What is human geography and why transportation does not belong to its scope?

After long-term development, human geography has formed a relatively complete disciplinary system. Generally, it can be divided into a comprehensive theoretical part, a general part (departmental human geography) and a monograph part (regional human geography).

The comprehensive theory part of human geography mainly refers to the study of the theory of man-land relationship. The general part of human geography can be divided into three aspects: economics, politics, and social culture. Some scholars also divide it into two aspects: social culture and economics. The monograph part of human geography includes regional geographical research on human elements in various regions.

Economic geography is the main task of explaining the geographical distribution and spatial organization of human economic activities such as the production, circulation and consumption distribution of human production and means of living. After the great geographical discovery in modern times, human commercial activities flourished unprecedentedly, thus giving rise to the predecessor of economic geography—commercial geography.

Traditional economic geography is concerned with the relationship between the distribution of various resources, production and commerce and the natural environment, with production layout and location analysis as the core of research. Among them, location theory and central place theory have played an important role in the development of geography and other disciplines.

Modern economic geography research began to pay attention to the impact of social structure, government decision-making, and people's behavioral decisions on economic layout. Land economics emerged, focusing on land consolidation issues. Some scholars believe that tourism involved in tourism geography research belongs to the category of economic activities, so tourism geography is also an integral part of economic geography.

Political geography is a regional system that analyzes political phenomena by studying the relationship between citizens and territory, and analyzes the impact that various national groups have on the world and regions based on political, military, economic and religious backgrounds. effect.

Ratzel's "Political Geography", published in 1897, regarded countries as organic matter attached to the earth and proposed the concept of "living space". Later, Mackinder proposed the Lu Xin theory in 1904. Thanks to their efforts and those of other scholars, political geography became an important branch of human geography.

In the 1930s, Haushofer led geopolitics astray in serving the aggressive policy of the German Nazis, which affected the development of political geography after World War II. The application of modern analytical techniques and models allows geographers to formulate the efficiency and effectiveness of various political regions at all levels and begin to study the geographical context of political behavior and government decision-making. For example, he participated in research on the decision-making of land reorganization, the positioning of the capital, the structure of metropolitan areas, the establishment of national parks, the geographical distribution model of votes, and the boundaries of territorial waters and coastal fishing rights.

For a long time, geographical works have noted the distribution of races and ethnic groups, as well as the impact of the natural environment on humans. Ratzel's representative work on human geography is named after "Human Geography". The human geography works of Vidal Blancz and Brunet also contain racial and ethnic geography. However, although ethnogeography and ethnogeography are still marginal disciplines between ethnography, ethnology and geography, most of the researchers are ethnographers and ethnographers.

The population size, distribution and migration in various places are important geographical phenomena, and human geographers pay great attention to them. The first chapter of Vidal Blancz's "Principles of Human Geography" discusses the distribution and density of human beings on the earth and the population status of each continent. After World War I, Bauman analyzed the geographical differentiation of the population in Central Europe, and the Swedish geographer de Jerle conducted an in-depth study of the Swedish population distribution and produced a population distribution map. Since then, population geography has become a branch of human geography.

Social geography analyzes social phenomena in space, studies the regional distribution of various social types and analyzes and compares their interrelationships. When exploring the relationship between man and land, we emphasize the impact of social factors on regional cultural landscape and lifestyle. Research content includes geographical issues such as population, settlement, ethnicity, religion, language behavior and induction, and is committed to solving social problems.

Cultural geography explains how various cultural elements make different regions have various regional characteristics from the perspective of the spatial combination of human culture. The research objects and content have many similarities with social geography. However, the main purpose of the former is to study the regional characteristics of different human social groups and their relationship with the environment, while the latter is to study the cultural regions created by human beings. Some scholars refer to the contents of social geography and cultural geography as sociocultural geography.

Although the distribution, diffusion and change of humanistic phenomena are restricted by the natural environment, social, economic, cultural and political factors, especially social production methods and socio-economic systems, also play a very important role. Therefore, human geography can be said to be a humanities or social science within geography.

Human geography is combined with economics, demography, political science, environmental science, ecology, regional science, and behavioral science to solve global resource shortages, population crises, natural disasters, and environmental pollution. It contributes to ecological balance and urban issues, and especially plays an important role in national and regional economic development planning.

At present, human geography is still a discipline loosely combined with many sub-disciplines, and it still needs further development.

In addition, the theoretical discussion on the relationship between man and land, the application of quantitative statistical methods, models and systems, the introduction of behavioral science, and the study of practical social problems are also still in their initial stages.

Although there are still some problems and weak links in human geography, in the development of modern society, the role of human beings (especially human quality) and the role of science and technology have become increasingly significant, making the humanistic aspects of geography The trend strengthens. The improvement of the status of human geography will bring the development of geography into a new stage. There are many ways to classify customs in Chinese regions.