Knowledge platform _ geography

Demographic Transition
With progress from a rural subsistence to an urban, developed society, populations undergo a demographic transition.
There are four stages to the demographic transition:
(a) ‘primitive’ (high birth rate, high death rate, little growth);
(b) ‘early expanding’ (high birth rate, lowering death rate);
(c) ‘late expanding’ (lowering birth rate, low death rate);
(d) ‘advanced’ (low birth and death rates; little growth)
The demographic transition accompanied the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the growing population could find work. Deaths decreases slowly, the growth rate never exceeded 2 per cent, and the populations were initially low.
The demographic transition has begun very suddenly in the developing world. Improved nutrition and medical care have caused death rates to drop rapidly. Populations are growing by up to 4 per cent. There will be little work for the larger population in an age of mechanization.
Each stage of the transition has a characteristic population pyramid.
At present agricultural revolutions have kept food supplies in step with population on a world level, although regional shortage and famines still occur.

Population growth
Malthus suggested that populations grow geometrically but that food supply grows arithmetically. Sooner or later there will be a world food crisis.
Populations growth rate is controlled by the rate of births and deaths. At present the world population has a net birth of over 2 percent and will double to 8 billion in 35 years if this rate is maintained.

Age-Sex Pyramids
Populations can be described by age-sex pyramids. Usually pyramids are:
(a) progressive, when population are expanding;
(b) stationary;
(c) regressive, when populations are declining.
Type (a) is common in the developing world, types (b) and (c) in the developed world.

Population Resources Regions
The world can be classed into four population-resources-technology regions:
(a) high-technology: either low-population-resources ratio (USA type) or high-population-resources ratio (British type).
(b) low-technology: either low population-resources ratio (Brazil type) or high-population-resources ratio (Egypt type). The Egypt type offers the lowest prospects for improved living standards.

Distribution of the World’s People
The distribution of the world’s people is influenced:
(a) by physical factors;
(b) by economic factors;
(c) by cultural factors;
(d) by political factors;
(e) by disasters;
Regions of high and low population can also be correlated with the periods for which they have been occupied. Asia and Africa are the source regions for origin of man.

Demographic Transition model:
A model of population growth
Has 5 steps.
Stage 1 is low growth, Stage 2 is High Growth, Stage 3 is Moderate Growth, and Stage 4 is Low Growth and Stage 5 although not officially a stage is a possible stage that includes zero or negative population group.
This is important because this is the way our country and others countries around the world are transformed
from a less developed country to a more developed country.

Formal Region- (uniform) or homogenous region is an area within which everyone shares in common one or mare distinctive characteristics. The shared feature could be a cultural value such as a common language, or an environmental climate.
Functional Region- (nodal region) Area organized around a node or focal point. The characteristic chosen to define a
functional region dominates at a central focus or node and diminishes in importance outward. This region is tied to the central point by transportation or communication systems or by economic or functional associations.

Diffusion
The process of spread of a feature or trend from one place to another over time.
Types of Diffusion
Relocation diffusion: The spread of an idea through physical movement of people from one place to another.
Expansion diffusion: The spread of a feature from one place to another in a sn*******ng process. This can happen in 3 ways:
# Hierarchical diffusion: The spread of an idea from persons or nodes of authority or power to other persons or places (Ex: hip-hop/rap music)
# Contagious diffusion: The rapid, widespread diffusion of a characteristic throughout the population. (Ex: ideas placed on the internet)
# Stimulus diffusion: the spread of an underlying principle, even though a characteristic itself apparently fails to diffuse. (Ex: PC & Apple competition)

Top down Development and Development from Below
Lipton or Rondinelli’s Approach; top-down oriented strategies, as such their goals of equity are difficult to achieve.
Top-down development is where decisions about development are made by governments or by private companies. The decisions are enforced on people. The locals have very little say. The argument goes that people gain from ‘trickle down’ effects – e.g. jobs.
Stöhr and Taylor’s (1981) Approach; Development from Below; that, instead of being primarily oriented to economic growth, would aim the satisfaction of the basic needs of the inhabitants of each area concerned.
Bottom-up development is where decisions about development are made by the local people. They get support from outside organisations, but decisions are not enforced on them.
The area’s natural, human and institutional resources must be mobilised, motivated and controlled from the bottom,
The first policy objective is oriented to alleviate poverty (Stöhr and Taylor, 1981)
“A very different type of definition of development”- (Unwin, 1989). it shares with Lipton’s theory based on the perception of an inequitable flow of resources from rural to urban areas.
Critique to top-down approach of development; Top down oriented strategies of development is funded and carried out by the government or world bank etc. Often in the form of loans which developing communities can't pay back. Usually they don't respond to the needs of the community and these schemes are unsustainable (i.e. building a school without teachers, when what the community really needs is fresh water). it's the bad type of development.
It is usually rural-cantered, small-scale, based on the use of appropriate
technology [...] determined from within and [...] therefore unique to each
society;
It is egalitarian and self-reliant and it is communalist (Unwin, 1989).
Bottom up is basically the opposite. It's carried out and funded by NGOs (non-government organisations). They work with the community forming apprenticeships. The community are taught to help themselves and build amenities/services which they can repair and manage themselves. Its sustainable in the long run, and appropriate because it responds to the real needs of the community. (for example Water Aid providing wells via this method in Nigeria)
Comparison of Top Down Development and Bottom Up Development;
Top down development is where you put money into the top of society e.g. invest in a university or persuade a big company to set up shop in a less developed area. The idea is that the company / development will employ people from the local area, and this way money will 'trickel down' ('trickel down economics' is good terminology, and is 'pump priming') into the local economy as the local employees also gain in personal wealth and spend their money on local goods and services. This is also known as the Barcelona model for redevelopment - when Spain held the 1992 olympics the redevelopent of the poorer Barcelona was one of its main purposes. The local gov. has also built a university and other stuff there - you may want to research it further because I can't remember most of it.
Bottom up development is the reverse, you put money intio the poor community and help them to help themselves, perhaps building schools or giving them farms or something.

The Club of Rome is a global think tank that deals with a variety of international political issues.
Founded in 1968 in Rome, Italy, the Club of Rome CoR* describes itself as "a group of world citizens, sharing a common concern for the future of humanity."
The club states that its mission is "to act as a global catalyst for change through the identification and analysis of the crucial problems facing humanity and the communication of such problems to the most important public and private decision makers as well as to the general public.“
*Since 1 July 2008, the organization has its headquarters in Winterthur, Switzerland.
The Club of Rome raised considerable public attention with its report Limits to Growth, the best-selling environmental book in world history.
The Club of Rome predicted that economic growth could not continue indefinitely because of the limited availability of natural resources, particularly oil.
*The 1973 oil crisis increased public concern about this problem.
The Limits to Growth is about the model of exponential economic and population growth with finite resource supplies.
Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and commissioned by the Club of Rome it presented the consequence of interactions between the Earth's and human systems.
Five variables were examined in the original model. These variables are: world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion.
*The purpose of The Limits to Growth was not to make specific predictions, but to explore how exponential growth interacts with finite resources. Because the size of resources is not known, only the general behavior can be explored.
The book continues to generate fervent debate and has been the subject of several subsequent publications.
The most recent updated version was published on June 1, 2004 under the name Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update.
The Mankind at the Turning Point was accepted as the official Second Report to the Club of Rome in 1974. The Second Report revised the predictions of the original Limits to Growth and gave a more optimistic prognosis for the future of the environment, noting that many of the factors were within human control and therefore that environmental and economic catastrophe were preventable or avoidable, hence the title was given as the Mankind at the Turning Point.
In 1991, the Club published The First Global Revolution. It analyses the problems of humanity.
"In searching for a common enemy of humanity are pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, against whom we can unite. These phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.
Sustainable Development
Sustainable development is economic development in such a way that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. (Brundtland Commission) The book 'Limits to Growth', commissioned by the Club of Rome, gave huge momentum to the thinking about sustainability.
There exist more definitions of sustainable development, but they have in common that they all have to do with the carrying capacity of the earth and its natural systems and the challenges faced by humanity.
Sustainable development can be broken up into environmental sustainability, economic sustainability and sociopolitical sustainability.
# Global warming issues are also problems which are emphasized by the sustainable development movement. This led to the 1997 Kyoto Accord, with the plan to cap greenhouse-gas emissions.
Opponents of the implications of sustainable development often point to the environmental Kuznets curve. The idea behind this curve is that, as an economy grows, it shifts towards more capital and knowledge-intensive production. This means that as an economy grows, its pollution output increases, but only until it reaches a particular threshold where production becomes less resource-intensive and more sustainable. This means that a pro-growth, not an anti-growth policy is needed to solve the environmental problem.
But the evidence for the environmental Kuznets curve is quite weak. Also, empirically spoken, people tend to consume more products when their income increases. Maybe those products have been produced in a more environmentally friendly way, but on the whole the higher consumption negates this effect.
There are people like Julian Simon however who argue that future technological developments will resolve future problems.

Hirschman
Albert Otto Hirschman (April 7, 1915 – December 10, 2012) was an influential economist and the author of several books on political economy and political ideology.
His first major contribution was in the area of development economics. Here he emphasized the need for unbalanced growth.
Because developing countries are short of decision making skills, disequilibria to stimulate these and help mobilize resources should be encouraged. Key to this was encouraging industries with a large number of linkages to other firms.
A Rockefeller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley (1941–1943),
Hirschman helped develop the Hiding hand principle in his 1967 essay 'The principle of the hiding hand'.
In 2003, he won the Benjamin E. Lippincott Award from the American Political Science Association to recognize a work of exceptional quality by a living political theorist for his book The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph.
In 2007, the Social Science Research Council established an annual prize in honor of Hirschman.
He died at the age of 97 on December 10, 2012.
Hirschman was a deep thinker whose work has been influential in many fields. Hirschman’s early work on the unbalanced nature of economic development was pathbreaking.
His work in development, on backwards and forwards linkages, is now being rediscovered and formalized.
Hirschman’s best known books were Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) and The Passions and the Interests (1977).
The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph was basically a work of political philosophy.
Hirschman was not just a theorist but a practical economist who spent a great deal of time working in the field, particularly in Latin America, advising countries like Colombia and Brazil on economic policy on behalf of various international institutions.
Hirschman’s greatest insights came from his practical experience and were contained in his lesser-known books, centering around what he called “reform mongering.”
Albert Hirschman was a progressive. He believed in the importance of economic development, social change, just distribution of resources, and the welfare state. But he also had a realistic understanding of how difficult social change was to accomplish, and spent a great deal of time dissecting the modalities of bringing it about.
Hirschman formalized these arguments in one of his last books, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991).
Hirschman did not approve of revolutionary change. His preferred course of reform mongering was one of slow but steady gradualism under democratic governments.
He advocated this approach to Latin Americans in the 1960s when many were dreaming of further Cuban-style revolutions.
His message to revolutionaries was that democratic change and reformism were slow and often disappointing, but that they worked much better in the end. This is a lesson many still need to take to heart.
Prof. Hirschman, the leading exponent of the theory of unbalanced growth argues that a deliberate unbalancing of the economy in accordance with predesigned strategy is the best way to achieve economic growth.
"An ideal situation obtains when one disequilibrium calls forth a development move which in turn leads to a similar disequilibrium and soon ad-infinitum".
He observes that development has proceeded in this way with "growth being communicated from the leading sectors of the economy to the followers, from one industry to another, from one firm to another."
Development process is a chain of disequilibrium that must be kept alive and the task of development policy is to maintain tension, disproportions and disequilibria.
Hirschman's theory of unbalanced growth is based on the following propositions:
(a) That technical complementarity is found among the various industries but in the case of some of them the degree of complementarity is more than the other. Therefore, the programme for economic development should aim at the establishment of those industries where these complementarities happen to be the greatest.
(b) That a simultaneous investment in a number of complementary industries according to the programme of balanced growth may achieve a once for all increase in national income. But after this, the economy will become stabilised at a higher level without any movement forward.
The objective of development is not only to achieve a once for all increase in national income, rather this process of income propogation must continue year after year.
In order to see that the development process moves on continuously, it is necessary to create and maintain deliberate imbalances in the economy.
To create these imbalances Hirschman suggests investment either in Social Overhead Capital (SOC) or in Directly Productive Activities (DPA).
Social Overhead Capital is defined as "comprising all those basic services without which primary, secondary and tertiary productive activities cannot function".
This includes investment in education, public health, transport and communications, irrigation, drainage etc.
Large investment in SOC will encourage investment in DPA by providing cheap inputs to agriculture and industry e.g., cheap electricity and power supply may encourage the development of industries both large and small and may stimulate activity in other sectors as well.
To quote Hirschman "Investment in SOC is advocated not because of its direct effect on final output, but because it permits and infact invites DPA to come in some SOC investment as a prerequisite of DPA investment."
Imbalances in the economy can also be created by investment in directly productive activities such as investment in manufacturing industries and constructional activities.
Expansion in investment in DPA without the corresponding expansion in SOC will lead to increase in cost of production in view of inadequate availability of overhead facilities.
In such a situation, pressures are likely to be exerted and the government may step in and undertake investment in SOC for creating the necessary infrastructure which would lead to an all-round development of the economy.
The sequence of development from SOC to DPA is known as development via excess capacity.
The second sequence viz from DPA to SOC is called development via shortages.
Development via excess capacity of SOC is more continuous and smooth than development via shortages of SOC.
According to Hirschman, "development via shortages is an instance of disorderly compulsive sequence while that with excess SOC capacity is essentially permissive."
Every investment project has both forward linkages (it may encourage investment in subsequent stage of production) and backward linkages (it may encourage investment in earlier stages of production) and the task of development policy is to find out projects with the maximum total linkage.
Hirschman has worked out the forward and the backward linkage in case of number of industries and on the basis of that, the maximum linkage exists in the case of intermediate manufacturing industries.
Therefore, if investment is made in such industries, it is bound to affect the demand and supply positions in other sectors of the economy and thus leading to their expansion as well.

Circular cumulative causation is a theory developed by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal.
It is a multi-causal approach where the core variables and their linkages are delineated.
The unfolding of events connected with a change in the economy.
These changes apply to a whole set of variables as a consequence of the multiplier effect.
Thus, the location of a new factory may be the basis of more investment, more jobs both in that factory and in ancillary and service industries in the area, and have a better infrastructure which would, in turn, attract more industry.
The momentum of change is self-perpetuating, and investment should continue to be attracted to the area. (agglomeration).
The idea behind it is that a change in one form of an institution will lead to successive changes in other institutions. These changes are circular in that they continue in a cycle.
A further part of Myrdal's ideas is that this process of improvement is made at a cost to some other part of the economy; that regions prosper as others feel the loss of investment, and the out-migration of the fittest of their population.
Three stages of regional economies occur:
The pre-industrial phase with few regional inequalities;
a time when cumulative causation is working, where regional inequalities are greatest because of the backwash effect;
and a third stage where the spread effect stimulates growth in the periphery.
Cumulative causation, like the multiplier, also works ‘backwards’—as a major factory closes, the effects are felt throughout the local economy.
The change doesn’t occur all at once but in small changes because that would lead to chaos.

Karl Gunnar Myrdal
(Born December 6, 1898—died May 17, 1987),
Swedish economist and sociologist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974,
He was regarded as a major theorist of international relations and developmental economics.
Myrdal became an associate professor at the Institute of International Studies in Geneva (1930–31). He also was professor of political economy (1933–50) and of international economy (1960–67) at Stockholm University; in 1967 he became professor emeritus. From 1947 to 1957 Myrdal was executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe.
Myrdal explored the social and economic problems of African Americans in 1938–40 and wrote An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). In this work Myrdal presented his theory of cumulative causation—that is, of poverty creating poverty.
Myrdal also pointed out that two economic policies implemented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration inadvertently destroyed jobs for hundreds of thousands of African Americans.
The first such policy involved restrictions on cotton production, instituted to raise the incomes of farm owners. Myrdal wrote: “It seems, therefore, that the agricultural policies, and particularly the Agricultural Adjustment program (A.A.A.), which was instituted in May, 1933, was the factor directly responsible for the drastic curtailment in number of Negro and white sharecroppers and Negro cash and share tenants.”
The second policy was the minimum wage, which, Myrdal pointed out, made employers less willing to hire relatively unskilled people, many of whom were African American.
In his writings on developmental economics, Myrdal warned that economic development of rich and poor countries might never converge. Instead, the two might possibly diverge, with poor countries locked into producing less-profitable primary goods while rich countries reaped the profits associated with economies of scale. This pessimistic view, however, has not been borne out by events.
In other books Myrdal combined his economic research with sociological studies. These include The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory (1930) and Beyond the Welfare State: Economic Planning and Its International Implications (1960).
The book Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations (1968) represents a 10-year study of poverty in Asia. Whereas Mydral was a Malthusian who thought that population growth in Asia would stunt economic growth, conditions in the early 21st century show that many Asian countries have experienced both population growth and high economic growth.

Models in Geography
In geography, often, models are used to explain something that is seen in the physical environment. During the 20th century a number of models were developed to try to explain spatial arrangements of human activities and distribution of natural phenomenon; how things are arranged, spread or distributed. Although models show a very general idea of the spatial arrangements and patterns, all of these describe the spatial relation; arrangements and patterns.

Morteone
Carried forward the heritage of geography founded by Vidal;
contribute in the field of physical geography,
Methodology;
Sought to combine the physical and human aspects of geography;
Approach;
Regional and Systematic approach; Attempted to blend it together;
Contribution;
Monumental work on physical geography; Famous for his work, Traite de Geographie physique, showed an inevitable orientation towards the Davisian Idea;
Concept; To Him, physical geography was an essential part of the whole geographical study of an area.

Demangeon
One of the forerunners of Vidalian Tradition, strong supporter of possibilism,
Methodology;
Inductive method; based on observation and analysis; minor shift from contemporary methodological approach, study on the basis of physical and regional units;
Approach;
Regional synthesis; Every region has its unique character, the aim of geography is to synthesize the interlocking of phenomena;
Contribution;
Produced a manual of human geography;
Pioneered the study of rural settlement;
Concept; Emphasis over modification of nature; Concept of geographical milieu and transformed milieu;

Brunhes
Geographer of Vidalian Tradition, strong supporter of possibilism,
Methodology;
Regional Synthesis, study of micro regions to understand the interrelationship of physical and cultural components,
Approach;
Systematic approach to the study of geography
Basic Principle;
The principle of evolution and activity and Territorial Unity or Interconnection,
Contribution;
Famous for his work, La Geographie Humaine, carefully identified its nature and scope of human geography;
Concept; the State of Perpetual Change;
Study of temporal changes;

Blache
French geographer, Founder of Possibilism in Geography,
Believed that the Nature may be superior but human efforts are no less important;
Boosted both Physical and human geography
Methodology;
Application of Scientific method
Approach;
Basic Principle; every phenomena is interconnected and must be studied in combination,
Contribution;
Anti-thesis of environmental determinism,
Founded New School of Human Geography,
Interested in Historical Geography,
Concept; Gave the concept of pays (small regions) ideal unit of study,

Ratzel
German Geographer, Great determinist and even greater anthropologist,
Believed in the Principle of Terrestrial Unity,
More emphasis on Human Aspects,
Boosted Dualism in Geography,
Methodology;
Favored Empirical Investigation,
Approach;
Champion of Systematic Approach,
Contribution;
Volkerkunde; History of Mankind,
Anthropogeography; Application of Darwin’s Theory to human society,
Origin of Geopolitics and Geo Strategies, Politike geography,
Concept; Founder of the Concept of
Anthropogeography
Cultural Landscape,

Concept - Realism
Antithetical to idealism;
Close to the philosophy of positivism but has different methodology of explanation.
Based on - Platonic-Socratic Thought;
The doctrine that human science is rational explanation of empirically observable regularities;
Advocates that - reality exists independent of the mind; it is not mind dependent’; Facts speak for themselves and explanation is logical and inductive.
The cyclic process of physical world prove for Scot the existence of a Divine order, a harmony and a low.
Realism advocates the use of theories and models in geographical explanation.

Concept - Functionalism
Development - A deliberate movement of protest and opposition directed against Structuralism.
French scholars like
Jean Brunhes and others
Period - 19th and early 20th century
Supports - Based on Darwin’s theory; functions, individual differences, attempts to find the interrelationships, region was considered as functional unit; which is more than the sum of the parts, a place may be explained in terms of its function. Functionalism conceives the geographical realities as states of equilibrium (a status quo)
Criticism - criticized on both conceptual and methodological grounds. Advocates social control rather social change

Concept - Marxism
The system of thought developed by Karl Marx.
Emphasis - The essence of Marxist Philosophy is positivistic approach which gives emphasis on materialism.
It is a form of realism, seeks to relate the empirical world of appearances to a set of determinants-economic processes.
Emergence - Emerged as a critic of Quantitative Revolution and approach of Regional Science;
Marxist geography analyses the relationship between the Social Processes, Environment and Spatial Relation;
Stresses on - Disclosure of ‘social process which originates in spatial appearance.’
Concerns - A powerful theoretical and political base for resistance

Concept - Existentialism
Development - Emerged to challenge and even abandon the purely objective, quantitative and deterministic analysis.
Stresses on - Personal freedom, personal decisions and personal commitments;
Urges a concern for human values, quality, subjectivity and spirituality;
Believes that man is responsible for making his own nature
Opposed To - Ideas of making man as the product of his environment
Supportes - Existential Geography is the study of the biography of the landscape,
A type of historical geography that endeavors to reconstruct the landscape;
It is anthropocentric in nature

Concept - Idealism
Supports - It recognizes the importance of studying human activity on the earth in relation to the overall cultural context.
Opposed To - the nomothetic approach of positivists or natural science
Concerned with - the activities which are the outcome of deliberate rational action;
Ideally suites to the study of regional geography,
Emphasizes the autonomy of social sciences, it is particularly useful in the study of human and regional geography
An idiographic approach which means that validity of generalisation will be limited to regions and people of broadly similar culture.