World geography

Chapter 1
Globalization and World Regions

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 Different and similar world
• If you compared places, you would find…
– what the different is.
– what the common is.

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 People

匈奴 Xiongnu

日耳曼 Germanic

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 Food
Chinese food

Pasta Pizza
Italian Food
Japanese

English food (Fired! Fired! Fired!)

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Turkish food (Donser Kebap 沙威瑪 )
 Landscape

Vancouver Taipei City

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 Different and Changing Worlds
• Political, economic, and social
experience and expectations are rapidly
change nowadays.
• The physical shape of world isn’t change.
• But connecting among people bring
places closer as cooperation,
competition, and conflict with other
peoples become more intense.
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 9/11

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 9/11
•The 911 event alerted American’s government
“You can not dominate another county
arbitrarily”

•What’s different from Muslims and Americans?

Environment  Society, Economics, Politics

•Oil  Economics  Political Power  Cultural

decline, poverty, belief conflict  reaction

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4 geographic levels to see Earth
• Global
– views from spacecraft show the contrasts
between continental land areas and ocean
waters.
• Major World regions
– are whole or large parts of continents and are
the division used in this text for the regional
chapters.
• Countries
– are the building blocks of major world
regions.
• Local regions
– are parts of countries and the places where
many individuals voice their concerns.

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 Globalization vs. Localization
• Globalization
– Globalization is increasing level of
interconnections among people throughout
the world.
– The speed and intensity of globalization, in
terms of world trade and the flow of
financial investments, increased markedly in
the 1990s.

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 Globalization vs. Localization
• Localization is both response to and the outcom
e of globalization.
– On the one hand, global exchanges and flows of infor
mation, ideas, people, money, and technology move
us toward worldwide political solutions, economic ex
changes, cultural attitudes, and environmental conc
erns.
– On the other, localization focuses on distinctive iden
tities of places or people in regions, countries, or loc
al areas.

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 Facets of Globalization
• Increasing connections take place through
intensified flows of ideas, goods, and
people:
– Ideas, technologies, and diseases;
– Goods from many place of manufacture;
– People migrations for work, political asylum,
family consolidation, and long-distance
tourism;
– The spread of images and message through
the media of TV, film, the Internet and print.
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 Facets of Localization
• Local voice remain loud in our consciousness an
d ensure that global trends are often far from b
eing fulfilled.
– Political nationalism maintains separation countries
and of groups within countries. Ex. Basque, Aceh

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 Facets of Localization
– Despite globalization force, many local customs and
practices preserve local identities. Ex. Pop music
– Changes and intensification of ideologies, especially
religious or political beliefs. Ex. 三民主義
– Religious difference among Christian, Muslim, Jewish,
Buddhist, and Hindu countries continue to be signifi
cation.
– Demonstrators resist the visible economic penetratio
n of countries around the world by global media and
corporations such as CNN, the Murdoch group, McDon
ald’s, Starbuck, Toyota, and Nike.

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 Figure 1.3

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Despite of globalization, the World
remained diverse
• Political activity: Countries Act
– 1950-1991 Cold war
– North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) vs. Soviet
Union
– Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) vs.
Communist governments
– Southern Africa Development Coordination (SADCC)
vs. apartheid
– UN become a world-wide level arbitrator
• Inside vs. Outside
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Economic Activities: Global Trends
• The numbers people living on < $1 per day
– 900 m (85%)(1820)1.4 b (30%)(1980) 1.2 b (20%)(2000)
• In the 1990s, the uneven spread of expanding global economi
c activities caused group of countries to enter into or revive
regional economic agreements, mainly through trade.
– European Union (EU)
– North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
– Mercosur (southern South America)
– Association of South East Asian Countries
– South Africa Development conference
• US, the countries of western Europe and Japan Controlled ne
arly all the investment, production, and consumption of goo
ds.
• China, India and Brazil increased their contribution.

• Wealthier people vs. Poorer people

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 Cultural Activities: Major Regions,
Local Voice
• One world culture? Did these wiped out the loca
l cultural difference
– Cocacola-ization of eating and drinking habits
– the spread of Western TV, movies, pop music
– global markets for some consumer goods
– Ex. India
• Western cultural norms
– democracy, individual ,and human rights
– Materialism, consumerism, and superficial value

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 Civilizations (World Cultures)
• Figure 1.6

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 Environmental issues at varied
scales
• Earth is marked by a variety of natural environ
ments that create differences among regions
• Natural environments affects human events at g
lobal, world regional, country, and local scales.
– world regional, country, or local scales: Prediction of
hurricanelike storms, effects of acid rain, and damag
e from river floods and volcanic eruptions
– global scale: global warming, El Nino, the ozone hole
over Antarctica, and the destruction of tropical rain
forests
– Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1992), Kyoto, Japan (1997)

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 What is geography about?
• Geography is study of
– where and how human and natural feature
and events (political, economic, cultural, and
environmental) are distributed on Earth’s
surface,
– the relationships among them,
– how their distributions change over time,
– and how those features and relationships
affect human lives.
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 Subject matter
• The tensions among globalization,
localization, and the continuing
significance of country governments
provide a basis changes and move toward
either greater interdependence or
conflict.
• Thus, geographers compare places and
assess the interactions among them at
different levels of geographic scale.
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 Geographic methods
• Location
• Place
• Human/Environment interaction
• Movement
• Region

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 First, geography is about place
• Place might be a
– Individual place
– Small town
– Large city
– Rural area
– Another state
– Another country
• Place might be perceived as points on a map or
as large area.
• However, they all have different relationships
to each other in terms of location, direction,
distance, and size.
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 Latitude and Longitude
• Figure 1.8

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 Distance and Direction

Meridian and parallel is the basic of time, distance and direction

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 Map and Scale

Size of Scale Representative Franction (RF)

Large Scale 1:25,000 or larger
Medium Scale 1:1,000,000 to 1:25,000
Small Scale 1:1,000,000 or smaller

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 Next, geography is about explaining
the difference among place
• The two basic geographic concepts of place and
location are combined in three main approaches
to geographic information gathering and
explaining
– Regional geography
• A region is a area of Earth’s surface with
similarities within and between defined
areas, or regions, of the world.
– Spatial analysis
– Human-environment relationship
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 Regions and Globalization
• Regions are defined by
– A high degree of uniformity
– Limited variability
– More-or-less lasting boundaries
• Regional boundaries may include physical
features, political boundaries, or economic
characteristics.

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 Region’s dynamic features
• Regions are also dynamic geographic entities
that have distinctive internal and external flow
patterns of such phenomena as people, goods,
and ideas.
• Nodes are key features of regions, being
specific places from which flows begin or
through which of a set of nodes may define the
boundary of a region.

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 Flow feature
• Flows within and among
– regions include population migrations
– information from the media, Internet, or
publications
– movements of money
– technology innovations in manufacturing
process, information processing, or new
transportation modes
– and ideology through political and regions
within world regions
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 The flows of geographic levels
• The dynamic elements of such flows
within and among regions affect the
prominence
– of regions within a countries
– of countries within world regions
– of world regions within the global system

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 The characteristics of flows
• The variety of these flows is generated by
– path
– speed
– direction and the different relationship to social stru
cture imposed by governments and other institutions.
• Breaks or interruptions in the flows may result i
n social problem such as
– inequities,
– injustices,
– and underresourced livelihoods at the local level.

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 Changes in dynamic regions
• People create regions
• Regions shape people’s activities
• People remake regions
• Regions interact with other regions
• Regions are used by those in power

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 Major world regions
• Europe
• Russia and Neighboring Countries
• East Asia
• Southern Asia and South Pacific
• South Asia
• North Africa and Southwestern Asia
• Africa South of the Sahara
• Latin America
• North America

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 Figure 1.11

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 Development of world regions
• Early history (about 5000 B.C)
• Settle Farming
• City-State and Empires (2500-1000 B.C.)
• Trading Empires and “Classical” Civilizations
(1000 B.C.- A.D.600)
• Disruptions, Migrations, and Feudalism (A.D.
600 - 1450)
• The modern, globalizing world
– Explorations and colonies ( around A.D. 1450)
– Industrialization (mid-1700s)
– Globalization, Countries, and Protectionism (1450-
early 1800s)
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