Blog 1: What are geography’s core concepts

Denver, Colorado

I will start this series of blogs on geography’s core concepts by identifying the ones I have selected to write about. Different national curriculums have different lists, but they mostly agree on four fundamental ones— place, space, environment and interconnection. They are central to geographical thinking and are the subject’s biggest ideas, because:

• They are each at the top of a hierarchy of concepts of increasing complexity and abstractness, as they incorporate simpler and less abstract concepts, but cannot be subsumed by an even bigger and more abstract one. Place, for example, incorporates region; environment incorporates nature and landscape; and interconnection incorporates systems.
• They can be applied to a great variety of topics and across different fields of the subject, and so give geography a degree of unity and coherence.
• They have a number of functions, such as identifying topics worth studying and questions to ask, organising information, suggesting methods of analysis, forming generalisations, identifying possible explanations, and providing a basis for public policies.

These characteristics will be explained in subsequent blogs.

Time or change, scale and sustainability are other common core concepts in school geography curriculums. However, they differ from the first four in their more limited range of functions. Scale, for example, is largely an analytical concept, because it is mostly used in geography to analyse relationships by investigating them at different scales, or across scales. Time is also an analytical concept, because it can be used to explain phenomena by understanding how they have developed or changed over time. Sustainability, on the other hand, is largely an evaluative concept, because it is mostly used to assess the implications of an environmental change, or the economic or demographic viability of a place.

So in these blogs I will talk about place, space, environment, interconnection, time, scale and sustainability.

Next blog: Unpacking the concepts