Geography
Regional Boundaries
Regional boundaries refer to the lines that demarcate the separation between different geographic regions. These boundaries can be defined by physical features such as rivers or mountains, or they can be man-made, such as political borders between countries or states. They serve to delineate areas with distinct characteristics, such as culture, language, or governance.
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11 Key excerpts on "Regional Boundaries"
eBook - PDFThe World Today
Concepts and Regions in Geography
- Jan Nijman, Michael Shin, Peter O. Muller(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
Therein lies an important principle: regions are de- vices that allow us to make spatial generalizations, and they are based on criteria to help us construct them. If you were studying the geography of presidential-election politics, then a Midwest region defined by State boundaries would make sense. If you were studying agricultural distributions, you would need a different definition. Criteria for Regions Given these different dimensions of the same region, we can identify properties that all regions have in common: • Area To begin with, all regions have area. This obser- vation would seem obvious, but there is more to this idea than meets the eye. Regions may be intellectual constructs, but they are not abstractions: they exist in the real world, and they occupy space on the Earth’s surface. • Boundaries It follows that regions have boundaries. Occasionally, nature itself draws sharp dividing lines, for instance, along the crest of a mountain range or along a coast. More often, Regional Boundaries are not self- evident, and we must determine them using criteria that we establish for that purpose. For example, to define a cultural region, we may decide that only areas where more than 50 percent of the population belong to a particular religion or speak a certain language qualify to be part of that region. • Location All regions also possess location. Often the name of a region contains a locational clue, as in Amazon Basin or Indochina (a region of Southeast Asia lying be- tween India and China). Geographers refer to the absolute location [10] of a place or region by providing the latitu- dinal and longitudinal extent of the region with respect to the Earth’s grid coordinates. A more useful measure is a region’s relative location [11], that is, its location with reference to other regions. Again, the names of certain regions reveal aspects of their relative locations, as in Mainland Southeast Asia and Equatorial Africa.
eBook - PDFHuman Geography
People, Place, and Culture
- Erin H. Fouberg, Alexander B. Nash, Alexander B. Murphy, Harm J. de Blij(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
TYPES OF BOUNDARIES When boundaries are drawn using grid systems such as latitude and longitude or township and range, political geographers refer to them as geometric boundaries. In North America, the United States and Canada used a single line of latitude west of the Great Lakes to define their boundary (Figure 3.9). At different times, po- litical geographers and other academics have advocated “natural” boundaries over geo- metric boundaries because they are visible on the land- scape as physical geographic features. Physical-political boundaries (also called natural-political boundaries) follow Geometric boundary Political boundary defined and delimited (and occasionally demarcated) as a straight line or an arc. Physical political (natural- political) boundary Political boundary defined and delimited (and occasionally demarcated) by a prominent physical feature in the natural landscape, such as a river or the crest ridges of a mountain range. 60 CHAPTER 3 Political Geography FIGURE 3.5 The former Yugoslavia. The contested geography of the former Yugoslavia, and in particular Kosovo, as discussed, provides a good example of territoriality. Map from the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations Cartographic Section, June 2007. FIGURE 3.6 The vertical plane of a political boundary. The Former Yugoslavia, Map No. 3689 Rev.12, June 2007. © United Nations Cartographic Section, DFS © E.H. Fouberg, A.B. Murphy, H.J. de Blij, and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 3.1 How Is Space Organized into States and Nations? 61 FIGURE 3.7 The international boundary between Iraq and Kuwait. Kuwait’s northern boundary was redefined and delimited by a United Nations boundary commission; it was demarcated by a series of concrete pillars 2 kilometres apart. an agreed-upon feature in the physical geo- graphic landscape, such as the centre point of a river or the crest of a mountain range.
eBook - PDFThe World Today
Concepts and Regions in Geography
- Jan Nijman, Peter O. Muller, Harm J. de Blij(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
This observation would seem obvious, but there is more to this idea than meets the eye. Regions may be intellectual constructs, but they are not abstractions: they exist in the real world, and they occupy space on the Earth’s surface. • Boundaries It follows that regions have boundaries. Occa- sionally, nature itself draws sharp dividing lines, for instance, along the crest of a mountain range or along a coast. More often, Regional Boundaries are not self-evident, and we must determine them using criteria that we establish for that pur- pose. For example, to define a cultural region, we may decide that only areas where more than 50 percent of the population belong to a particular religion or speak a certain language qual- ify to be part of that region. • Location All regions also possess location. Often the name of a region contains a locational clue, as in Amazon Basin or Indochina (a region of Southeast Asia lying between India and China). Geographers refer to the absolute location 7 of a place or region by providing the latitudinal and longitudinal extent of the region with respect to the Earth’s grid coordinates. A more useful measure is a region’s relative location 8 , that is, its location with reference to other regions. Again, the names of certain regions reveal aspects of their relative locations, as in Mainland Southeast Asia and Equatorial Africa. • Homogeneity Many regions are marked by a certain homoge- neity or sameness. Homogeneity may lie in a region’s cultural properties, its physical characteristics, or both. Siberia, a vast region of northeastern Russia, is marked by a sparse human population that resides in widely scattered, small settlements of similar form, frigid climates, extensive areas of permafrost (permanently frozen subsoil), and cold-adapted vegetation. This dominant uniformity makes it one of Russia’s natural and cultural regions, extending from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east.
- Matt Duckham, Michael F. Goodchild, Michael Worboys, Matt Duckham, Michael F. Goodchild, Michael Worboys(Authors)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- CRC Press(Publisher)
More subtle are the long term On the ontological status of geographical boundaries 171 effects that may arise from the simple existence of the boundary, regardless of how it is physically demarcated. An international boundary drawn across an initially homogeneous region may lead in time to the two subregions thereby separated acquiring marked differences in character. Prescott (1965) cites a detailed study by Daveau of the effects of the Swiss-French boundary in the Jura to the west of Lake Neuchâtel over several centuries, where, for example, the ‘small strip fields’ of Amont in France are clearly contrasted with the ‘summer pastures’ of Carroz in Switzerland, ‘even though the physical character of the landscape on both sides is the same’ (Prescott, 1965, p. 97). This is a case where the physical effect of a boundary is something directly visible, but in many cases the effect is more subtle, having to do with patterns of movement and interaction. A political boundary introduces discontinuities into such patterns, some of which may be obvious, others only to be uncovered by detailed research. Fielding (1974), for example, notes that ‘[p]eople in Vancouver…are more likely to marry partners from Toronto or Winnipeg than from Seattle, Tacoma, or Bellingham, despite the proximity of single people in the latter group.’ Such differences in patterns of interaction are epiphenomenal. One could, albeit rather artificially, consider a field whose value at a given point is the probability that a randomly-chosen single inhabitant of Vancouver will marry a person living at that point. Then the state of affairs described by Fielding would show up as a heteroline marking a discontinuity in the field values along the border. 4 SOME KEY ATTRIBUTES OF BOUNDARIES In the light of the foregoing discussion it should be evident that the world of geographical boundaries is highly diverse, encompassing physical, biological, psychological, social, and political phenomena.
eBook - PDF- Rodolfo B. Valdenarro(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Delve Publishing(Publisher)
The World in Spatial Terms • Geography is said to be the study of the special physical as well as human characteristics of either a place or a region. • The relation in between the humans and their environment is considered to be the most important part of the geography. • The study of culture or any learned system of shared belief, values or traits can be done by a geographer. Applied Human Geography 18 • Geographers analyses the things on the surface of the Earth. • It is important to provide changes in the settlement patterns over the time. • There are certain tools which can be used by the geographers in their study such as maps, charts and graphs. They can also use the field notes, take interviews, use photographs, reference books and videos etc. • High tools such as satellites which provide detailed images of the earth can be used by the geographers. • There are computer databases such as GIS which means Geographic Information Systems that can store huge amounts of data. • Absolute location: It is the exact latitude and longitude or address of a place. • Relative Location: It is the location of a place which is related to other locations. Figure 1.5: GIS Spatial Data. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MDC_Lands_2007.svg Introduction to Geography 19 1.6.2. Places and Regions • There are physical as well as human characteristics of a place which makes it special. • There are certain physical characteristics such as animal as well as plant life, climate and weather, sources of water, soils and landforms. • Landforms are the natural shapes on the Earth’s surface. For example, hills, valleys and mountains. • There are human characteristics such as language, ethnicity, political and economic systems, standards of living, religion and population distribution. • A region can be defined as an area having common characteristics which make it different from other surrounding areas.
eBook - PDF- Joseph P. Stoltman(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
A common strategy is to place boundaries on "natural" divisions like mountain ranges or rivers. This makes the human-imposed boundary seem as if it were a natural part of the landscape (D. Kaplan & Hakli, 2002). Maps also play an important role in naturalizing borders because they represent national boundaries as if they were uninterrupted lines on the globe that divide different territories. On the map, these territo- ries are often conveniently represented in homogenous colors that are sharply contrasted at the border where, say, 164 • HUMAN GEOGRAPHY the blue of one country meets the red of another. Despite these appearances, many of these borders, particularly those created through decolonization in the second half of the 20th century, do not actually mark a sharp division on the ground. A good example of this is the border that divides present-day Bangladesh from India (R. Jones, 2009a). The border runs through the middle of the cultural and linguis- tic region of Bengal, and people who live on both sides of the border still speak the same language and practice simi- lar cultural traditions. Prior to its creation by a British lawyer in 1947, as the British decolonized India, the line on the map that would become the international border was a police jurisdictional boundary. It was not marked on the ground, few people knew where it was, and it did not play an important role in most people's daily lives. Although the police jurisdictional boundary became the new international political border overnight on August 16, 1947, no one came to mark it for several years after the partition. Local people learned where the boundary was, but they continued to cross it to go to the market, visit friends, or go to work. On maps all around the world, it was represented as a sharp break, but it had little meaning to people who lived nearby.
eBook - PDF- John A. Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, Gerard Toal, John A. Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, Gerard Toal(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
As globalization impacts the traditional barrier role of state boundaries, so the focus of political power has also shifted to the regions and intra-state areas, such as Catalonia, Scotland, and Sicily, creating new life for territorial demarcators which were, until recently, considered largely redundant. Conclusion: Towards a Theory of Boundaries and Bounding The main argument in this chapter is that the process of bounding ± drawing lines around spaces and groups ± is a dynamic phenomenon, of which the boundary line is, more often than not, simply the tangible and visible feature that represents the course and intensity of the bounding process at any particular point in time and space. A deeper understanding of the bounding process requires an integration of the different types and scales of boundaries into a hierarchical system in which the relative impact of these lines on people, groups, and nations can be conceptualized as a single process. But the study of boundaries continues to take place within separate and distinct realms, be it the geographic and the state, be it the social and the group affiliations, or be it the political and the construction of ethnic and national identities. What is sorely lacking is a solid theoretical base that will allow us to understand the boundary phenomenon as it takes place within different social and spatial dimensions. A theory which will enable us to understand the process of ``bounding'' and ``bordering'' rather than simply the compartmentalized outcome of the various social and political processes. A conceptual framework for the study of the boundary phenomenon would have to take three dimensions into account, all of which have been addressed in this chapter.
eBook - PDF- R. Knowles, J. Wareing(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Made Simple(Publisher)
Problems even arise over fixed features in the landscape such as mountain ranges or rivers, because although these may be barriers to movement and can therefore be considered as effective boun-daries, it can be argued with equal conviction that they give unity rather than separation in many regions. Thus the River Danube gives a unity within its basin despite the barrier effects of political frontiers, while the Ural Moun-tains, because of the economic links with the Kusbas and the Donbas, can be said to join east and west Russia rather than separate Europe from Asia. The problem becomes even more acute when complex functional regions are involved since there is, for example, usually a considerable overlap between competing city regions. The area served by a city newspaper will not neces-sarily be the same as that served by its public transport or shops, and the boundary of the functional region will usually be a broad tract rather than a single precise line (Chapter Twenty). The second problem concerns the question of scale. Depending on the cri-teria used, there are thousands of regions that can be defined, ranging from the major environmental regions to the region served by a single shop. In Britain alone there is a vast number of regions overlapping each other. If government is taken as the regional criterion, the London region is the entire country, but as far as everyday shopping is concerned, Greater London itself is made up of a large number of regions based on major centres such as Harrow, Croydon or Enfield. However, despite these problems, the region is a very useful model for dividing space and, equally important, it has practical applications. A third type of region can be identified, the programming region, which is designed to serve a particular purpose.
eBook - PDF- John A Agnew, David N Livingstone, John A Agnew, David N Livingstone, SAGE Publications Ltd(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
25 Region and Regionalism J . N i c h o l a s E n t r i k i n REGION AND GEOGRAPHIC THOUGHT The regional concept has been too readily dis-missed as a crude tool, whereas it is really a basic tool that has been used crudely. Donald Meinig 1978: 1202. The history of the regional concept is so thor-oughly fused with the history of geography that it is difficult to write about the region without seeming to portray the discipline as a whole. The region has been cast in all the major revolutionary dramas of twentieth-century geographic thought, from environ-mental determinism and spatial science to the twenty-first-century concerns of critical stud-ies and globalization. The region’s persist-ence in a rapidly changing intellectual environment attests to its status as a primitive of geographical understanding, not to its inherent theoretical or causal power (Entrikin 2008). The concept reflects a highly flexible, adaptable, and useful way of viewing the world. Its relational, whole/part form of spa-tial understanding fits well with geography’s cartographic tradition and has a utility that extends beyond the boundaries of the aca-demic field of geography. Regional geography may be a dormant methodological orienta-tion in geography, but the concept of region, the process of regionalization, and the theme of regionalism continue to thrive within parts of the discipline. Today, interest in the region is most evi-dent in the literatures of political and eco-nomic geography. This more circumscribed, sub-disciplinary interest parallels the contin-uing fragmentation of academic geography. Many twenty-first-century geographers view with suspicion arguments in support of uni-fying methodologies and theoretical perspec-tives, or of any so-called ‘meta-narratives’ of disciplinary coherence. Such discipline-wide debates were once the primary stage on which the region appeared.
eBook - PDFRegionalization of the World
Comparing Regional Integrations
- Pierre Beckouche, Yann Richard(Authors)
- 2024(Publication Date)
- Wiley-ISTE(Publisher)
Demangeon hesitated: he excluded Russia from the political point of view (with the Bolshevik regime being incompatible with democracy), but considered that its presence in Europe was necessary for the economic balance of the continent. For Ancel, on the other hand, the physical and human geography of Russia distanced it from Europe (Demangeon 1932b; Ancel 1936b; Arrault 2007). 1.3.3. After World War II: global regions at last? After World War II, regional geography went beyond the first Vidalian tradition, i.e. the relations considered too simple between human groups and environments, From Regional Geography to the Geography of Regionalization 7 the rural tropism, and especially the monographic approach. From the 1960s onwards, regional monographs took a back seat. The notion of spatial organization became central; it encompassed what was happening within the region and the relations with other regions. Some geographers refer to this as the “system region” (Dumolard 1975). In the wake of Walter Christaller’s economic theories and the theoretical contributions of economists such as François Perroux, the region was considered less in its homogeneity and more through the idea of functional integration. Regionalization then consisted of observing the spatial limits of economic channels and identifying nodes (cities) that dominated surfaces. We find this idea in Juillard (1962). The young regional science seeks laws of geographic space and studies the forces that organize it according to repeating patterns (Isard 1975). To understand regions, it is necessary to analyze networks, economies of scale, inter-scale relationships, production relationships and center–periphery relationships. This is what Marxist-inspired radical geography does. Moreover, spatially sensitive economists, such as Lipietz (1977), push geographers to seek principles of spatial division of labor valid at the intra-national level, as well as the international level.
eBook - ePub- Cynthia Metcalf, Rhonda Atkinson(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Research & Education Association(Publisher)
Human Geography focuses on humans and the cultures they create relative to their space. It encompasses population geography, economics, and political geography and looks at how people’s activities relate to the environment politically, culturally, historically, and socially.Physical Geography addresses Earth’s physical environment: water (hydrosphere ), air (atmosphere ), plants and animals (biosphere ), and land (lithosphere ). Physical geographers study land formation, water, weather, and climate (weather patterns, specifically precipitation and temperature, over time), as well as more specific topics such as geomorphology, biogeography, and environmental geography.Regional Geography organizes areas of Earth that have some degree of similarity and divides the world into different realms .Topical/Systemic Geography is the orderly and methodical study of climate, landforms, economics, and culture.The main focus of geographers, no matter the subfield, is the spatial perspective. For example, population geography deals with the relationships between geography and population patterns, including birth and death rates. Political geography concerns the effect of geography on politics, especially on national boundaries and relations between states. Economic geography focuses on the interaction between Earth’s landscape and the economic activity of the human population.COMPETENCY 1.1Apply the six essential elements of geography. Geographic Education: 18 Standards, 6 ElementsThe National Geography Standards(http://nationalgeographic.org/standards/national-geography-standards/
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