How do geographers study places?

"Place" is a word that we use a lot in everyday conversation. One might say, "LoDo in Denver is a cool place to hang out," or "Boulder is a great place to raise a family," and so on. Yet, what do we mean, exactly, by these phrases?

In geographical terminology, place refers to the physical and human characteristics of an area, be it a neighborhood, district, small town, or city. According to geography Professor A. David Hill:

Three things can give identity to a place:

(1) the physical environment, which is the product of natural processes;
(2) the built or artificial environment, which is produced by human action; and
(3) the meanings invested in the place, which are the human intellectual and emotional responses to the place. The first two things are tangible, material, and "objective," and the third is intangible, nonmaterial, and "subjective."

Earth's surface is by no means uniform in either physical or human characteristics. Physical differences derive from the natural processes that produce landforms, bodies of water, climate, soils, natural vegetation, and animal life. Physical geography addresses those processes. Human geography focuses on the ideas and human actions that shape the character of places. Places vary in their population, as well as in their settlement patterns, architecture, economic and recreational activities, communication networks, ideologies, languages, and economic, social, and political organizations.

An important principle of human geography is that over the long run, societies survive and develop because of successful, or adaptive, decisions. By that we mean that people learn in place about how to live in place. People are forever manipulating their environments, changing them for many reasons. Places thus become the expressions of the individuals and groups that control them. People having manifested themselves in places, the places thus become extensions of the selves; people create "ownership" of place. This bond, or sense of place, is a principal element of human awareness. It is the intangible but fully authentic meaning that we invest in an environment, and it is a principal criterion for distinguishing places.

Hence, geographers study why places have the characteristics that they do, how and why places differ from one another, and what places mean to the people that live there. In this lesson, you can learn to think like a geographer in order to explain what makes University Hill the "place" it is. Before we continue, let's think more about the concept of place.

Please view Figure 1a.-d. and answer the following question. Note: All questions in the lesson appear in a blue background. Please submit answers to these questions in your final report.

(1) What kinds of places do you think these are? In your answer, briefly describe what geographic characteristics you associate with the four images.

Figure 1a.

Figure 1b.

Figure 1c.

Figure 1d.

As you can see, each of the four places pictured above conveys certain geographic qualities in terms of culture, population, environment, etc. In this lesson, you can learn what makes the University Hill district of Boulder, CO a unique place. Please continue to page 2 of the Preview exercise.

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