I. Geography: Its Nature and Perspectives

AP Human Geography emphasizes the importance of geography as a field of inquiry and introduces students to the concept of spatial organization.  Knowing the location of places, people, and events is a gateway to understanding complex environmental relationships and interconnections among places and across landscapes.

Geographic concepts emphasized throughout the course are location, space, place, scale of analysis, pattern, regionalization, and globalization.  These concepts are basic to understanding spatial interaction and spatial behavior, the dynamics of human population growth and migration, patterns of culture, political control of territory, areas of agriculture production, the changing location of industry and economic development strategies, and evolving human settlement patterns, particularly urbanization.  Students learn how to use and interpret maps and spatial data, apply mathematical formulas, and interpret models in order to better understand the world from a spatial perspective.

The course enables students to consider the regional organization of various phenomena and encourages geographic analysis in order to understand processes in a changing world.  For example, geographic perspectives on the impact of human activities on the environment, from local to global scales, include effects on land, water, atmosphere, population, biodiversity, and climate.  These human ecological examples are inherent throughout the course, especially in topics dealing with population growth, agricultural and industrial practices, and rapid urbanization.  A significant outcome of the course is developing students' awareness of geographic methods and the relevance of geospatial technologies to a variety of situations (everyday life, planning and public policy, professional decision making, problem solving at scales from local to global.)

II. Population and Migration

Understanding the ways in which human population is organized geographically helps students make sense of cultural patterns, political organization of space, food production issues, economic development concerns, natural resource use and decisions, and urban systems.  Therefore, many of the concepts and theories enountered in this part of the course connect with other course units.  Additionally, course themese of location, space, place, scale of analysis, and patterns can be emphasized when studying basic population issues such as crude birth rate, crude death rate, total ferility rate, infant mortality rate, doubling time, and natural increase.

Explanations of why the population is growing or declining in some places are based on patterns and trends in fertility, mortality, and migration.  For example, when learning about the relevance of place context and government policies, students may analyze fertility rates and age-sex structures (show in population pyramids) in various countries.  Analyses of refugee flows, immigration, and internal migration help students understand the connections between population phenomena and other topics.  For example, environmental degradation and natural hazards may prompt population redistribution at various scales, which in turn creates new pressures on the environment, culture, and political institutions.

This part of the course also enhances students' critical understanding of population trends across space and over time as they consider models of population growth and decline, including Malthusian theory, the demographic transition, and the epidemilogical (mortality) transition model.  Students can then evaluate the role, stengths and weaknesses of major population policies, which attempt to either promote or restrict population growth.

III. Cultural Patterns and Processes

Understanding the components and regional variations of cultural patterns and processes is critical to human geography.  Students begin with the concepts of culture and cultural traits and learn how geographers assess the spatial and place dimensions of cultural groups as defined be language, religion, ethnicity, and gender, in the present as well as the past.

The course explores cultural interaction at various scales, along with the adaptations, changes, and conflicts that may result.  The geographies of language, religion, ethnicity, and gender are studied to identify and analyze patterns and processes of cultural differences.  Students learn to distinguish between languages and dialects, ethnic religions and universalizing religions, and folk and popular cultures, as well as between ethnic political movements.  These distinctions help students understand the forces that affect the geographic patterns of each cultural characteristic.

Another important emphasis of the course is the way culture shapes relationships between humans and the environment.  Students learn how culture is expressed in landscapes and how land use, in turn, represents cultural identity.  Built environments enable the geographer to interpret cultural values, tastes, symbolism, and beliefs.  For instance, when analyzing Amish communities in the Western Hemisphere, it is important to understand how their unique values and practices (lack of power lines to buildings and the use of preindustrial forms of transportation) influence the cultural landscape.

IV.  Political Organization of Space

Students learn about the nature and significance of the political organization of territory at different scales.  Political patterns reflect ideas of territoriality -- how Earth's surface should be organized -- which in turn affect a wide range of exercises of power over space and boundaries.  Two major themes are the political geography of the modern state and relationships between countries.  Students are introduced to the different forces that shapes the evolution of the contemporary.world map.  These forces include the rise of nation-states, especially in Europe; the influence of colonialism and imperialism; the rise of supranational organizations; and the devolution of states.

Students learn about the basic structure of the political map, including the inconsistencies between maps of political boundaries and maps of ethnic, cultural, economic, and environmental patterns.  Additionally, students analyze forces that are changing th roles of individual countries in the modern world, such as ethnic separatism, terrorism, economic globalization, and social and environmental problems that cross international boundaries (climate change and acid rain)  This part of the course also focuses on subnational and suprenational politictial units.  For example at the scale above the state level, attention is direction to regional alliances, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).  At the scale below the state level, students learn about the ways in which electoral districts, municipalities, indigenous areas, provinces, and autonomous lands affect political, social, and economic processes.

V. Agriculture, Food Production, and Rural Land Use

Students examine geographic hearths where domestication of plants and animals first occured and study the processes by which domesticated crops and animals spread.  This diffusion process helps explain why distincy regional patterns emerge in terms of diet, energy use, and the adaption of biotechnology.

This part of the course also examines the major agricultural production regions of the world, which are categorized as commercial or subsistence operations and are characterized as extensive (shifting cultivation) or intensive (mixed crop/livestock).  Agricultural production regions are examined, as are settlement patterns and landscapes typical of each major agriculture type.  Students learn about land survey systems, environmental conditions, sustainability, global food supply issues, and the cultural values that shape agricultural patterns.  In addition, this unit addresses the roles of women in agriculture production, particularly in subsistence farming and mark economies in the developing world.

Students learn theories and models about patterns of rural land use and associated settlements (Von Thunen's land use model).  They also student the impacts of large-scale agribusiness on food production and consumption.  The effects of economic and cultural globalization on agriculture and the need to icnrease food supplies and production capacity are also addressed.

VI.  Industrialization and Economic Development

Students learn about the geographic elements of industrialization and economic development, including past and present patterns of industrialization, types of economic sectors, and the acquisition of comparative advantage and complementarity.  Students also learn how models of economic development (Rostow's stages of economic growth and Wallerstein's world-systems theory) help to explain why the world is divided into a more developed economic core and aless developed periphery with (in some cases) a semiperiphery between them.

The analysis of contermporary patterns of industrialization and their impact on development is another important focus.  Students use measures of development (Gross domestic product, and the Human Development Index (HDI)) as tools to understand patterns of economic differences.  Additional topics to be studied include Weber's industrial location theory and accounts of economic globalization, which accent time-space compression and the new international division of labor.  For example, students analyze the reasons why some Asian economies achieved rapid rates of growth in the mid to late 20th century, whereas the economies of most countries south of the Sahara did not.

Students also examine the ways in which countries, regions, and communities must confront new patterns of economic inequality that are linked to geographies of interdependence in the world economy.  Relevant topics include the global financial crisis, the shift in manufacturing to newly industrialized countries (NICs), imbalances in consumption patterns, the roles of women in the labor force, energy use, the conservation of resources, and the impact of pollution on the environment and quality of life.

VII.  Cities and Urban Land Use

The course divides urban geography into two subfields.  The first is the study of systems of cities, focusing on the location of cities and why cities are where they are.  This study involves and examination of such topics as the current and historical distribution of cities; the political, economic, and cultural functions of cities; reasons for differential growth among cities; and types of transportation and communication linkages among cities. Theories of settlement geography, such as Christaller's central place theory, the rank-size rule, and the gravity model, are introduced. Quantitative information on such topics as population growth, migration, zones of influence, and employment is used to analyze changes in the urban hierarchy.

The second subfield of urban geography focuses on the form, internal structure, and landscapes of cities and emphasizes what cities are like as places to live and work.  Students are introduced to topics such as the analysis of patterns of urban land use, ethnic segregation, types of intracity transportation, architectural traditions (neoclassical, modern, and postmodern) cycles of uneven development, and environmental justice (the disproportionate location ofpolluting industries and brown field in low-income or minority residential areas).  Students' understanding of cities as places is enhanced by both quantitative data from censuses and qualitative information from narrative accounts and field studies.  Students also learn about and apply models of internal city structure and development in the United States and Canada (Burgess concentric zone model, Hoyt sector model,  Harris-Ullman multiple nuclei model, and Galactic city model), examine the strengths and weaknesses of these models, and compare and contrast the models with the internal structure of cities outside North America.  

Topics such as economic systems, housing finance, culture, architectural history, government policies, and innovations in transportation can be useful in the analysis of spatial patterns of urban landscapes.  Although much of the literature in urban geography focuses on the cities of North America, comparative urbanization is an increasingly important topic.  The study of cities worldwide illustrates how differing economic systems and cultural values can lead to variations in the spatial structures of urban landscapes.

Students also examine current trends in urban development, such as the emergence of edge cities, new urbanism, transit-oriented development, smart growth, and the gentrification of neighborhoods. In addition, students evaluate sustainable urban planning design initiatives and community actions, such as bikeways and walkable mixed-use commercial and residential developments, that reduce energy use and protect the environments of cities in the future.