up and down
Longitude
The numbering system used to indicate the location of a meridian and helps along with latitude to establish time zones.
Meridian
An arc drawn between the north and south poles and helps define time zones along with parallels
Prime Meridian
The meridian that passes through Greenwich, England at 0 degrees longitude and is the place where every day has 12 hours of daylight.
International Date Line
Follows closely at 180 degrees longitude - when you pass it heading east the clock moves back 24 hours and vise versa.
Example: It curves around the islands that make up the nation of Kiribati, so that all regions of the country remain on the same day.
Map scale
The distance on a map relative to distance on Earth - helps give a sense on how big something is on a map as compared to on Earth.
Thematic Map
A type of map that display one or more variables-such as population or income level-within a specific area.
Example: Cartograms, Dot, Choropleth, Isoline, and Circle
Mental Map (Cognitive)
A map of a person’s personal point of view of the world - helps a person realize where things are in their own perception.
Example: One person believes that Starbucks is very close by while another person believes it takes a long time.
Remote sensing
Acquisition of data about Earth’s surface from a satellite orbiting the planet or other long-distance methods. Helps to show information about the Earth from a satellite on any feature
Time Zones
24 zones that are 1000 miles apart from the other, each one is an hour before or after the one next to it, and by passing the International Date Line, you either go forward 24 hours or back 24 hours.
Example: Eastern Time is 3 hours ahead of Western Time.
Carl Sauer and the Cultural Landscape
Cultural landscape is built based on the natural landscape on one side, and it is also the creation of human culture on another side.
