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

This is Unit Twelve of Social Sciences and History, part two of two: geography from the megacity to the world's regions. Part one closed on which way the flow runs. This part closes the geography band by asking the same questions, where and why there, at three scales at once: the field, the factory and the city, and then the region, where Finlayson's nine realms are each a case of the same framework, a core and a hinterland, a settlement history, a pattern of cities. The capstone at the end draws that framework whole, and it keeps every dated figure dated and every borrowed link attributed, including one glossary error the course declares. By the end you will be able to tell a megacity from a megalopolis and sprawl from gentrification. To classify a resource and name the glossary's error. To classify a farming system in one sort. To give each of the nine realms its core and its cities. And to hold the framework from field to region.

Two entries on the city's edge: megacities, megalopolises and world cities, then the fringe with its suburbs, sprawl, gentrification and edge cities.

Megacities.

SSH 1122 Megacity, Megalopolis, World City

A megacity is a very large city with primacy and high centrality; Finlayson's threshold is ten million, Mexico City at twenty-two. A megalopolis is a chain of metropolitan areas: Boswash, or the Blue Banana from northwest England to northern Italy. A world city conducts a disproportionate share of the world's business. Gateway cities link regions; shock cities change fast.

The fringe.

SSH 1123 Suburbanization, Sprawl, Gentrification, Edge Cities

Suburbanization is growth on metropolitan fringes; sprawl is low-density housing discontinuous with the built-up area; reurbanization is central-core growth after decline. Gentrification is higher-income households moving into older, central, working-class neighborhoods. An edge city concentrates shopping and offices on the fringe near highway junctions. Fiscal squeeze is falling revenue against rising demands; dualism, formal and informal sectors side by side.

Three entries on resources and environment: classifying a resource with the glossary error declared, pollution and the greenhouse figure, and conservation against preservation.

Classifying a resource.

SSH 1124 Renewable, Nonrenewable, Proven and Potential: Classifying a Resource

The exam names a resource and asks its kind, and the anchor's environment chapter defines the set. A nonrenewable resource is in finite supply and is depleted by use; fossil fuels, coal, oil and natural gas, derived from ancient plant and animal matter, are the type. A renewable resource is in effectively infinite supply, solar and wind energy the anchor's examples; biofuels come from living matter. Proven reserves are deposits that can be recovered with some certainty, the section text's definition, since the glossary's entry for the term is the nation-state definition pasted in error, an anchor error the course declares. Potential reserves are estimates of deposits thought to exist but not fully verified. Production is the extraction of fossil fuels from the ground. Coal is nonrenewable, a fossil fuel. Wind is renewable. Ethanol from corn is a biofuel, renewable by source. Oil in a field already drilled and measured is proven reserves; oil a survey suggests lies under a basin is potential. Ask whether use depletes it, and, for a deposit, whether it has been verified. The trap is the glossary: a student who memorizes its proven-reserves line learns a definition of the nation-state. The second trap is treating renewable as clean by definition; the anchor's key term speaks of supply, not pollution.

Pollution.

SSH 1125 Air, Land, Water Pollution; Eutrophication

Eutrophication: nutrient-rich water promotes algae, fertilizer runoff feeding a dead zone, and the dead blooms' decomposition consumes oxygen. A landfill buries solid waste against odor, vermin and unsightliness. The greenhouse effect traps longwave radiation in the lower atmosphere, and the anchor puts its warming at thirty-five degrees Celsius. Thirty-five is the anchor's figure; the common statement is about thirty-three.

Conservation against preservation.

SSH 1126 Conservation Against Preservation

Conservation is using natural resources in a sustainable way so they are preserved for future generations, a managed forest; preservation is setting areas aside so resources stay essentially untouched with as little human impact as feasible, a wilderness. The chapter's outcomes connect preservation efforts worldwide to anthropogenic pressures on the environment. Renewable energy initiatives are the chapter's third outcome.

One entry that gathers part one's farming forms into a single sort: who eats it, then how the land is worked.

Classifying a farm.

SSH 1127 Classifying a Farming System From Its Description

The exam describes a farm and asks which system it is, and the anchor's agriculture chapter sorts by purpose, method and scale. First purpose: subsistence, feeding the farmer's family outside the cash economy, or commercial, producing primarily for sale. Then method, within subsistence: shifting cultivation with swidden clearing; intensive subsistence on small parcels, double cropped where mild; pastoral nomadism, herds moving without fixed pattern; transhumance, herds moving seasonally uphill and down. Within commercial: plantation, one or two export crops on large holdings in developing regions; ranching, livestock grazing extensively; agribusiness, production, processing and distribution together; conventional farming with chemicals and hormones, or organic without them. A family clears forest, farms it a few years, moves on: shifting cultivation. A rice family plants and harvests twice a year on a small plot: intensive subsistence with double cropping. Herders take the flock to alpine pasture each summer: transhumance. A sugar estate exporting to Europe: plantation. Cattle on a vast dry range for market: ranching. A corporation that grows, processes and ships: agribusiness. Ask who eats it, then how the land is worked. The trap is calling a large farm commercial by size alone; the anchor's test is sale. The second trap is transhumance as nomadism; the seasonal, vertical, returning pattern is the difference.

Ten entries on the world's regions: Finlayson's region types and the core-and-hinterland pair, then nine realms in turn, each with its core, its history and its cities.

Finlayson's regions.

SSH 1128 Regions: Formal, Functional, Vernacular; Core and Hinterland

Finlayson's regions are formal, homogeneous in at least one feature, plant hardiness zones for instance; functional, unified by connection; and vernacular, defined by people's perceptions, which is Dorrell's perceptual region. Spatial interaction pairs a core, the central business district, with a hinterland, the land behind, sparser, producing what the core sells, and the pattern applies globally. That pair is the framework's unit.

Europe.

SSH 1129 Europe: From Cottage to Factory to City

Europe's eastern boundary is usually the Urals, so western Russia counts as Europe. The Industrial Revolution began in the United Kingdom, factories replacing cottage industry after Watt's steam engine of seventeen seventy-five, and rural-to-urban migration filled cities that grew as centers of trade and industry, while Basque, Catalan and Welsh identities persist inside states. Sample question ten's premise is witnessed here.

Russia.

SSH 1130 Russia: Size, Cold, and Russification

Russia holds one-eighth of the world's land across eleven time zones but about one hundred forty-three million people, mostly western, with Kaliningrad an exclave. Cold limits settlement and farming; Oymyakon is the coldest inhabited place. Muscovy's expansion built the empire, and Russification made non-Russians adopt Russian language and culture: cultural assimilation. The sixth-largest economy, as the anchor ranks it, undated.

North America.

SSH 1131 North America: Core, Cities, Continental Trade

Canada and the United States share language and history. Early industry ran on the Northeast's hydropower; steam after the eighteen sixties spread it, and the manufacturing core led the world by the early twentieth century. Cities began on the eastern coast and stayed near water, and continental trade ran under NAFTA from nineteen ninety-four and the USMCA from twenty eighteen. The anchor names a president; the course does not.

Middle and South America.

SSH 1132 Middle and South America: Hearths, Primacy, Inequality

Mexico groups culturally with Central America. The Mesoamerican hearth produced the Maya, from about two thousand BCE, and the Aztec; the Inca ruled the altiplano from Cusco. Tordesillas in fourteen ninety-four split the New World between Spain and Portugal. The realm is over eighty percent urban, with primate cities and megacities. The top tenth holds about seventy-one percent of wealth, undated.

Sub-Saharan Africa.

SSH 1133 Sub-Saharan Africa: Berlin, Boundaries, Neocolonialism

The Sahara divides an Arab, Muslim north from the south. Farming began about ten thousand years ago, women the primary farmers. At the Berlin Conference of eighteen eighty-four thirteen European countries and the United States set the rules for claiming Africa, and about ninety percent was soon European-controlled; forty-eight countries, one-third urban. Neocolonialism is economic control after political control ended.

North Africa and Southwest Asia.

SSH 1134 North Africa and Southwest Asia: Water, Hearths, Choke Points

Population clusters on water: the Nile valley, the Mediterranean coast, the Tigris and Euphrates, northwestern Iran. The Fertile Crescent saw the first farms and Mesopotamia's wheel. The region is the hearth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the Umayyads ruled fifteen million square kilometers; Hormuz and Suez are its choke points. The anchor's Islamism section and Pew survey are voiced as its own.

South Asia.

SSH 1135 South Asia: Monsoon, Indus, Density

The Himalaya rose from India's collision with Eurasia. The Indus Valley civilization, from about thirty-three hundred BCE, depended on the monsoon and declined by eighteen hundred BCE. The region is a religious hearth, Vedism to Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and a linguistic one: Indo-European north, Sino-Tibetan Himalaya, Dravidian south. India, over one point three billion, makes it the most populous region.

East and Southeast Asia.

SSH 1136 East and Southeast Asia: Ring of Fire and the Pacific Rim

Mountains and the Gobi, a rain-shadow desert, wall it off. It sits on the Ring of Fire, about ninety percent of earthquakes, with Tambora's eruption of eighteen fifteen cooling the globe. Postwar, Japan Westernized and grew; China, Korea and Vietnam turned communist; the Pacific Rim, APEC and ASEAN frame its trade. Japan's GDP rank is as the anchor ranks it, undated.

Oceania.

SSH 1137 Oceania: Isolation, Biogeography, the Seas

Oceania, Australia, the Pacific islands and the polar regions, is united by isolation; Aborigines arrived forty to fifty thousand years ago, and New Zealand was settled last. Under the Law of the Sea, territorial waters run twelve miles, exclusive economic zones beyond. Biogeography explains its unique wildlife, and Wallace drew the boundary. Invasive species cost Australia billions yearly.

Three entries to close: where people cluster, inequality measured, and one framework for the world's places.

The clusters.

SSH 1138 Three Population Clusters and the Ten Largest Cities

About seven point four billion people cluster in warm places near water and avoid cold, dry ones: East Asia, South Asia and Europe are the three major clusters. All ten of the most populous cities lie in countries traditionally called developing, where growth rates run high, and Madagascar is the anchor's worked natural-increase example. The count is dated to the anchor's writing.

Inequality measured.

SSH 1139 Globalization and Inequality, Measured

World regional geography is in many ways a study of global inequality, Finlayson says. Inequality is uneven wealth: by some accounts the wealthiest one percent hold as much as the bottom ninety-nine; around half the world lives on under two dollars a day, a fifth under one, and open governments sit beside authoritarian ones. The figures are undated and attributed.

One framework.

SSH 1140 Land Use From Field to City to Region: One Framework for the World's Places

The exam's rural and urban land-use item and its regional-geography item are one question asked at three scales, and the anchors answer it in sequence. At the field: agriculture began independently in several hearths, and its first division is purpose, subsistence for the family or commerce for sale, with method beneath it, shifting fields, intensive plots, moving herds, export plantations, extensive ranches, integrated agribusiness. The Green Revolution moved high-yield seeds and fertilizer from core to periphery and, as the witness records, supported the population growth of Asia; the biorevolution follows it, and food security is the measure both are judged by. At the factory: industry located by least cost, Weber's transportation above all, bulk reduced at the source and cargo broken at the port, then organized by Fordism's assembly line and Taylor's stopwatch, then split by outsourcing and offshoring into a supply chain that containers and JIT delivery hold together, until competition's pressure to cut costs deindustrialized the places that began it. At the settlement: rural space, still forty-five and a half percent of humanity by the UN's dated count, gave way to cities that first rose in five hearths; the city's limits are argued three ways; its interior is modeled as rings, wedges or several centers; its place in a national system is read by rank-size or primacy; and its edges sprawl, suburbanize, and gentrify back. Beneath all three lie resources, renewable or not, proven or potential, conserved or preserved. At the region: Finlayson's nine realms are each a case of the same framework, a core and a hinterland, a history of settlement, a pattern of cities, a set of resources and a place in the global inequality that regional geography, he says, is in many ways the study of. Field, factory, city, region: the same questions, where and why, asked at each scale. The framework is the course's reading of two anchors' order, not a claim either makes in one place. The Green Revolution's population link is the witness's; the proven-reserves definition is the section text's, not the glossary's; every dated figure stays dated and attributed. That is the idea this lecture opened with, drawn at all four scales.

Look at what you can now do. You can tell a megacity, ten million with primacy, from a megalopolis, a chain, and a world city, a share of business, and sprawl from gentrification. You can classify a resource by whether use depletes it and a deposit by whether it is verified, and you know the glossary's proven-reserves line is a pasted error. You can classify a farming system by who eats it, then how the land is worked. You can give each of the nine realms its core, its settlement history and its pattern of cities, with every ranking and share left dated. And you can hold the framework from field to factory to city to region, where and why there asked at each scale, which is the idea this lecture was built on. Unit thirteen turns to economics.