Areal Differentiation In Geography Pdf
Physical Geography: Earth 1 Environments and Systems Physical geography investigates and seeks to explain the spatial aspects, functions, and characteristics of Earth’s.
The study of the spatial distribution of physical and human phenomena as they relate to other spatially proximate and causally linked phenomena in regions or other spatial units. Along with spatial analysis and landscape approaches, this is often seen as one of the three major approaches to understanding in human geography.
It is indeed the oldest western tradition of geographical inquiry, tracing its beginnings to the Greeks Hecateus of Miletus and Strabo. The geographer, in Strabo 's words, is 'the person who describes the parts of the Earth '. But description was never simply taking inventory of the various characteristics of different regions.
The purpose was to understand those features of parts of the Earth that were of greatest political and military significance. This understanding was to wax and wane in relative importance down the years. But it never completely faded away, even if revived under different circumstances and using different concepts and language. The 'classic ' epoch of regional geography, to use Paul Claval 's (1993, p.
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15) phrase, was reached in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when much of the conceptual debate in geography was devoted to the concept of the region. Such geographers as Paul Vidal de la Blache and Alfred Hettner were leading exponents of regional perspectives. An influential modern statement of geography as areal differentiation, drawing from the arguments of Hettner in particular, was made in Richard Hartshorne 's The nature of geography (1939). This is usually seen as claiming that geography is about showing how unique regions reveal the co-variation of phenomena that can only be understood through identifying regions. Hartshorne 's repeated use of the term areal differentiation and his avowed indifference to the 'phenomena themselves ' could well lead to such an idiographic interpretation.
The logic of the presentation, however, suggests that recognizing regions requires investigation of similarities as well as differences over space. Areal differentiation, therefore, is about establishing degrees of sameness as well as difference between regions (Agnew, 1989).
Hartshorne 's critics (principally exponents of the spatial-analysis view of the field) accused him of seeing locations as unique and justifying a traditional regional geography in which 'areal differentiation dominated geography at the expense of areal integration ' (Haggett, 1965). This led to the association of areal differentiation with the particularity of regions at the expense of attention to more extensive geographical patterns and to the causes of such spatial distributions. Defining geography as a spatial science thus moved the field away from a central concern with regions as spatial clusters of linked phenomena. In the 1980s areal differentiation made something of a comeback as a central perspective for human geography. The revival is neither directly connected to older debates such as those between Hartshorne and his critics nor is it monolithic.
Indeed, there are at least three specific intellectual positions in the revival, none of which uses the same concepts or vocabulary as the others. The first derives from the streams of thought referred to collectively as humanistic.