Human geography

Описание мероприятия

Для кого эта программа

This course is designed to:

• introduce students to key current debates in geography and to position these debates within the history of geographical ideas
• enable students to obtain a broad knowledge of a range of contemporary geographical issues and to understand how these have developed over time
• provide a basic understanding of economic, social, cultural and political concerns from a global and local perspective.

Описание программы

This is the level 100 course on which subsequent, more specialised geography courses are based.

Assessment

This course is assessed by a three‐hour unseen written examination.

Учебный план:

Section 1: Human geography as a discipline

• The history of geographical ideas: Travel writing and exploration, discussion of the development of key sub‐disciplines in geography from regional geography, behavioural and humanist approaches, radical geography, locality and ‘place’, new economic geography, postmodernism and new cultural geography.
• The history of geographical methods: Quantitative methods, qualitative methods, synthetic approaches, data sources.
• Different views of the world: How ‘maps’ are used in the presentation of geographical knowledge; examples from, Mackinder’s Pivot of History, Apollo space photographs, the London Underground.  

Section 2: Geographical views of world economies

• Different structures of the world economy: Global capital – financial circulation, offshore banking, debt. Global labour – international division of labour, export processing zones, feminisation of labour. Global trade – Free Trade Areas, World Trade Organization.
• Different structures of world polity: Nation state – definition, rise and decline. The Cold War – development, authoritarianism, democracy. Post‐ Cold War – New World Order, rogue states, humanitarianism.
• Location of economic activities: Legacy of classical location theory. Global shifts in economic activity. Economic policies for market intervention.

Section 3: Resources, population and sustainability

• Resources and Sustainability: Nature of resources. Resource depletion debates. Pollution and economic development.
• Population and Sustainability: Population profiles; ageing and youth societies. Population trap and resource depletion. Sustainable growth, Rio Summit, Brown versus Green agendas.
• Population Movements: Theories of rural‐ urban and international migration. Examples of population mobility and Diaspora. Introduction to issues of assimilation and integration.

Section 4: The geography of cities

• Models of urban growth, organisation and change: Anti‐urbanism and Chicago School, morphology and urban systems, planning and management, new towns, suburbs and edge cities. Inner city decline and gentrification.
• An urbanizing world: Mega‐cities in the South, urban poverty, squatter settlements, contemporary images.
• Global cities: Definitions of global and world cities, ‘new’ or just New York? Inequality, segregation and enclaves.

Section 5: North‐South interactions

• Development: Cold War and Bretton Woods, modernisation and achievements, democracy, non‐aligned movement post‐ development.
• Commodity Chain: How commodities move from production in the South to consumption in the North (use examples of coffee, bananas, ‘exotics’).
• Global Consumerism and Cultural Imperialism: Relationship between consumerism and development, dangers of cultural imperialism, hybridity, critique of the cultural dupe.
• Travel and Tourism: Explain how tourists see the South differently as enclaves, colonial heritage, sex tourism, opportunities for tourism development.

Результат обучения:

At the end of this course and having completed the essential reading and activities students should be able to:

• outline the theoretical contribution and development of geography to the social sciences
• critically analyse processes of contemporary economic, social, cultural and political change from a geographical perspective
• describe and discuss the importance of understanding both diversity and homogeneity to the process of geographical enquiry
• discuss alternative understandings of how the global and the local human environment are connected.