Human Geography: Nature and Scope
Stages, schools and sub-fields
Explain the humanistic, radical and behavioural schools.
Human geography has changed over time, as each period asked new questions:
| Period | Approach | Main focus |
|---|---|---|
| Early colonial period | Exploration and description | Explorers and traders described new lands, mostly for empires. |
| Later colonial period | Regional analysis | A region was described in detail, to understand the whole by its parts. |
| 1930s (between the wars) | Areal differentiation | Why one region differs from another. |
| Late 1950s to late 1960s | Spatial organisation | Computers and statistics used to map and analyse human activity: the quantitative revolution. |
| 1970s | Humanistic, radical and behavioural schools | Discontent with purely numbers-based geography. |
| 1990s | Post-modernism | Grand general theories questioned; each local context matters. |
The three schools of the 1970s each stressed something different:
- Humanistic geography focused on human awareness, choice and well-being.
- Radical geography used Marxian theory to explain the causes of poverty, deprivation and inequality.
- Behavioural geography stressed people's lived experience and how they perceive space, by ethnicity, religion and so on.
Human geography has many fields, and each links closely with a sister social science:
- Social geography (with sociology), including the geography of well-being, leisure, culture and gender;
- Urban geography (urban studies and planning);
- Political geography (political science), including electoral geography, which studies how people vote across regions, and military geography;
- Population geography (demography);
- Settlement geography (rural and urban planning);
- Economic geography (economics), including the geography of resources, agriculture, industry, marketing, tourism and international trade;
- Historical and cultural geography (history, anthropology).
Each period asked new questions.
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