In our study of population geography, we have seen that humankind is unevenly distributed over the Earth. Spatial variations in fertility, death rates, rates of population change, age groups, gender ratios, and standards of living also exist: these patterns can be depicted as demographic culture regions. The principles of mobility prove useful in analyzing human migration and also help explain the spread of factors influencing demographic characteristics such as disease.

Population geography proves particularly intriguing when scale is taken into account. Although most geodemographic issues are experienced locally, and policies shaping them are usually set at the national level, the important debates about the world’s population are truly global in nature.

The theme of nature-culture shows how the natural environment and people’s perception of and engagement with it influence demographic factors. Nature-culture interactions shape the spatial distribution of people and sometimes help guide migrations. In addition, population density is linked to the level of environmental alteration, and overpopulation can have a destructive impact on the environment and give rise to environmental refugees.

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The cultural landscape visually expresses the varied ways in which societies accommodate their populations. How people distribute themselves over the Earth’s surface finds a vivid expression in the cultural landscape. The look and feel of places are constantly adapting to demographic change.

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DOING GEOGRAPHY

Public Space, Personal Space: Too Close for Comfort?

Culture can condition people to accept or reject crowding. Personal space—the amount of space that individuals feel “belongs” to them as they move about their everyday business—varies from one cultural group to another. As the Seeing Geography section for this chapter notes, different people seem to require different amounts of personal space. One’s comfort zone varies with social class, gender, ethnicity, the situation at hand, and what one has grown accustomed to over one’s life. Some Arabs, for example, consider it appropriate and even polite to be close enough for another to smell his or her breath during conversation. Those from cultures that have not developed a high tolerance for personal contact might experience such closeness as intrusive. Americans conducting business in Japan are often surprised at the level of physical closeness expected in their dealings. Such closeness might well be interpreted as overstepping one’s bounds, literally, in the United States!

In this exercise, you will gather some data on the amount of personal space needed by those around you. Observe and record your findings, and discuss them in class as a group.

Steps to Understanding Indigenous Culture

There has been some talk lately about the future of the ever-huger “McMansions” and sprawling suburban developments that for several decades have characterized middle-class life in the United States. Clearly, both waste resources. McMansions are expensive to heat and cool, and their landscaping is often out-of-step with the local environment. Living in a suburb often means commuting long distances to jobs or school, in cars occupied by just one or two people. But think, too, about the proxemics involved and consider these questions:

Is there such a thing as too much space?

Do you know or have you heard of people who have opted out of living large in the ‘burbs? Why do you think they made this decision?

In what ways do planners and architects take culturally diverse preferences about personal space into account when they design cities, streets, buildings, homes, and classrooms?

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Do you need your “personal space”? Most Americans and Canadians do. If so, Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India, is a place you might want to avoid. West Bengal state, where Kolkata is located, has the highest population density in the country.

Why do people form such dense clusters? The theme of cultural interaction would tell us of push factors that encourage people to leave their farms and move to the city. Some can no longer make a living or feed their families with the food provided by the tiny plots of land they work. Others are forced off the land by landlords who want to convert their farms to use mechanized Western methods of agriculture that use far less labor (see Chapter 8). But cultural interaction also tells us of pull factors exerted by cities such as Kolkata—the hope or promise of better-paying jobs, the encouragement of friends and relatives who came to the city earlier, or the greater availability of government services. And so, pushed and pulled, they come to the teeming, crowded city, to jostle and elbow their way through the streets.

But, it is not only cities in the developing world that become so dense. If you have ever visited, or lived in, Manhattan, New York, you are all too familiar with dense crowds of people. In fact, there are some who grow up in these environments and find that the relative solitude of rural areas verges on terrifying. They prefer the bustle of activity and the sounds of the city, and they feel at home in a crowd.

Being a woman is another reason that you might feel uncomfortable in this Kolkata street environment. Notice the relative absence of women in this crowd. Many societies have strict norms that dictate where women, and men, may and may not go. Harassment or even violence may be the result of violating these norms.

The study of the size and shape of people’s envelopes of personal space is called proxemics. Anthropologist Edward T. Hall, whose book The Hidden Dimension is listed in Ten Recommended Books on Population Geography at the end of the chapter, is the founder of this science. Urban planners, architects, psychologists, and sociologists, as well as geographers, use proxemics to explain why some people need more space than others and how this varies culturally.

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Match each of the terms on the left with its definition on the right. Click on the term first and then click on the matching definition. As you match them correctly they will move to the bottom of the activity.

Question

You can learn more about population geography on the Internet at the following web sites:

Coclanis, Peter. 2010. “Russia’s Demographic Crisis and Gloomy Future.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 19 February, pp. B9 - B11.

D’Emilio, Frances. 2004. “Italy’s Seniors Finding Comfort with Strangers.” Miami Herald, 30 October, pp. 1A-2A.

Howden, Lindsay M., and Meyer, Julie A. 2011. Age and Sex Composition: 2010. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau.

Johnson, Tim. 2011. “Mexico City Copes With That Sinking Feeling.” The Seattle Times, 24 September. http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/mexico-city-copes-with-that-sinking-feeling/.

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Marsh, Viv. 2012. “China to Overhaul ‘Threatening’ One-Child Slogans.” BBC News, 27 February. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17181951.

Population Reference Bureau. 2007. 2007 World Population Data Sheet. Washington, D.C.: Population Reference Bureau. http://www.prb.org/Publications/Datasheets/2007/2007WorldPopulationDataSheet.aspx.

Population Reference Bureau. 2012. 2012 World Population Data Sheet. Washington, D.C.: Population Reference Bureau. http://www.prb.org/pdf12/2012-population-data-sheet_eng.pdf.

Rosin, Hanna. 2010. “The End of Men.” Atlantic Monthly, July/August. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. 2012. Global Overview 2011: People Internally Displaced by Conflict and Violence. New York: United Nations.

World Bank. Statistics in Africa. http://www.worldbank.org/afr/stats.

Yonetani, Michelle. 2013. Global Estimates 2012: People Displaced by Disasters. Geneva: Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and Norwegian Refugee Council.

(For additional suggested readings, see the Contemporary Human Geography LaunchPad: http://www.macmillanhighered.com/launchpad/DomoshCHG1e)

Diamond, Jared. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin. Why do thriving civilizations die out? Ecology, biology, and geography all play a role in Diamond’s analysis.

Hall, Edward T. 1966. The Hidden Dimension. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. This is the classic study of proxemics conducted by an anthropologist. Hall argues that culture, above all else, shapes our criteria for defining, organizing, and using space.

Harrison, Mark. 2012. Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Contagious diseases that have shaped the course of world history—the bubonic plague (Black Death), yellow fever, influenza, and cholera—have spread along trade routes. This fascinating account traces the close relation between mobility necessitated by commercial interactions and devastating illness.

Johnson, Steven. 2006. The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. New York: Riverhead Books. In this gripping historical narrative, physician John Snow’s tracing of the Soho cholera outbreak of 1854 is placed in the larger context of the history of science and urbanization.

Livi Bacci, Massimo. 2012. A Short History of Migration. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press. Examines past and present migrations the world over, with an eye toward those factors that have helped and hindered specific groups of migrants.

Mann, Charles C. 2006. 1491. New York: Vintage. This highly readable account of the American landscape on the eve of European conquest challenges long-held notions. Contending that the indigenous population of the Americas was, in fact, much larger and well-off than assumed, Mann paints a picture of a preconquest landscape that was culturally rich, technologically sophisticated, and environmentally compromised.

Meade, Melinda S., and Michael Emch. 2010. Medical Geography. 3rd ed. New York: Guilford. Surveys the perspectives, theories, and methodologies that geographers use in studying human health; a primary text that undergraduates can readily understand.

Newbold, K. Bruce. 2007. Six Billion Plus: World Population in the Twenty-First Century. 2nd ed. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. The impact of increased global population levels across the next century is assessed with respect to interaction with environmental, epidemiological, mobility, and security issues.

Seager, Joni, and Mona Domosh. 2001. Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World. New York: Guilford. A highly readable account of why paying attention to gender is crucial to understanding the spaces in which we live and work.

Tone, Andrea. 2002. Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America. New York: Hill & Wang. This social history of birth control in the United States details the fascinating relationship between the state and the long-standing attempts of men and women to limit their fertility.

Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography. Published by the Carfax Publishing Co., P.O. Box 2025, Dunnellon, Fla. 34430. Volume 1 appeared in 1994.

Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. Volume 1 was published in 1996.