Human geography earned its first UK chair in 1883
Human geography—sometimes called anthropogeography—maps how people inhabit and reshape space. England's Royal Geographical Society formed in 1830; the United Kingdom's first geography professor arrived in 1883. American institutions followed with National Geographic in 1888 and a professional association in 1904.
Its subject is the link between people and the places they live: communities, cultures, economies and ways of life set against their surroundings, with urban sprawl and redevelopment as typical examples. Researchers mix descriptive and numerical methods. Halford Mackinder became Britain's first major geographical thinker and took a chair at the London School of Economics in 1922. The American professional body dropped "Association of American Geographers" for "American Association of Geographers" in 2016 to reflect a more international membership. One of the earliest uses of mapping for a human question came from a physician: John Snow plotted the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak, a founding moment for health geography.
Physical and human geography only drifted apart later. In the 19th century Carl Ritter and others popularised environmental determinism, the claim that climate and terrain directly shape people's bodies, minds and morals, an idea tied to the evolutionary biology of the day. Regional geography, dominant into the mid-20th century, tried to carve the world into regions and describe each one's human and physical character. By the 1960s the quantitative revolution attacked that work as unscientific and too descriptive, and geographers turned to statistics and mathematical models of space.
From the 1970s a wave of critical geography pushed back against that positivism. Behavioural geography asked how people perceive places and choose locations. Radical geography, strongly shaped by Marxist theory in the 1970s and 1980s, wanted explanations and political engagement rather than detachment, and argued that the quantitative school's claimed objectivity served capital. Feminist geography, new cultural geography and postmodern approaches followed.
Today's branches are many. Cultural geography tracks how language, religion and government vary from place to place; health geography studies how diseases spread and are contained; political geography includes geopolitics and electoral patterns; urban geography examines a town's site in its landscape and its situation among other towns. Newer fields cover energy systems, the relationship between law and space, and how infrastructure such as water, transport and housing shapes inequality.
Source: Human geography
