Population geography is the subdiscipline of human geography that has concerned itself with describing, analyzing, and reflecting upon the geographical organization and growth of human populations in their environmental and social settings. It thus distinguishes itself from demography which, as the mathematical science of the human population, focuses on the processes of fertility, mortality, and migration and how these create predictable populations. Put another way, population geography emphasizes how populations and population processes appear and change across space, while demography emphasizes change over time. This article explores the disciplinary basis of knowledge, reviews three major approaches to knowledge creation, and closes with a brief resumé of outstanding debates. It argues that while spatial science approaches have lent credibility and vitality to intellectual debates within and beyond the field, and structural approaches have offered important insights about inequalities, a further integration of these with emerging cultural approaches is needed to tackle contemporary knowledge challenges.

Defining human geography is especially difficult because of complicating factors like the relationship between human geography and geography (the former to many considered a mere subdiscipline of the latter); the rather late professionalization of the discipline; variations in human geography written in different languages; and the difficulty (indeed, sheer dubiousness) of being able to identify definitive research questions, sequential paradigms, or key thinkers. It is tempting to define a common ground for human geography's intellectual core (as Hartshorne attempted), and wish to enforce this. Such a common ground might provide human geography with a sense of unity. But the reality of how human geography is practiced simply cannot sustain this. As David Livingstone so powerfully put it in The Geographical Tradition (1992: 28), “The idea that there is some eternal metaphysical core to geography independent of historical circumstances will simply have to go.”

Indeed, human geography has not had a linear trajectory of intellectual advances accompanied by more or less parallel diffusions as the subject was established and pursued around the world. Human geography has been energized and replenished in a more decentered manner by multiple authors asking very different questions within the same subdisciplinary space. Some, like Alexander Von Humboldt, are seen as forbearers, but others, such as Friedrich Ratzel and Ellsworth Huntingdon are remembered more for how subsequent geographers disowned their ideas. Somewhat an exception to this is Paul Vidal de la Blache, who took up the chair of geography at the Sorbonne in 1898 and whose students became professors of geography at most of France's (then) 16 other universities. In this instance one could argue that a single leading figure established the terrain and direction of a national geographical tradition – at least for several subsequent generations.

Of course there have been highly influential theorists and practitioners in every era, but human geography has been a remarkably open field, particularly since the 1960s, when especially diverse ideas and political practices found traction, and when links were made to anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, economics, and philosophy. This perspective helps explain how contemporary human geography has emerged as a complex and differentiated grouping of scholars and students, institutions and analytical sites, technologies and methodologies, journals and conferences, arguments and audiences – evidenced by the very diversity of entries covered in this encyclopedia.

Our first take follows a conventional narrative plot that begins with ‘origins’ and a ‘classical period’, then unfolds in a linear narrative of ongoing progress of ‘new’, ‘newer’, and ‘newest’ cultural geography. This will give the reader a sense of comfort typical with linear, ‘progressive’ stories, and it will suggest that the boundaries of cultural geography are knowable, periodic, and fixed. This will be deliberately challenged in the takes that follow.

In Rowntree’s words, Sauerian cultural geographers “depicted the personality of geographical space in historical perspective.” This approach – especially followed in North America in the decades following Sauer – tended to examine the geography of the material cultural landscape, organized, patterned, and located usually in a rural context at the regional scale. Common topics included the study of the diffusion of rural farming practices, modes of agrarian life, distributions and patterns of material cultural products (from vernacular architectural styles to musical instruments), and culturally specific land-use practices.

There is further historical context also worthy of brief explanation: in the 1920s Sauer was reacting against a particularly mechanistic approach to understanding relations between humans and nature – environmental determinism – which had dominated geography until that time. Environmental determinists sought to identify causal links between ecological and terrestrial variations and cultural appearances, traits, and behaviors across the Earth’s human population distribution. Environmental determinists were prominent in Europe (e.g., Mackinder and Ratzel) and their disciples brought it back to America (e.g., William Morris Davis and Ellen C. Semple) and Australia (e.g., Griffith Taylor), under the banner of ‘anthropogeography’ or sometimes, more simply, ‘human geography’.

Environmental determinists sought not only to describe culture as way of life, but also heavily emphasized a sense of civilization or progress – cultural difference was judged through the lens of environmental determinists as moral and intellectual superiority based on a scale of perceived development. Humans were not all considered equal. While humans may have ‘risen’ from ‘nature’, according to environmental determinists, some were less human than others depending upon where they were ‘located’ along a course of ascension ‘above’ nature. Ascendance above the nonhuman world was understood by environmental determinists as a process of becoming civilized, and becoming cultured. Humans were differentiated by being classified into ‘races’. These classifications were regularly disputed, and relied upon crude techniques, such as anthropometrics (body measurement), or drew upon the now discredited scientific ideas of the 1930s, including eugenics and social Darwinism. Certain ‘races’ were regarded to have achieved ‘higher’ levels of civilization – literally, acquiring cultured traits (like reason, rationality, technology, etc.) – as they evolved away from nature. McClintock demonstrates how in the nineteenth-century Europe, these ideas of racial superiority were naturalized through depictions of the human ‘family tree’ – which placed the white races securely on the top branches. Fanciful assumptions were made that the environment somehow determined cultural differences, including morality and intellect. In other words, climate, remoteness, topography, and available ecological resources were responsible for variations in ways of life, and enabled (or limited) peoples to become cultured.

Such theories are dubious not only because of the inherent racism and lack of cross-cultural understanding typical of that time. They are also logically inconsistent because environmental determinists mistook material cultural evidence – the extent of cultivation (literally, in the case of the sophistication of farming practices) and assembly of material objects and edifices (like industrial technologies, buildings, cities, etc.) – as proof of ascent (or otherwise) along hierarchical scales of civility and cultural advancement. Enormous presumptions were made about what evidence constituted culture as a way of life, which was itself poorly theorized. For instance, environmental determinists were too quick to view the absence of grand buildings in some indigenous cultures as evidence of lack of advancement. At the same time, the depth and complexity of indigenous cultural practices and traditions was rarely recognized, or could rarely be imagined outside the dominant Western hierarchical worldview of the time which posited such peoples as ‘lower’ or ‘less cultured’. Ideas of culture as a way of life, when partially and selectively deployed, operated to justify a bounding of certain human worlds as cultured, as separate from others; the remainder categorized as less civilized, primitive, or as belonging to the natural world. Such a conception of culture – a ‘thing’ possessed by certain humans to various extents, in opposition to nature (as ‘without culture’) – became perhaps the most pervasive and influential example of binary thinking in geography, sustaining imagined boundaries between the civilizations of Europe and the savagery of ‘new’ worlds. Further, in this (European) human-centered moral universe, rights were allocated to only those certain people who sat above animals, plants, and minerals. Indigenous rights to land and resources in settler societies were not recognized or were traded away in treaties – acts which set in train conflicts that remained the subject of political struggle for centuries. Geographical knowledges thus enabled European colonial dispossession to be seen as the ‘survival of fittest’ cultures and states over others, while missionary evangelism and the appointment of Aboriginal ‘protectors’ could be justified as the benevolent ushering of indigenous and ‘lower’ races along the civilizing spectrum – diffusing civilization and ‘culture’ through Christianization.

Although contemporary cultural geographers might, with understandable moral outrage, recoil at the idea that such ideas were a foundation for their subdiscipline, it is important to note that environmental determinists were, in effect, writing cultural geography prior to the name ‘cultural geography’ coming into widespread use with the Berkeley School. Environmental determinists conjectured on the qualities of culture, cultural differences, and geographical distributions. The logic of environmental determinist thinking in turn had its own historical context – it did not appear from a vacuum either. It had been influenced by Western philosophy as far back as Aristotle and Plato, and later Locke, Darwin, Montesquieu, and Lamarck. It is thus possible to argue that the production of cultural geographical knowledges has been a mainstay of Western intellectual efforts throughout many hundreds of years. In regular use, however, the term ‘cultural geography’ only became prominent after Carl Sauer and the Berkeley School rejected environmental determinism, introduced the concept of cultural landscape, and injected into geographical theory the capacity of humans to transform their surroundings through a particular way of life.

For essentially half a century, the superorganic, Sauerian understanding of cultural landscape dominated cultural geography, especially in North America, until the emergence of humanistic geography in the 1970s, and the so-called ‘cultural turn’ of the late 1980s, which transformed the subdiscipline and stretched what was meant by culture. Throughout the 1960s, geography had been engaged in an excursion into mathematical modeling and positivist exploration of spatial processes – the so-called quantitative revolution. In the 1970s, geographers reacted against this, drawing on Marxist theories of uneven development, class conflict, and the structural contradictions of the capitalist system, to enliven a new radical geographical perspective. Throughout these decades, cultural geography – still very much seen as in the Sauerian tradition as the study of cultural landscape, region, ecology, and diffusion – was a persistent, albeit sidelined presence. Cultural geography did contribute to the growing, interdisciplinary fields of cultural and political ecology, but by the 1970s it had become less popular and less visible, a specialty considered by many to be arcane or inconsequential.

Rowntree was describing the postmodern ‘cultural turn’ (as it would become known) that in the late 1980s and early 1990s networked its way through Anglophone geography, and to some extent further afield. The timing of the ‘cultural turn’ can be linked to a broader dissatisfaction across the social sciences and humanities – including geography – with existing conceptual tools and their ability to help understand the complexity and volatility of contemporary social change. The cultural turn was influenced by the writings of theorists outside geography, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams, and Clifford Geertz, and captured in a series of important books on meaning, power, and the symbolic landscape. According to Cook et al., the foundational narratives and initial energy for the turn in geography came mainly from geographers based in the United Kingdom. They credited the collection by Chris Philo – New Words, New Worlds – for putting the ‘new’ into ‘cultural geography’, although manifesto-like statements about the need for ‘new’ cultural geography had appeared earlier, in particular the papers organized for Cosgrove and Jackson’s session at the 1987 Institute of British Geographers (IBG) conference, on ‘new directions in cultural geography’. During the 1990s, momentum gathered for ‘new cultural geography’ under a series of conferences organized with the support of the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society and the IBG.

The curiosities of ‘new’ cultural geographers in the 1980s and 1990s can be interpreted as a series of broad intentions. First, although postmodernism was the catchcry, much of cultural geography after the cultural turn was politically post-Marxian, in the sense of either seeking to advance from, or reacting to, the Marxist political economy that dominated human geography from the 1970s. Humanist geographers writing in the late 1970s and early 1980s were keen not only to reflect more theoretically on the nature of the tensions between socioeconomic structure and human agency, acknowledging Marxist insights into the macro-scale processes and conditions that create social divisions and determine life chances, but also to recognize how human agency is enacted within the bounded and structured confines of particular places and times. Influential at the time were perspectives from phenomenology and structuration theory. Even though Marxism emphasized structures of capitalism, it did enable cultural geographers to move further from superorganicism by recognizing the manner in which esthetic and moral values were contested, and “configured in such a way that they reinforce [society’s] economic and political structures” (Shurmer-Smith, 2002: 29).

Post-Marxist cultural geographers were also heavily influenced by feminist thought and philosophy, and in particular by the realization that socioeconomic class was not the only axis of oppression. Whereas Marxist historical materialism provided a useful theoretical perspective for radical geographers in the 1970s who sought explanations for the way in which capitalism was responsible for socio-economic forms of oppression, those seeking explanations for racism, sexism, and homophobia required different kinds of theoretical tools and empirical approaches. By this time, racial conflict was widespread and the Civil Rights Movement had reversed segregation in the United States, the sexual revolution had confronted conservative norms about gender roles and had empowered women, and decades of international migration and the growth of tourism had produced more heterogeneous cities. The idea of culture as a stable, superorganic ‘way of life’ held collectively by populations needed to be improved upon. Culture became understood more relativistically as identities and behaviors, held by some in a cultural geographical group (and not by others), and deployed by individual people at different times and in differing ways depending on context. This theoretical shift was necessary for researchers interested in confronting oppression, to understand human cultural difference, challenge the idea of ‘race’, uncover the gendered nature of social institutions, and unsettle conservative ideas of ‘normal’ sexuality and family.

For example, the concept of ‘queer’ (understood both as an adjective and as a verb) became crucial to questioning and contesting normative assumptions about sexuality, gender, and space, encouraging researchers to replace assumptions considered ‘fixed’ and ‘natural’ with more fluid and unbounded perspectives. Bell et al. demonstrated how space is often taken for granted as heterosexual by discussing the hostility experienced by those who acted outside the codes and norms of heterosexuality, for example, same sex kissing in the street. More recently, the challenges posed by the gay-friendly marketing of nations, cities, and festivals has been discussed, in particular how such efforts operate to assimilate particular understandings of gayness into mainstream life. Other related debates have included the practicalities of doing and writing queer geographies, as well as potential political interventions that encapsulate the philosophical commitment to ideas of slippage, in-between-ness and liminality.

A second and related intention of the cultural turn was to uncover how ideas, knowledges, and social practices are produced, maintained, and circulated, especially in the realm of everyday life. Whereas Marxist geographers, with their intent to explain socioeconomic oppression, sought to understand the structure and politics of the world capitalist system, cultural geographers interested in sexism, racism, homophobia, and other axes of oppression needed to move beyond superorganic ideas of ‘systems’ and ‘structures’ and grasp with more subtlety the manner in which ideas and attitudes about people and places infused social life, and were responsible for the ways that repression and cruelty materialized. Influences from post-structuralist literary theory permeated geography: meanings for culture were no longer taken as fixed or stable; instead, depictions and representations of places and peoples became subject to analysis. Foucault’s idea of knowledge as power and the related concept of ‘discourse’ (understood as sets of statements that make people, plants, places and things understandable) were particularly influential. Representations and discourses could be captured as ‘data’ in formal documents, such as government policies and planning approvals, and in ‘everyday’ sources such as newspapers, films, television shows, and songs. Analysis of this could reveal the origins and contours of discursive formations – ideas, knowledges, beliefs, attitudes, depictions, and ‘common sense’ notions that permeate society and shape the contemporary world’s cultural geography. For instance, racism toward ‘Asians’ in Britain, or Muslims in the United States, could be revealed through understanding how both groups have been depicted (often in a demonizing fashion) in television and newspapers. Methodological advances included the literary technique of deconstruction, and the development of latent and manifest content analysis – a more numerical, coding-based approach to representational analysis using the language and pictorial material in everyday media as evidence.

Thus, overtly drawing on post-structuralist semiotics, geographers could ‘read’ from everyday discourses the signs and symbols that embody meaning. What these meanings were – and thus how researchers interpreted them – was argued to be open to political and ideological processes, as different groups sought to maintain or contest dominant meanings, or replace them with alternatives or pluralistic interpretations. Cultural representations in the everyday were outcomes of relations of power, from contestations between hegemonic interests (who install dominant meanings) and subordinate groups, who to various extents resist these dominant meanings and ideologies, and express their own interpretations.

Concurrent with this shift toward the representational and the everyday was the reclamation in analysis of ‘popular’ forms of culture. Inspired by the manner in which cultural studies emerged as a new interdisciplinary field seeking to challenge the stuffy orthodoxies of literary criticism, classics, and musicology, geographers embraced popular culture – once considered fanciful, escapist, or common – as a new area of research to be taken seriously. The meaning of culture ‘as art’ was exposed as elitist and deeply tied to imperial notions of European civilization as more ‘cultured’ than other societies. Instead, popular culture in all its forms, from hip hop to sit-coms, and magazines and comic books, became possible sources of representational material for cultural geographical analysis.

Despite the exciting possibilities offered by working outside conventional paradigms, advances in ‘new’ cultural geography were not without their critics. The offences supposedly committed can be condensed down to at least five. Cultural geographers were charged with neglecting the immediately political – of drifting away from a concern with oppression. At best, ‘new’ cultural geography was all hype and no action. Second, cultural geography was charged with ignoring questions concerning rigor, morality, and truth. Cultural geography lacked methodological rigor and had become an ‘anything goes’ subdiscipline. Third, cultural geography was charged with speaking an exclusionary language of post-structuralist ‘jargon’ filled with its own self-importance. Fourth, driven by theory, the cultural turn had transformed the word into the world. Scant empirical data became a veneer, allowing theory-as-fashion to run rampant. Conversely, a final critique suggested that the cultural turn had discarded the possibility of integrative or holistic theory, transforming the world relativistically into a series of case studies, with a soft theoretical veneer. At best, the cultural turn resulted in a number of highly reflexive case studies. Thrift alerted us that such charges are of benefit. Crucially, he pointed to the importance of the application of analysis of everyday geographies into government policies through initiatives in both teaching and training. Others argued that cultural geographers have continued to work politically (on forms of oppression beyond capitalist exploitation), that methodological experimentation was precisely what was required to push the barriers of knowledge beyond problematic assumptions and staid conventions. Futher, cultural geography’s contemporary terminology was appropriate, and no different to the technical language of the physical sciences – having its own theoretical origins, and specific intended purposes and meanings.

Yet, throughout the 1990s, and on into the 2000s, cultural geographers themselves would voice dissatisfaction with the dominance of the now mainstream representational strand of cultural geography. The argument was that cultural geography had become too reliant on textual analysis and cultural discourse, without requisite ethnographic work required to understand how these representations impacted on people, social policy, and the material landscape. Instead, it was recommended that geographers promote efforts to ‘rematerialize’ geography, through a ‘newest’ cultural geography, intended to supersede the ‘new’ cultural geography of the 1980s and 1990s.

One response was through the importation of yet another set of outside theoretical influences, this time from history and philosophy of science and the work of authors such as Bruno Latour: the so-called ‘actor-network theory’ with its focus not on representations or discourse, but on the relations forged in an ongoing manner between people, objects, plants, and animals. The core of this theoretical perspective was recognition that humans did not have a monopoly over culture, nor over agency; instead, nonhuman objects, animals, and plants were theorized as agents with equal capacity to exist and enact agency in networked sets of relationships with humans and other beings. These sets of relationships – often described as ‘assemblages’, ‘actor-networks’, or ‘hybrid geographies’ – move cultural geography away from a purely discursive focus, and advance an understanding of the world in which dualistic ideas about humanity and nature as separate spheres are no longer assumed.

While actor-network theory provided an excellent tool for challenging nature–human dualisms, concerns were raised about how understandings of place rested within this conceptual framework. Cloke and Jones extended the concept of networks by turning to the concept of dwelling. It offered deeper insights into how (non)human actors are relationally co-constituted in landscapes and places, as well as networks. Examples would be ‘the city’, ‘the orchard’, or ‘backyard’, conceptualized not as bounded geographical entities, but as a set of continually revised relationships between people, the material objects (such as cars, roads, and ports, in the case of the city), and ecological systems containing plants, birds, insects, etc. Thrift also pointed out the failure of actor-network theory to conceptualize place, using the term ‘ecology’ to signal that thinking about relational places involves understanding interactions between a wide spectrum of entities, some human, some physical, some biological, and some human made. Further, Thrift argued that actor-network theory gave conceptual priority to the technical over the human body – that is, its perceptual mechanisms, memory, and various bodily skills. Hence, Thrift extends relational thinking about the spatial by directing attention to Judith Butler’s concept of performativity. In this view, identities are unstable, and not innate; instead, they are performed repetitively by subjects interacting (whether consciously, or in an embodied, unconscious level) with historically embedded discourses, norms, and ideals. Gender is not a given biological fact; rather it is performed by subjects in relation to social norms and ideals. This has enabled the rethinking of the relationships between scale, subjectivity, the body, and mobility. For example, Knopp rethinks the role of mobility in the lives of nonheterosexual people. Rather than explain the mobility of people with same-sex desires purely through attributes of the urban or the rural (as destinations and/or places of origin), the embodied motivations of individual people are also seen as crucial. On the one hand, particular sexual desires may be played through differences nonheterosexual people imagine between the city and the country. On the other hand, identities are created and performed through the experiences and acts of physically moving through space. A focus on embodied (dis)placement is a constant reminder that personal-identity formation is spatially co-constituted, progressive, and fluid, and never complete or fixed.

Human geography in the Dutch academia distinguishes itself from human geography in other continental European countries. It has developed a strong applied focus and an orientation which forms a bridge between continental European approaches in human Geography and the Anglo-Saxon human geography. The motor of this development has been the rivalry between the Amsterdam School of Sociography and the more French oriented Utrecht School of human geography. In recent times Dutch academic geography has found her way back from the more applied modes of thought to more theoretically informed debates, to which she contributes substantially.

Human geography has long had a reputation as a magpie discipline – scavenging the shiny ideas of other subjects, and making new uses of them. For many people working in human geography, this is a real strength; the openness or porosity of the subject means it is always transforming, morphing, moving in new directions. For critics, conversely, this signifies everything that is bad about human geography: it is a rag-bag – a messy mix of bits and pieces – so it lacks coherence and is too faddish. The debate between fans and critics of this peculiar characteristic of human geography can become very heated, especially when it seems that new ideas might be transforming human geography so as to make it almost unrecognizable. One such debate occurred around the concept of culture, and the traffic in ideas between human geography and cultural studies. This interchange is sometimes referred to as the ‘cultural turn’ in human geography and the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and social sciences (which includes cultural studies). This, then, is a story of interactions between bodies of knowledge, ways of thinking and doing, and academic subject areas. As will become clear, these ‘turns’ to culture in space and to space in culture have been incredibly productive, and recognized as such, while also generating heated debate. This, too, seems to be something positive about human geography: the scrutinizing of the changes in the discipline, the debate, and dissent. It is certainly a sign of life.

Human geography and environmental studies identify and analyze environmental changes and human–environment relations in distinct yet interrelated ways. The phrase ‘human–environment geography’ describes a subfield of human geography that is useful in capturing geographical work that is most directly comparable to research and teaching in environmental studies. Human–environment geography and environmental studies evolved along different intellectual trajectories, which partially explain many of the peculiarities of the two fields. The two fields converge in their embrace of pluralism, and their mutual concern with material transformations of the environment, human drivers of such transformations, and human conceptions of nature. Conversely, the fields diverge along several lines, including disciplinary training, relative attention to social theory, and degree of engagement with public policy. Consideration of the convergences and divergences across the fields of human geography and environmental studies draw out the ways in which practitioners and scholars in each field might draw lessons regarding the innovations and shortcomings of their counterparts.

Human geography has always, implicitly or explicitly, drawn upon philosophy. Both disciplines can be traced to Ancient Greece, and the Western philosophical tradition provides a number of examples of thinkers who explicitly engaged with topics of geographical concern. In the last couple of centuries, geography has more explicitly thought through its relation to philosophy, particularly in the engagement with positivist thought and critiques of this position. Humanist geography and radical geography worked on fundamental assumptions within geography, thus working philosophically. More recently, there has been a re-engagement with theory within large parts of human geography, much of which draws upon a range of works in contemporary European philosophy.

Computational human geography refers to the use of computational methods and techniques to solve problems in human geography research and applications. Geographic information systems (GIS) and science are a big part of computational human geography but the notion is considerably broader, encompassing spatial process modeling and simulation, the modeling of spatial decision and behavior, visualization techniques, most aspects of spatial analysis, and an increasing number of other areas. Computation in human geography goes back to the beginnings of the quantitative revolution and is philosophically related though methodologically distinct from it. Two major thrusts have persisted through the years: the use of numerical techniques to solve large, complex quantitative problems; and the development of models of complex spatial processes expressed directly in computational terms. Typical exponents of the latter kinds of applications are cellular automata models of urban and environmental processes, and agent-based models of spatial decision and behavior. More recent developments involve applications of mobile and portable computing. Critiques of computational human geography originate from both within the field and from the humanistic and social theory perspectives. The former address a number of epistemological and methodological problems while the latter tend to focus on issues of ontology and representation.

Human geography appeared in the 1880s and 1890s. Ratzel coined the term ‘anthropogeographie’ in 1882. French geographers began to speak of la géographie humaine from 1895.

Human distributions were studied by geographers since a long time. Thanks to the progress of ethnography and folklore studies, the knowledge of the diversity of tools, know-hows, techniques, and human settlements had much progressed from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Ritter’s position analysis did not stress only the role of atmospheric and oceanic currents in the shaping of the diversity of the Earth, it focused also on the significance of ‘circulation’ and the role of steamships in contracting the Earth’s surface.

What motivated the birth of human geography as a semiautonomous field of enquiry within geography was, however, Darwin’s interpretation of evolution. Human geography was born as a kind of ecology of human groups in their relations to environments. The main aim of the new discipline was to answer a fundamental question: up to what point were human beings and human activities a reflection of environmental conditions? Human geography was born from a deterministic interpretation of man/milieu relationships.

It soon appeared that the influence of milieus on human groups could not be described as a one-way process. Ratzel, who had created human geography in an environmentalist perspective, held in fact an ambiguous position. In many cases, he stressed the strong control the physical constraints exercised on peoples, especially nature peoples. He had learned from Ritter, however, the role of exchange in escaping local conditions: cultured peoples freed themselves from the tyranny of nature, thanks to their sense of space, their Raumsinn, and the institution which allowed for mastering distance: the state.

The evolution in France was different, but the result was similar: the environmentalist perspective which had given human geography its raison d’être was transformed. In order to analyze the relations, human beings developed with their environment. Vidal de la Blache had introduced in the 1880s the idea of genre de vie, that is, the way people exploited the local resources. It was a tool not only for exploring ecological constraints but also for appreciating their limits: ways of life traveled with the groups who had developed them, and applied to environments for which they had not been devised; technical innovation allowed the introduction of new technologies and new links with the local environment. Last but not least, and as for Ratzel, trade allowed local people to find elsewhere what they were unable to produce locally. Because of the Lamarckian interpretation of evolutionism, which was very popular in the French geography in the 1890s, the idea of adaptation to local conditions seemed more significant than that of natural selection.

In Germany as well as in France, human geography lost almost immediately the scientific ambition out of which it was born: when doing field work, scholars discovered the wide variety of solutions different groups gave to similar environmental conditions. The interest of geography stemmed from the detailed views it offered on man/milieu relationships, their variety, their stability for long periods, their crises, etc. Because of the introduction of such a possibilist perspective, human geography had ceased to be a nomothetic discipline. It was transformed into an idiographic one.

In such a context, the study of human geography could be built on three paradigms since the environmentalist one has ceased to be exclusive: (1) it could be conceived in Kantian terms as a science of the regional differentiation of the Earth’s surface; (2) it could be presented in an evolutionist perspective as the analysis of man/milieu relationships; and (3) since many geographers disagreed with the breakdown of geography into human and physical parts, a new interest developed in landscapes.

These three conceptions could be combined. In Germany, emphasis was mainly put on the regional approach, according to Hettner’s views, and landscape studies along the lines developed by Schlüter. The Ratzelian legacy was lighter, except in political geography. In France, geography mainly combined the regional approach with the man/milieu perspective: the starting point of research was not the landscape, but density maps, since they showed in a simplified way how the environment was used by human groups.

There was another possibility to combine the three main approaches in human geography, but it did not develop in the 1890s or early 1900s. Its success came later and elsewhere, in North America. For Carl Sauer, the aim of human geography was mainly to focus on man/milieu relationships and to analyze them through landscape expertise. It meant that geographers were as much interested in the transformation of the ‘natural’ components of landscapes by men as in the influence of environment on human behavior.

The strength of the German and French schools of geography came from the fact that they expressed two ways of combining the paradigms of human geography when environmental determinism ceased to appear as the only entry to the discipline. The Berkeley school had a status similar to the German and the French ones, even if it was not a national school.

Human geography has since the 1970s been heavily influenced by phenomenological philosophy and became interested in studying the meanings places have for people within it. The sense of place of a location is the collection of experiences and associations the location provokes in its users. As phenomenology comprehends well, in order to experience a place fully, a range of bodily senses come into play, among them hearing. In fact, given their biological importance for orientation and balance, the ears might be as important to sense of place as the eyes are. The current question for human geography is how rapidly changing soundscapes (e.g., as a result of cellular phones and the iPod) alter modern people’s senses of place.

A sharp increase of research into sonic sense of place and auditory culture has occurred in art criticism and popular music studies, which experienced a turn toward space and the body over the 1990s. In ethnomusicology, there has longer been a trickle of studies of sound cultures outside the West. Unfortunately, research on contemporary urban soundscapes tends to be concentrated in urban Europe and the United States. Judging from its long tradition of engaging with both phenomenology and cross-cultural fieldwork, human geography seems bound to follow suit, and widen understandings of the diverse effects of sound on place and identity.