Geography III: Agriculture, Industry, Settlement, Environment, and the World's Regions

This is Unit Twelve of Social Sciences and History, part one of two: geography from the first farms to the shape of a country's cities. Unit eleven closed on core and periphery with every theory attributed. This part carries one question through agriculture, industry and settlement: which way does the flow run. Food flows to the family or to the market, and that sorts every farming form. The Green Revolution's seeds flowed from core to periphery, which is the exam's sample question six. Work flows out of the company or out of the country, and that sorts outsourcing from offshoring. And people flow into a city in rings, in wedges, or toward several centers. Ask the direction, and the item names itself. By the end you will be able to sort a farming form. To answer sample question six. To name a production strategy. To name a city's model. And to tell rank-size from primacy.

Six entries on agriculture's forms: where farming began, subsistence against commercial, and the named forms of each.

Where farming began.

SSH 1101 Agriculture's Independent Origins

Agriculture modifies the Earth's surface by cultivating crops and raising livestock, for sustenance and profit, and hunting and gathering came before. It was the key to sedentary civilization, domesticating plants and animals and creating surpluses, and it began independently in the Old World and the New. Finlayson, the witness, dates rice on the Yangtze to about sixty-five hundred BCE.

Subsistence against commercial.

SSH 1102 Subsistence Against Commercial

Subsistence agriculture grows food only to sustain the farmers and their families, who consume most of it without entering the cash economy. Commercial agriculture produces crops and animals primarily for sale, its objective higher profit, and agribusiness runs production, processing and distribution. Subsistence survives mainly in rural Africa, parts of Asia and Latin America. Industrialized agriculture overshadows the traditional forms. Here the flow is to the family or the market.

Shifting cultivation.

SSH 1103 Shifting Cultivation, Swidden, Slash-and-Burn

Shifting cultivation is subsistence farming with a kind of natural rotation: fields are farmed, then left to recover. Slash-and-burn obtains land by slashing vegetation and burning the debris, the ash fertilizing a few seasons; the cleared land is swidden. Crop rotation keeps the field and changes the crop. Shifting the field is not rotating the crop.

Intensive subsistence.

SSH 1104 Intensive Subsistence and Double Cropping

Intensive subsistence agriculture uses small parcels of land effectively and efficiently to maximize yield per hectare, on rice, wheat and vegetables. Where the climate is mild, double cropping plants and harvests the fields twice a year. This is unit eleven's high agricultural density, many farmers per field. Intensive means labor per hectare, not profit.

Herders.

SSH 1105 Pastoral Nomadism and Transhumance

Pastoralism is subsistence breeding and herding of animals. Pastoral nomadism is its traditional form: herders travel long distances with no fixed pattern. Transhumance is a seasonal vertical movement, herds to cooler, greener high pastures in summer and back to lowlands for winter: distance without pattern against altitude with a calendar. Transhumance has a home. Nomadism does not.

The commercial forms.

SSH 1106 Plantation, Ranching, Agribusiness

A plantation is a large landholding in a developing region specialized in one or two crops, usually for export to more developed countries. Ranching is commercial agriculture in which livestock graze over an extensive area. Agribusiness is commercial agriculture engaged in production, processing and distribution of food, and nontraditional agricultural exports set new crops beside the old. Plantations point outward, to export.

Three entries on the Green Revolution and after: the sample question, the biorevolution and its alternatives, and food security.

The sample question.

SSH 1107 The Green Revolution: Inputs, Transfer, and the Population Link

Sample question six asks what the Green Revolution did, and the key is that it raised food production to meet population growth. Dorrell's definition: a new agricultural technology of high-yield seeds and fertilizers exported from the core to the periphery to increase their productivity. Its section text names the inputs, higher-yielding varieties of wheat, corn and rice, with fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation and new machines, and the places, the farmlands of South, Southeast and East Asia and Mexico, lifting tens of millions above survival. Finlayson, the witness, supplies the population half: South Asia's historic growth was supported by the Green Revolution, which began in India in the nineteen sixties, when a hybrid rice yielding ten times the traditional seed, called Miracle Rice, answered a famine risk in nineteen sixty-one and spread through Asia. Choose the option that pairs higher food production with population growth. Distractors claim it reduced population, spread organic farming, moved farmers to cities, or originated in the periphery. What succeeded it: the biorevolution, genetic engineering with the potential to exceed it. The trap is the direction of transfer: core to periphery, in the anchor's words. The second trap is calling it sustainable or organic; the anchor's sustainable agriculture is a later response to its costs. Direction is the whole answer here, as it is through this lecture.

The biorevolution.

SSH 1108 Biorevolution, GMOs, Organic, Sustainable

The biorevolution is genetic engineering of plants and animals with the potential to exceed the Green Revolution's production; GMOs have laboratory-modified DNA, and reactions to GM food ripple through the food system. Organic farming excludes commercial fertilizers, pesticides, growth hormones and GMOs. Sustainable agriculture produces safe, high-quality food while protecting environment, farmers and animals. Sustainable intensification is the current focus.

Food security.

SSH 1109 Food Security, Food Sovereignty, Famine

Food security is the situation when all people, at all times, have access to food for an active and healthy life. Food sovereignty is a people's right to set its own agricultural policies. Famine is extreme scarcity of food; undernourishment, intake below the healthy minimum; a food regime has one food dominant. Globalized agriculture is shaped above the national level.

Five entries on industry: where it locates, mass production, naming a production strategy, deindustrialization, and industry's impact on places.

Where industry locates.

SSH 1110 Locational Criteria: Bulk-Reducing and Break-of-Bulk

Locational criteria decide whether an activity occurs in a place. A bulk-reducing industry makes a product weighing less than its inputs, so it smelts at the mine; a break-of-bulk point is where cargo transfers from one transport mode to another, unloading at the port. Weber held transport cost the most relevant factor. Labor, markets, energy and agglomeration are the other criteria.

Mass production.

SSH 1111 Fordism, Taylorism, Economies of Scale

Fordism is rational mass production that standardizes and simplifies: assembly lines, mass consumption on higher wages. Taylorism is the scientific management of production. Economies of scale are efficiencies gained by operating at larger scale, and neo-Fordism keeps mass production and consumption but adds flexibility. Competition's relentless pressure to cut costs runs through all of it, and Marx's falling rate of profit frames that pressure.

Naming a production strategy.

SSH 1112 Outsourcing or Offshoring: Naming the Production Strategy

The exam describes a firm's move and asks the term, and the anchor's industry chapter defines the set. Outsourcing shifts production of a good or provision of a service from within a company to an external source; offshoring shifts it to another country; the two can combine or occur separately. A supply chain is all the products and processes in producing a good. JIT delivery brings components right before they are needed to cut inventory and storage costs. Containerization moves goods in standardized shipping containers; intermodal transport uses more than one mode; logistics coordinates the whole. Footloose capitalism is production's spatial flexibility, and back office services are staff who never meet clients. The firm closed its own call center and hired a contractor in the same city: outsourcing. The firm moved its own factory abroad: offshoring. The firm hired a contractor abroad: both. Parts arrive the morning they are installed: JIT. A box goes ship to rail to truck unopened: intermodal containerization. Ask two questions: did the work leave the company, and did it leave the country. The trap is treating the two as synonyms; the anchor separates who does the work from where. The second trap is footloose capitalism as a firm's whim; the anchor defines it as spatial flexibility the transport system makes possible.

Deindustrialization.

SSH 1113 Deindustrialization and Footloose Capital

Deindustrialization is the shift from a manufacturing-based economy to one based on other activities; it follows competition's relentless pressure to cut costs, which pushes industry toward cheaper labor and materials and more customers, and output can rise while factory jobs stay flat through automation. Footloose capitalism is the spatial flexibility that lets production move. The gig economy has freelance work replacing permanent jobs.

Industry's impact.

SSH 1114 Industry's Impact on Places

Industrial production changed people's relationship to their environments: folk cultures hand-made goods locally; now production splits into countless spatially discrete pieces. Goods became cheaper and more accessible, lives changed, and we live, the anchor says, by a schedule dictated by international production. Industry's origins and diffusion are the chapter's first outcome. Unit four carries the Industrial Revolution's history.

Seven entries on rural and urban: rural defined, village forms, the urban hearths, a city's limits, the urban share, naming a city's model, and rank-size against primacy.

Rural defined.

SSH 1115 Rural Defined: Land Use, Density, Livelihood

Rural space is typified by land use, especially agriculture and forestry, low population density, agricultural employment, small settlements and an agrarian way of life; definitions vary by country, and rural units mix agricultural and non-agricultural activity. About forty-five and a half percent of the world's population still lives in rural areas, the UN's figure through the anchor, dated twenty sixteen.

Villages.

SSH 1116 Clustered, Dispersed, Linear, Circular Villages

Early villages needed water, defensibility, and land to cultivate. A clustered rural settlement has families living close together with fields around; a dispersed one has farmers on isolated individual farms. Dutch villages are linear along dikes; some African villages are circular, penning livestock at night, the iraal an enclosed village of huts. A settlement pattern reveals culture and history.

The urban hearths.

SSH 1117 The Five Urban Hearths

The earliest towns and cities developed independently in hearth areas after their first agricultural revolution. Five regions show the earliest urbanization: Mesopotamia and Egypt, both in the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley, northern China, and Mesoamerica; Mesopotamia and Egypt came first, from around thirty-five hundred BCE, then world-empires, then diffusion everywhere. Unit five teaches the same hearths as history.

A city's limits.

SSH 1118 City Proper, Agglomeration, Metropolitan Area

No standardized international criteria define a city's limits, so three concepts compete. The city proper follows an administrative boundary. The urban agglomeration takes the extent of the built-up area. The metropolitan area follows the degree of economic and social interconnectedness of nearby areas, and annexation legally adds land to a city. Three answers to how big the city is.

The urban share.

SSH 1119 More Than Half Urban: The Continental Table

The United Nations reports that more than half the world's population lives in urban areas, fifty-four and a half percent in twenty sixteen, though thresholds run from a thousand to fifty thousand. By continent: North America eighty-one percent, Europe seventy-four, Asia forty-eight, Africa forty-one. Urbanization is population concentrating in metropolitan areas. The UN's figures are dated.

Naming a city's model.

SSH 1120 Concentric Zone, Sector, Multiple Nuclei: Naming the Model

The exam describes a city's internal structure and asks which model fits, and the anchor names three. The concentric zone model arranges social groups in a series of rings around the central business district, the CBD, the central nucleus of commercial land use, with a zone in transition of mixed commercial and residential use surrounding it. The sector model arranges groups in sectors radiating out from the CBD. The multiple-nuclei model arranges groups around a collection of separate nodes of activity rather than one center. Each is a model of the internal structure of cities, the anchor's phrase, and the chapter's outcome compares urban patterns across regions. The poor near the center, the rich at the edge, each group in a ring: concentric zone. A wedge of high-income housing running from downtown outward: sector. An industrial district, a university district and an old downtown, each with its own neighborhoods: multiple nuclei. The mixed warehouse-and-tenement belt right outside downtown: the zone in transition, from the first model. Ask whether the pattern is rings, wedges, or several centers. The trap is expecting one model to fit every city; the anchor presents them as models compared across regions. The second trap is the zone in transition, which belongs to the concentric model and names a land-use mix, not a social class.

Rank-size and primacy.

SSH 1121 Rank-Size Against Primacy: Reading a Country's Cities

The exam gives city sizes and asks whether a country follows the rank-size rule or shows primacy, and the anchor's definitions decide it. The rank-size rule is a statistical regularity in the size distribution of cities: the second city is about half the largest, the third a third, and so on down the ranks. Primacy is the condition in which the largest city is disproportionately large relative to the second and third. A primate city is the largest settlement when it has more than twice as many people as the second, and Finlayson adds that it represents the national culture; his examples are Montevideo, home to over half of Uruguay's people, and Mexico City. Centrality is a city's functional dominance within an urban system, the interdependent set of settlements in a region. Ten million, five million, three point three million: rank-size. Ten million, three million, two million: primacy, and the largest is a primate city. Two cities of six and five million: neither. Divide the largest by the second; more than two means primate, about two means rank-size. Germany, where Berlin is about twice Hamburg, is Finlayson's borderline. The trap is the threshold: more than twice, not merely the largest. The second trap is reading primacy as a virtue or a fault; the anchor defines a condition, and Finlayson notes many countries have no primate city.

Look at what you can now do. You can sort a farming form by whether the food flows to the family or to market, and name shifting cultivation, intensive subsistence, transhumance, plantation and ranching. You can answer sample question six: the Green Revolution raised food production to meet population growth, and its seeds flowed from core to periphery. You can name a production strategy by asking whether the work left the company and whether it left the country, and you know a bulk-reducing industry smelts at the mine. You can name a city's model as rings, wedges or several centers, and draw its limits three ways. And you can tell rank-size from primacy by dividing the largest city by the second. In each case you asked which way the flow runs, which is the question this lecture opened with. Part two opens on megacities, then carries sprawl, resources, pollution, and the world's regions to land use from field to city.