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115 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Globalization
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The gradual reduction of regional contrasts at the world scale, resulting from increasing international cultural, economic, and political exchanges.
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Hinterland
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Literally, "country behind," a term that applies to a surrounding area served by an urban center. That center is the focus of goods and services produced for its hinterland and is its dominant urban influence as well. In the case of a port city, the hinterland also includes the inland area whose trade flows through that port.
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Ice Age
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A stretch of geologic time during which the Earth's average atmospheric temperature is lowered; causes the equatorward expansion of continental ice sheets in the higher latitudes and the growth of mountain glaciers in and around the highlands of the lower latitudes.
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Location
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Position on the Earth's surface [Absolute v. Relative].
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Megalopolis
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When spelled with a lower-case m, a synonym for conurbation, one of the large coalescing supercities forming in diverse parts of the world. When capitalized, refers specifically to the multimetropolitan corridor that extends along the northeastern US seabord from north of Boston to south of Washington, DC.
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Natural Landscape
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The array of landforms that consitutes the earth's surface (mountains, hills, plains, and plateus) and the physical features that mark them (such as water bodies, soils, and vegetation). Each geographic realm has its distinctive combination of natural landscapes.
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Neocolonialism
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The term used by developing countries to underscore that the entrenched conolial system of international exchange and capital flow has not changed in the postcoloinal era - thereby perpetuating the huge economic advantages of the developed world.
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New World Order
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A description of the international system resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union in which the balance of nuclear power theoretically no longer determines the destinies of states.
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Pacific Ring of Fire
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Zone of crustal instability along tectonic plate boundaries, marked by earthquakes and volcanic activity, that ring the Pacific Ocean basin.
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Perifery
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The 'have-not' components of a national or regional system.
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Physical Geography
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The study of the geography of the physical (natural) world. Its subfields include climatology, geomorphology, biogeography, soil geography, marine geography, and water resources.
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Population Density
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The number of people per unit area.
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Population Distribution
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The way people have arranged themselves in geographic space. One of human geography's most essential expressions because it represents the sum total of the adjustments that a population made to its natural, cultural, and economic environments.
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Regional Boundary
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In theory, the lines that circumscribes a region. But razor-sharp lines are seldom encountered, even in nature. In the cultural landscape, tehse boundaries are rarely self-evident and often turn out to be transitional.
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Regional Character
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The personality or "atmosphere" of a region that makes it distinct from all other regions.
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Regional Concept
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The geographic study of regions and regional distinctions.
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Regional Disparity
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The spatial unevenness in starded of living that occurs within a country, whose "average," overall income statistics invariably mask the differences that exist between the extremes of the wealthy core and the poorer periphery.
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Regional Geography
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Approach to geographic study based on the sptial unit of the region. Allows for an all-encompassing view of the world, because it utilizes and integrates information from geography's topical/systematic fields.
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Relative Location
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The regional position or situation of a place relative to the position of other places. Distance, accessibility, and connectivity affect relative location.
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Scale
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Represation of a realworld phenomenon at a certain level of reduction or generalization. In cartography, the ratio of map distance to ground distance; indicated on a map as a bar graph, representative fraction, and/or verbal statement.
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State
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A politically organized territory that is administered by a sovereign government and is recognized by a significant portion of the international community. A state must also contain a permanent resident population, an organized economy, and a functioning internal circulation system.
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Subduction
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In plate tectonics, the process that occurs when an oceanic plate converges head-on with a plate carrying a continental landmass as ts leading edge. The lighter continental plate overrides the denser oceanic plate and pushes it downward.
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Systematic Geography
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Toical geography: cultural, political, economic geography, and the like.
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Taxonomy
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A system of scientific classification.
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Transition Zone
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An area of spatial change where the peripheries of two adjacent realms or regions join; marked by a gradual shift (rather than a sharp break) in the characteristics that distinguish these neighboring geographic entities from one another.
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Urbanization
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1. The proportion of a country's population living in urban places is its level of ubanization.
2. The PROCESS of urbanization involves the movement to, and the clustering of, people in towns and cities - a major force in every geographic realm today. 3. When an expanding city absorbs rual countryside and transforms it into suburbs. |
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European State Model
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A state consisting of a legally defined territory inhabited by a population governed from a captial city by a representative government.
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Geographic Realm
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The basic spatial unit in our world regionalization scheme. Each realm is defined in terms of a synthesis of its total human geography - a composite of its leading cultural, economic, historical, political, and appropriate environmental features.
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Geographic Change
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Evolution of spatial patterns over time.
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Spatial System
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The components and interactions of a functional region, which is defined by the areal extent of those interactions.
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Balkanization
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The fragmentation of a region into smaller, often hostile political units.
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Break-of-bulk Point
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A location along a transport route where goods must be transferred from one carrier to another. In a port, the cargoes of oceangoing ships are unloaded and put on trains, trucks, or perhaps smaller river boats for inland distribution.
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Centrifugal Forces
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A term employed to designate forces that tend to divide a country - such as internal religious, linguistic, ethnic, or ideological differences.
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Centripetal Forces
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Forces that unite and bind a country together - such as a common faith, a strong national culture, and shared ideological objectives.
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Complementarity
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Exists when two regions, through an exchange of raw materials and/or finished products, can specifically satisfy each other's demands.
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Conurbation
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General term used to identify a large multi-metropolitan complex formed by the coalescence of two or more major urban areas.
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Devolution
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The process whereby regions within a state demand and grain political strength and growing autonomy at the expense of the central government.
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Entrepot
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A place, usually a port city, where goods are imported, stored, and transshiped; a break-of-bulk point.
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Exclave
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A bounded (non-island) piece of territory that is part of a particular state but lies separated from it by the territory of another state. Alaska is an exclave of the United States.
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Four Motors of Europe
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Rhone-Alpes (France), Baden-Wurttemberg (Germany), Catalonia (Spain), and Lombardy (Italy). Each is a high-technology-driven region marked by exceptional industrial vitality and economic success not only within Europe but on the global scene as well.
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Indo-European Languages
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The major world language family that dominates the European geographic realm. This language family is also the most widely dispersed globally, and about half of humankind speaks one of its languages.
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Industrial Revolution
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The term applied to the social and economic changes in agriculture, commerce, and especially manufacturing and urbanization that resulted from technological innovations and specialization in late eighteenth-century Europe.
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Infrastructure
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The foundations of a society: urban centers, transport networks, communications, energy distribution systems, farms, factories, mines, and such facilities as schools, hospitals, postal services, and police and armed forces.
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Intervening Opportunity
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In trade or migration flows, the presence of a nearer opportunity that grealty diminishes the attractiveness of sites farther away.
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Irredentism
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A policy of cultural extension and potential political expansion by a state aimed at a community of its nationals living in a neighboring state.
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Land Hemisphere
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The half of the globe containing the greatest amount of land surface, centered on Western Europe.
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Landlocked Location
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An interior state surrounded by land. Without coasts, such a country is disadvantaged in terms of accessibility to international trade routes, and in the scramble for possession of areas of the continental shelf and control of the exclusive economic zone beyond.
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Local Functional Specialization
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A hallmark of Europe's economic geography that later spread to many other parts of the world, whereby particular people in particular places concentrate on the production of particular goods and services.
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Metropolis
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Urban agglomeration consisting of a (central) city and its suburban ring.
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Model
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An idealized representation of reality built to demonstrate its most important properties.
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Nation
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Legally a term encompassing all the citizens of a state, it also has other connotations. Most definitions now tend to refer to a group of tightly-knit people possessing bonds of language, ethnicity, religion, and other shared cultural attributes. Such homogeneity actually prevails within very few states.
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Nation-state
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A country whose population possesses a substanial degree of cultural homogeneity and unity. The ideal form to which most nations and states aspire - a political unit wherein the territorial state coincides with the area settled by a certain national group of people.
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Physiography
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Literally means landscape description, but commonly refers to the toal physical geography of a place; includes all of the natural featers on the Earth's surface, including landforms, climate, soils, vegetation, and water bodies.
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Primate City
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A country's largest city - ranking atop the urban hierarchy - most expressive of the national culture and usually (but not always) the capital city as well.
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Regional State
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A "natural economic zone" that defies political boundaries, and is shaped by the global economy of which it is a part; its leaders deal directly with foreign partners and negotiate the best terms they can with the national governments under which they operate.
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Shatter Belt
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Region caught between stronger, colliding external cultural-political forces, under persistent stress, and often fragmented by aggressive rivals. Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia are classic examples.
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Site
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The internal locational attributes of an urban center, including its local spatial organization and physical setting.
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Situation
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The external locational attributes of an urban center; its relative location or regional position with reference to other non-local places.
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Supranationalism
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A venture involving three or more states - political, economic, and/or cultural cooperation to promote shared objectives. The European Union is one such organization.
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Transferability
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The capacity to move one good from one place to another at a bearable cost; the ease with which a commodity may be transported.
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Isolated State
(Von Thünen's Isolated State Model) |
Explains the location of agricultural activies in a commercial economy. A process of spatial competition allocates various farming activities into concentric rings around a central market city, with profit-earning capability the determining force in how far a crop locates from the market.
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Climatology
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The geographic study of climates. Includes not only the classification of climates and the analysis of their regional distribution, but also broader environmentla questions that concern climate changes, interrelationships with soil and vegetation, and human-climate interaction.
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Colonialism
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Rule by an autonomous power over a subordinate and alience people and palce. Although often established and maintained through political structures, colonialism also creates unequal cultural and economic relations. Because of the magnitude and impact of the uropean colonial thrust of the last few centuries, the term is generally understood to refer to that particular colonial endeavor.
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Collectivization
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The reorganization of a country's agriculture under communism that involves the expropriation of private holdings an dtheir incorporation into relatively large-sclae units, which are farmed and administered cooperatively by those who lives there.
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Command Economy
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The tightly controlled economic system of the former Soviet Unionwhereby central planners in Moscow assigned the production of particular goods to particular places, often guided more by socialist idology than the principles of economic geography.
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Continentality
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The variation of the continental effect on air temperatures in the interior portions of the world's landmasses. The greater the distance from the moderating influence of an ocean, the greater the extreme in summer and winter temperatures. Continental interiors also tend to be dry when the distance from oceanic moisture sources becomes considerable.
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Core Area
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1. Core refers to the center, heart, or focus.
2. The core area of a nation-state is constituted by a national heartland, the largest population cluster, the most productive region, and the part of the country with the greatest centrality and accessibility - probably containing the capital city as well. |
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Distance Decay
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The various degenerative efefcts of distance on human spatial structures and interactions.
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Federation
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A political framework wherin a central government represents the various subnational entities within a nation-state where they have common interests - defense, foreign affairs, and the like - yet allows these various entities to retain their own identities and to have their own laws, policies, and customs in certain spheres.
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Forward Capital
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Capital city positioned in actually or potentially contested territory, usually near an international border; it confirms the state's determination to maintain its presence in the region in contention.
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Heartland Theory
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The hpothesis that any political power based in the heart of Eurasia could gain sufficient strength to eventually dominate the world. Further, since Eastern Europe controlled access to the Eurasian interior, its ruler would command the vast "heartland" to the east.
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Imperialism
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The drive toward the creation and expansion of a colonial empire and, once established, its perpetuation.
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Near Abroad
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The 14 former Soviet republics that, together with the dominant Russian Republic, constituted the USSR. Since the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia has asserted a sphere of influence in these now-independent countries, based on its proclaimed right to protect the interests of ethnic Russians who were settled there in substantial numbers during Soviet times.
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Oligarchs
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Opportunists in post-Soviet Russia who used their ties to government to enrich themselves.
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Permafrost
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Permanently frozen water in the near-surface soil and bedrock of cold environments, productin gthe effect of completely frozen ground. Surface can thaw during brief warm session.
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Population Decline
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A decreasing national population. Russia, which now loses nearly 1 million people per year, is the best example.
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Russification
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Demographic resettlement policies pursued by the central planners of the Soviet Empire, whereby ethnic Russians were encouraged to emigrate from the Russian Republic to the 14 non-Russian republics of the USSR.
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Taiga
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The subarctic, mostly coniferous snowforest that blankets northern Russia and Canada south of the tundra that lines the Arctic shore.
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Tundra
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The treeless plain that lies along the Arctic shore in northernmost Russia and Canada, whose vegetation consists of mosses, lichens, and certain hardy grasses.
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Weather
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The immediate and short-term conditions of the atmosphere that impinge on daily human activities.
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Unitary State System
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A nation-state that has a centralized government and administration that exercises power equally over all parts of the state.
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American Manufacturing Belt
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North America's near-rectangular Core Region, whose corners are Boston, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Baltimore. Dominated the industrial geography of the US and Canda during the industrial age; still a fomidable economic powerhouse that remains the realm's geographic heart.
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Cultural Pluralism
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A society in which two or more population groups, each practicing its own culture, live adjacent to one another without mixing inside a single state.
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Economies of Scale
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The savings that accrue from large-scale production wherein the unit cost of manufacturing decreases as the level of operation enlarges. Supermarkets operate on this principle and are able to charge lower prices than small grocery stores.
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Ecumene
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The habitable portions of the Earth's surface where permanent human settlements have arisen.
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Fossil Fuels
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The energy resources of coal, natural gas, and petroleum (oil), so named collectively because they were formed by the geologic compression and transformation of tiny plant and animal organisms.
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Ghetto
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An intraurban region marked by a particular ethnic character. Often an inner-city poverty zone, such as the black ghetto in US central cities. Ghetto residents are involuntarily segregated from other income and racial groups.
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Migration
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A change in residence intended to be permanent.
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Outer City
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The non-central portion of the American metropolis; no longer "sub" to the "urb," this outer ring was transformed into a full-fledged city during the late twentieth century.
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Pacific Rim
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A far-flung group of countries and parts of countries (extending clockwise on the map from New Zealand to Chile) sharing the following crteria: they face the Pacific Ocean; they evince relatively high levels of economic development, industrializiation, and urbanization; their imports and exports mainly move across Pacific waters.
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Physiographic Province
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A region within which there prevails substanial natural-landscape homogeneity, expressed by a certain degree of uniformity in surface relief, climate, vegetation, and soils.
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Productive Activities
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The major components of thhe spatial economy.
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Postindustrial Economy
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Emerging economy, in the US and a handful of other highly advanced countries, as traditional industry is increasingly eclipsed by a higher-technology productive complex dominated by services, information-related, and managerial activities.
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Push-pull Concept
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The idea that migration flows are simultaneously stimulated by conditions in the source area, which tend to drive people away, and by the perceived attractiveness of the destination.
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Rain Shadow Effect
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The relative dryness in areas downwind of mountain ranges caused by orographic precipitation, wherein moist air masses are forced to deposit most of their water content as they cross the highlands.
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Suburban Downtown
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In the US (and increasingly in other advanced countries), a significant concentration of major urban activities around a highly accessible suburban location, including retailing, light industry, and a variety of leading corporate and commercial operations.
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Sunbelt
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The popular name given to the southern tier of the US, which is anchored by the mega-States of California, Texas, and Florida. Its warmer climate, superior recreational opportunities, and other amenities have been attracting large numbers of relocating people and activities since the 1960s.
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Technopole
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A planned techno-industrial complex that innovates, promotes, and manufactures the products of the postindustrial informational economy.
Ex: California's Silicon Valley |
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Urban Realms Model
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A spatial generalization of the contemporary large American city. It is shown to be a widely dispersed, multicentered metropolis consisting of increasingly independent zones or urban realms, eaach focused on its own suburban downtown; the only exception is the shrunken central realm, which is focused on the central city's central business district.
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Glaciation
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Repeated advances of continental ice sheets.
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Functional Region
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A region marked by its sameness than its dynamic internal structure.
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Formal Region
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A type of region marked by a certain degree of homogeneity in one or more phenomena.
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Ethnicity
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The combination of people's culture (traditions, customs, language, and religion) and racial ancestry.
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Economic Geography
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The field of geography that focuses on the diverse ways in which people earn a living, and how the goods and services which they produce are expressed and organized spatially.
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Development
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The economic, social, and institutional growth of national states.
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Desertification
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Process of desert expansion into neighboring steppelands as a result of human degradation of fragile semiarid environments.
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Continental Drift
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The slow movements of continents controlled by the processes associated with plate tectonics.
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Cultural Landscape
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The forms and artifacts sequentially placed on the natural landscape by the activities of various human occupants. By this progression imprinting on the human presence, the physical (natural) landscape is modified into the cultural landscape, forming an interacting unity between the two.
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Culture
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The total sum of the knowledge, attitudes, and habitual behavior patterns shared and transmitted by the members of society.
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Absolute Location
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The position or place of a certain item on the surface of the Earth as expressed in degrees, minutes, and seconds of latitude, 0˚ to 90˚ north or south of the equator, and longitude, 0˚ to 180˚ east or west of the prime meridian passing through Greenwich, England.
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Advantage
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The most meaningful distinction that can now be made to classify a country's level of economic development. Takes into account geographic location, natural resources, government, political stability, productive skills, and much more.
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Cartogram
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A special transformed map NOT based on traditional representations of scale or area.
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Central Business District
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The downtown heart of a central city; marked by high land values, a concentration on business and commerce, and the clustering of the tallest buildings.
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Climate
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The long-term conditions (over at least 30 years) of aggregate weather over a region, summarized by averages and measures of variability; a synthesis of the succession of weather events we have learned to expect at any given location.
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Climactic Region
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A formal region characterized by the uniformity of the climate type within it.
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