Human geography
[2][3] This multidisciplinary approach draws from sociology, anthropology, economics, and environmental science, contributing to a comprehensive understanding of the intricate connections that shape lived spaces.
One of the first examples of geographic methods being used for purposes other than to describe and theorize the physical properties of the earth is John Snow's map of the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak.
Though Snow was primarily a physician and a pioneer of epidemiology rather than a geographer, his map is probably one of the earliest examples of health geography.
The connection between both physical and human properties of geography is most apparent in the theory of environmental determinism, made popular in the 19th century by Carl Ritter and others, and has close links to the field of evolutionary biology of the time.
Environmental determinism is the theory that people's physical, mental and moral habits are directly due to the influence of their natural environment.
However, by the mid-19th century, environmental determinism was under attack for lacking methodological rigor associated with modern science, and later as a means to justify racism and imperialism.
A similar concern with both human and physical aspects is apparent during the later 19th and first half of the 20th centuries focused on regional geography.
Due to a perceived lack of scientific rigor in an overly descriptive nature of the discipline, and a continued separation of geography from its two subfields of physical and human geography and from geology, geographers in the mid-20th century began to apply statistical and mathematical models in order to solve spatial problems.
[1] Much of the development during the quantitative revolution is now apparent in the use of geographic information systems; the use of statistics, spatial modeling, and positivist approaches are still important to many branches of human geography.
It draws heavily on Marxist theory and techniques and is associated with geographers such as David Harvey and Richard Peet.
Radical geographers seek to say meaningful things about problems recognized through quantitative methods,[7] provide explanations rather than descriptions, put forward alternatives and solutions, and be politically engaged,[8] rather than using the detachment associated with positivists.
It focuses on describing and analyzing the ways language, religion, economy, government, and other cultural phenomena vary or remain constant from one place to another and on explaining how humans function spatially.
This subdiscipline also draws on ideas from other branches of Human Geography to see their involvement in the processes and patterns evident in an urban area.
Such approaches are: As with all social sciences, human geographers publish research and other written work in a variety of academic journals.
