Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
as well as the type of person; fl at areas are easier to manage
than steep slopes. It can be argued that linear measured distance
per se
is not meaningful unless it is qualifi ed by conditions of this
kind.
Place
is another core concept in geography. Place is not
independent of space because it involves an area or territory; it is
a form of bounded space. Place can be applied at a variety of scales
from a state or country to a neighbourhood or home area. Place
therefore includes the search for boundaries, edges, and limits
that contain a defi nable and recognized territory. When describing
the differences between places, the focus may be on natural
boundaries such as rivers or mountain ranges, but boundaries
are also set by human decision-makers who may be intent
upon identifying political states or arbitrating among disputed
territories. The physical boundaries are not always unambiguous,
and the lesson of history is that major disputes and confl icts
can arise over the designation of relatively small parcels of land.
Geography also includes the mental maps and images that defi ne
places subjectively. Residents of a neighbourhood, for example,
might be asked to sketch the boundaries of their home area or to
construct their mental map of the city in which they live. People
attach special and often individual meanings to places, such as the
place where they spent their childhood or the place they associate
with some special event. Different people from different cultures
may perceive and interpret the same area of the Earth's surface in
different ways.
There are, in short, meanings attached to places: these meanings
may be affective and emotional, which does not lend them easily
to measurement. There is, for example, a growing interest in
literary places that either provide the settings for fi ctional novels
or were the locations where writers lived and worked. Such places
now attract many visitors who are at least as interested in the
fi ctional settings and the characters that inhabited them as they
are with the real lives of the authors. Haworth in Yorkshire, for
