Geography

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Geography is an academic discipline whose main concerns are describing and understanding areal differentiation in the distribution of various phenomena across the earth’s surface. It focuses on the nature and interrelationships of three concepts—environment, space and place. This has produced a threefold division of the discipline into physical geography, human geography and regional geography respectively, with the first two containing separate systematic subfields.

As an academic discipline, with a major presence in universities and similar institutions, geography is about a century old.

It was introduced, in Germany and elsewhere, to provide a source of ordered information about places; such material was of particular value to the civil services and (especially in times of conflict) armed forces of imperial nations (Taylor 1985). Geography was also promoted as an important subject in school education in a number of countries, to advance both ‘world knowledge’ as an end in itself and the ideological bases of national views.

With the development of universities as research as well as teaching institutions, geographers sought coherent frameworks for their discipline which would establish them as the equal of scholars in the burgeoning sciences and social sciences. This stimulated a number of proposed definitions of the discipline’s content and methods, of which the most notable in the English language were probably Hartshorne’s The Nature of Geography (1939) and Wooldridge and East’s (1951) The Spirit and Purpose of Geography. Such prospectuses were largely rejected in the 1960s and thereafter, although the ideas of some of the discipline’s founders—notably Paul Vidal de la Blache (Buttimer 1971)—continue to attract interest and support.

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