Human Geograpy Models and Theories

A sequence of demographic changes in which a country moves from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates through time.

Spatial interaction or \"gravity models\" estimate the flow of people, material or information between locations in geographic space. Factors can include origin propulsive variables such as the number of commuters in residential areas, destination attractiveness variables such as the amount of office space in employment areas, and proximity relationships between the locations measured in terms such as driving distance or travel time.

1) Traditional society 2) Preconditions for take-off 3) Take-off 4) Drive to maturity 5) Age of High mass consumption

(Burgess) Based on human ecology theories done by Burgess and applied on Chicago, it was the first to give the explanation of distribution of social groups within urban areas. This concentric ring model depicts urban land use in concentric rings: the Central Business District (or CBD) was in the middle of the model, and the city expanded in rings with different land uses. It is effectively an urban version of Von Thunen's regional land use model developed a century earlier. It contrasts with Homer Hoyt's sector model and the multiple nuclei model.

is a model of urban land use proposed in 1939 by economist Homer Hoyt. It is a modification of the concentric zone model of city development. The benefits of the application of this model include the fact it allows for an outward progression of growth.

an ecological model put forth by Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman in the 1945 article \"The Nature of Cities.\" The model describes the layout of a city. It notes that while a city may have started with a central business district, similar industries with common land-use and financial requirements are established near each other. These groupings influence their immediate neighborhood. Hotels and restaurants spring up around airports, for example. The number and kinds of nuclei mark a city's growth.

(Christaller) is a geographical theory that seeks to explain the number, size and location of human settlements in an urban system. The theory was created by the German geographer Walter Christaller, who asserted that settlements simply functioned as 'central places' providing services to surrounding areas

(Least Cost Theory) Leaning heavily on work developed by the relatively unknown Wilhelm Launhardt, Alfred Weber formulated a least cost theory of industrial location which tries to explain and predict the locational pattern of the industry at a macro-scale. It emphasizes that firms seek a site of minimum transport and labour cost.

The relative costs of transporting different agricultural commodities to the central market determined the agricultural land use around a city. The most productive activities will thus compete for the closest land to the market and activities not productive enough will locate further away.

is the study of factors affecting the health and illness of populations, and serves as the foundation and logic of interventions made in the interest of public health and preventive medicine. It is considered a cornerstone methodology of public health research, and is highly regarded in evidence-based medicine for identifying risk factors for disease and determining optimal treatment approaches to clinical practice.

basically features an amount of economic activity in one main area surrounded by a remote area of less dense activity. The concentration of this economic activity in one area (usually a city center) allows for the growth and expansion of activity into other and surrounding areas because of the cost minimizing location decisions of firms within these agglomeration economies sustaining high productivity and advantages which therefore allow them to grow outside of the city (core) and into the periphery.

The domino theory was a foreign policy theory during the 1950s to 1980s, promoted at times by the government of the United States, that speculated that if one land in a region came under the influence of communism, then the surrounding countries would follow in a domino effect. The domino effect suggests that some change, small in itself, will cause a similar change nearby, which then will cause another similar change, and so on in linear sequence, by analogy to a falling row of dominoes standing on end.

The Heartland lay at the centre of the world island, stretching from the Volga to the Yangtze and from the Himalayas to the Arctic. Mackinder's Heartland was the area ruled by the Russian Empire and then by the Soviet Union, minus the area around Vladivostok. Any power which controlled the World-Island would control well over 50% of the world's resources. The Heartland's size and central position made it the key to controlling the World-Island.

The Rimland's defining characteristic is that it is an intermediate region, lying between the heartland and the marginal sea powers. As the amphibious buffer zone between the land powers and sea powers, it must defend itself from both sides, and therein lies its fundamental security problems. Spykman's conception of the Rimland bears greater resemblance to Alfred Thayer Mahan's \"debated and debatable zone\" than to Mackinder's inner or marginal crescent. The Rimland has great importance coming from its demographic weight, natural resources, and industrial development. Spykman sees this importance as the reason that the Rimland will be crucial to containing the Heartland (whereas Mackinder had believed that the Outer or Insular Crescent would be the most important factor in the Heartland's containment).

is a term used by post-colonial critics of developed countries' involvement in the developing world. Writings within the theoretical framework of neocolonialism argue that existing or past international economic arrangements created by former colonial powers were or are used to maintain control of their former colonies and dependencies after the colonial independence movements of the post-World War II period.

(Population) an increased population would create more wealth that would provide food for the whole humanity. Scholars of such school of thought believed that, both man and society could be made perfect. In contrast to this viewpoint, Malthus interpreted overpopulation as an evil that would reduce the amount of food available per person.

The theory looks at the internal factors of a country while assuming that, with assistance, \"traditional\" countries can be brought to development in the same manner more developed countries have. Modernization theory attempts to identify the social variables which contribute to social progress and development of societies, and seeks to explain the process of social evolution. Not surprisingly, modernisation theory is subject to criticism originating among communist and free-market ideologies, world systems theorists, globalization theory and dependency theory among others.

the founder of the intellectual school of world-systems theory, characterizes the world system as a set of mechanisms which redistributes resources from the periphery to the core. In his terminology, the core is the developed, industrialized part of the world, and the periphery is the \"underdeveloped\", typically raw materials-exporting, poor part of the world; the market being the means by which the core exploits the periphery.

that refers to how the price and demand for real estate changes as the distance from the Central Business District (CBD) decreases. It states that different land users will compete with one another for land close to the city centre. This is based upon the idea that retail establishments wish to maximise their profitability, so they are much more willing to pay more money for land close to the CBD and less for land further away from this area.

describes the remarkable regularity in many phenomena including the distribution of city sizes around the world, sizes of businesses, particle sizes (such as sand), lengths of rivers, frequencies of word usage, wealth among individuals, etc. All are real-world observations that follow power laws such as those called Zipf's law, the Yule distribution, or the Pareto distribution. If one ranks the population size of cities in a given country or in the entire world and calculates the natural logarithm of the rank and of the city population, the resulting graph will show a remarkable log-linear pattern. This is the rank-size distribution.

Indo-European peoples arrived in the 4th millennium BC across the steppes north of the Black Sea. A warlike people, they imposed themselves as an elite on the Old European populations, who adopted their language. The hypothesis that Indo-European speakers reached Europe from the Pontic steppes in the Bronze Age

suggests that the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) lived in Anatolia during the Neolithic era, and associates the distribution of historical Indo-European languages with the expansion during the Neolithic revolution during the seventh and sixth millennia BC.

claims that the type of migration that occurs within a country depends on how developed it is or what type of society it is. A connection is drawn from migration to the stages of within the Development Transition Model (DTM).

developed a location model that demonstrates the relationship between location and pricing behavior of firms. He represented this notion through a line of fixed length. Assuming all consumers are identical (except for location) and consumers are evenly dispersed along the line, both the firms and consumer respond to changes in demand and the economic environment. In Hotelling's Location Model, firms do not exercise variations in product characteristics; firms compete and price their products in only one dimension, geographic location. Therefore, traditional usage of this model should be used for consumers who perceive products to be perfect substitutes or as a foundation for modern location models.

refer to four distinct periods in the history of American urbanization. Each epoch is characerized by the impact of a particular transport technology on the creation and differential rates of growth of American cities.

Describes automobile-dependent metropolitan areas· Large, self-sufficient suburban sectors · 4 criteria shape the extent, character, & internal structure of each urban realm:(1) terrain (topography, water)(2) size of metropolis(3) amount of economic activity in each realm(4) internal accessibility of each realm based on its dominant economic core

A structuralist theory that offers a critique of the modernization model of development. Based on the idea that certain types of political and economic relations (especially colonialism) between countries and regions of the world have created arrangements that both control and limit the extent to which regions can develop.