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.
