human geog chapter 7

© 2016 Pearson Education, Inc.

Chapter 7:Interpreting Places and Landscapes

Chapter 7 Lecture

Katie PrattMacalester College



• Relationships between people and space

• Environmental behavior

• Territoriality• Cognitive images

• Landscapes

• Place-making• Modernity• Globalization

Key Concepts

Figure: Chapter 7 Opener - Tourists visit the construction site of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.


• Interdependence between people and places

• Understanding environmental perception and knowledge

• Cindy Katz: Growing up Global

Behavior, Knowledge, and Human Environments

Figure 7.1: People’s Climate March in New York City.

Apply your knowledge: Scrutinize how globalization has shaped the environment you operate in as a student. How has it shaped you—the buildings, the people, the climate, the social life, etc.—and how do you shape it by interacting with it?


Behavior, Knowledge, and Human Environments (cont’d)

Figure 7.2: A Shepard's map, drawn by a 10-year-old Sudanese boy, illustrating his detailed environmental knowledge.


Figure 7.3: Graffiti as territorial markers.

• Places are socially constructed

• Territoriality– Social and cultural needs

• Ethology

• Proxemics• Insiders and outsiders• Sociospatial dialectic

Place-Making

Apply your knowledge: Describe the relationship between ethology and territoriality. Evaluate examples that you experience in everyday life of proxemics as a territorializing force.


Figure 7.4: (a) Public art pieces serve as an important cultural hub in San Francisco's Mission District (b) Banksy art, London (c) Pepsi-Cola World Cup branding by street artist Jaz (d) Black Hand street art, Iran.

• Street art is used in place-making in a variety of ways

Place-Making (cont’d)


Outsider Art

Figure 7.A: Nek Chand’s Rock Garden, Chandigarh, India.

Apply your knowledge: What makes outsider art “outside”? What are other cultural expression that are “outside” the mainstream forms? What does this tell you about cultural and social categories?


• Cognitive images

• Paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks

• Distortions


Figure 7.6: Cognitive image of Boston.

Apply your knowledge: Use the five elements to map out your image of the college campus.


• Images and behavior


Figure 7.7: Images of Los Angeles as seen by residents of different communities.

Apply your knowledge: What is cognitive imagery? How do cognitive images direct us to “learn” an environment? How is cognitive imagery built differently by each of us?


• Topophilia


Figure 7.8: Preference map of the United States held by a group of Virginia Tech students, based on the perceived attractiveness of cities and states as places to live.


• Humanistic approach in geography• Derelict landscapes• Ordinary landscapes

Landscapes as Human Systems

Figure 7.11: Vulgaria: size and ostentation are the dominant factors in upscale U.S. residential development.


Landscapes as Human Systems (cont’d)

Figure 7.9: Some cities are immediately recognizable because of their famous landmarks.



Figure 7.10: These ordinary landscapes in New England and Middle America have become symbolic of the United States.


Route 66

Figure 7.1: Historic Route 66 was created as part of the National Highway System Program.


• Landscapes of national identity

Trafalgar Square and British National Identity

Figure 7.B: Nelson’s column.Figure 7.C: Trafalgar Square.

Apply your knowledge: What is a place that you consider to be of special symbolic significance in your own country?


• Landscape and art• Art offers insight on

humans’ relationships with the environment


Figure 7.12: The Cornfield, a painting by John Constable (1776–1837) is a representation of the Romantic tradition.


• Funerary landscapes

Trafalgar Square and British National Identity

Figure 7.13: Funerary landscapes.


• Landscape as text• Semiotics• Commercial spaces

– “Palaces of consumption”

Coded Spaces

Figure 7.14: Aeroville shopping mall, Paris.

Apply your knowledge: Apply what you have learned about codes and provide a description of the systems of signification that operate in your neighborhood.


• Spread of Modernity to peripheral regions

• Cyberspace– With its own “landscape” (or technospace)

• Commonalities of a shared, global consciousness

Globalization and Place-Making


• Going slow– Slow food and slow city movements

• Rallying against globalization and effort to recover a sense of place

Globalization and Place-Making (cont’d)

Figure 7.15: Slow food festival, Bra, Italy.

Figure 7.16: Simjicheon, South Korea, one of the first officially designated “slow cities” in Asia.


Places as Objects of Consumption

Figure 7.17: Venice, Las Vegas, the boundaries between the heritage industry and the leisure industry and entertainment industries have become increasingly blurred.


Places as Objects of Consumption (cont’d)

Figure 7.18: Chinese mimicry: (a) The village of Hallstatt, Austria, and (b) a copy-cat version in China’s southern city of Huizhou.

Apply your knowledge: How have places become objects of consumption? Define what David Harvey means by the term” degenerative utopia” and think of an example.


• Homogenization of culture

• Cosmopolitanism

Future Geographies

Figure 7.19: Western pop culture: Hollywood movies dominate the schedule at the Gaumont cinema in Paris.

Apply your knowledge: Think of three example of how globalization of cultures shapes places and landscapes. Compare the values of the Cittaslow movement to globalization of culture, and analyze how homogenization can change place and landscapes.