This unit will certainly challenge you to look at your local surroundings in a different way. Big Geographical questions to consider through this unit; 1. What is a place? What turns a space into a place? What factors, human and physical, influence the character of places? What different categories of place exist? How can different people perceive places in different ways?
How is your Local place different from places that are geographically far away geographically distant? How is your local place different from places that economically, socially and culturally distant?
How do agencies try to manipulate our ideas and thoughts about place? What impact have globalizing forces had upon places? How does pace impact upon the quality of life of people living there?
How are places linked together via their relationships and connections? Why do places change over time? How can we use qualitative and quantitative sources to investigate place? You could think of a life experience a sibling being born, a first kiss, learning to ride a bike etc.
Did it make that place special? Yi-Fu Tuan also argued that our experience and understanding of the environment and our attachment to it expands with age. As we get older these experiences broaden and we perceive places differently. This all ties in with the concepts of Attachment, Home and Identity. Attachment, Home and Identity The photograph below shows the most vulnerable of people our children.
They have a very accute sense of attachment. Babies have a very narrow experience of life and are reliant on their parents. Their sense of attachment is incredibly strong and anything that splits that bond is upsetting. Babies also have a narrow zone of proximal development; they can learn very little for themselves and requires others to help in many ways. As we get older our experience of life and our zone of proximal development increase, we can learn and experience more things for ourselves.
We become more mobile, crawling then walking, our parents allows us more responsibility. As we age places that are taboo or out of reach become available. This changes the way we experience them. When were you first allowed to go to the centre of your local town? How did this change your experience of that place?
These places can also help to form our identity. Which places do you identify with as part of your identity? Identity Our identity is formed by many factors, including family and friends. One factor that comes into identity is place, however. At a local level, issues brought up by local newspapers and social media groups, being part of a local charity of club and your neighbours can have an influence on how you view yourself and your identity.
Business Intelligence. City Planning. Cloud Computing. Field Work. Geospatial Analysis. Geospatial Data. Location Intelligence. Open Source. Professional Development. Remote Sensing. Many geographers today teach and research about concepts that are relevant to everyday life.
This geographic knowledge enables us to understand the things we do on a daily or other episodic basis, and how everyday actions like traveling to work affect the world around us e.
This emphasis puts everyday activities in a larger context - notably a spatial one - and by so doing aims to increase our awareness of our personal lives and activities and their socio-spatial contexts at scales ranging from neighborhood to global.
We often assume there is no need to learn this type of geography because we already "know" it! Many people refuse to believe that they need to know geographic concepts such as location, place recognition, distance evaluation, distribution membership, and regional context. To illustrate the shortcomings of this attitude, let me pursue a few examples which illustrate that people actively practice geography - even if they are unaware of what they are doing.
Let me start by simply listing basic geographic tasks we all - at one time or another - seem to perform. Let me elaborate on some of these and emphasize some of the geography and the spatial concepts relevant to what you are doing. Where did I park my car? Perhaps the most frequently asked and vexing question today is simply one of location recognition - the most fundamental component of geography. Geography is a science that emphasizes the learning of locations and the learning of places.
The skills that are taught to learn location patterns of cities in the USA, rice fields in China, gold mines in South Africa, or the sources of outbreaks of epidemics in Africa are essentially the same as those we use to learn the location of schools, shops, recreational areas, churches, and dining establishments.
We absorb these types of information visually via newscasts on TV and in movies and videos; we get written descriptions of them in newspapers and journals; we hear the information from radio broadcasts; or we gather it multimodally as we walk or otherwise travel through an environment.
The information you are absorbing about places and their location is geographic - it is locationally referenced or place-based. And when engaging in a conversation about current events, you quote that information by recalling it directly from memory, or you internally manipulate it to obtain further insights by engaging in spatial information processing. This requires integration of separate bits of spatial information so as to better understand a situation or problem environment.
So, where did you park your car? Was there a nearby landmark? Was the section you parked in numbered? Was it near the street entrance you used to enter the parking area? Did you face the building or the street? Were you close to or far from the building entrance? Where did you enter the building? Where exit? Answering these questions involves querying a "mental map" that you construct from experienced or stored information. And what's more symbolic of geographic thinking than creating in working memory and using a map to solve your location problem?
Realizing this simple fact is changing the world of information technology. Information is being "georeferenced" to an increasing degree: exploring its inherent spatial nature is the heart of Geographic Information Science and the GIS technologies using geographic and spatialized metaphors as interfaces and search engines to a world of digitally accessible data. Searching for a place to live is a necessary activity for all people. The geography embedded in this act is substantial. Where do you search?
In examining home-work locational ties, geographers found that spatial proximity to work strongly influences many decision makers, particularly those constrained by economic, social, ethnic, or other barriers. Even social justice concerns are based on geographic concepts and geographic information.
When housing is purchased, real estate agents act as interventionists by helping to provide a buyer with a feasible set of alternatives for rental or purchase. They do this by examining economic, social, cultural, age, income and family characteristics of the buyer and matching them with housing qualities and neighborhood characteristics.
But if we look below the surface of these everyday acts, we find some interesting geographic paradoxes. For example, much inner-city land has a very high value per unit area accruing because of its central location and accessibility to the rest of the city. But much inner-city land is occupied by poor people. To do this, they can afford only to consume a little of it - hence multi-person, and multi-family occupancy of small spaces rental apartments, multi-family rentals of what was single family housing.
The paradox - stated by Regional Scientist William Alonso nearly 50 years ago - is that in many cities the poor live on some of the most expensive land and are forced to consume very little of it on a per capita basis producing high population density in inner city areas , while the rich live on land with less value per unit area and consume much of it on a per capita basis producing low suburban population densities. The result is a "density gradient" of population over distance from the city center and one of the most powerful generalizations geographers can make about the spatial distribution of phenomena - namely that the occurrences of many relationships exhibit a "distance decay" or lower frequency of occurrence as distance from an origin increases.
This generalization applies to migration frequencies, telephone calls, shopping behaviors and many other human activities. The result is high population densities in inner city areas and low densities in suburban areas - an observable fact of daily life that we implicitly "know" but have not bothered to make the underlying geography explicit.
Geographers, trying to understand the nature of urban environments, formalize this "common sense" knowledge and build theories and policies upon it. Thus, an everyday event that we "intuitively know," but which requires formalized knowledge to make apparent and to influence urban policy, achieves comprehension by asking a simple geography question - where do people live and why live there?
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