Introduction

Human geography includes politics, religion, art, music, dance, pop culture, folk art, urban studies, architecture, economics, business, technology, science, medicine and health, manufacturing, agriculture, demography, immigration, language, religions, ethnicity, and history — among other things.

If we were going to do a good regional geography, we would examine all of these human dimensions of change and stability and take note of which ones are particularly important in giving each region its character and set it off from other regions. We would look at flows of ideas, goods, raw materials, people, capital, and information. We would map trends. We would map the past. We would map correlations of things that we thought might be causally related. We would examine people's attitudes toward nature and the earth.

This is an exciting time to study geography. The ways in which human societies create, alter and interact with their social and physical environments has become an increasingly pressing issue. For example:

• Heightened geoeconomic and geopolitical competition between nation-states, along with the rapid restructuring of political and economic systems around the world, throw into disarray common assumptions about how the world “works.”

 
• Within cities, unsurpassed wealth lies cheek-by-jowl with abject poverty, creating an urban geography in which “race,” class, and gender inequalities lead to a growing “geography of fear.”

 
• Ethnic groups and local cultures are growing ever more insistent in their demands for autonomy, destabilizing nation-states we once regarded as completely stable.

 
• Cooperation and competition between trading blocks, and the increasing geographical fluidity of transnational corporations, is creating an economic geography that is ever more unstable and subject to crisis.