GEOGRAPHY, POPULATION
Population geography, with intellectual roots that go
back to the mid-nineteenth century, studies the way in which spatial variations
in the distribution, composition, migration, and growth of population are
related to the nature of places. A concern with spatial variation has been the
geographer's distinctive contribution to population studies, in comparison to
the demographer, who is much more interested in patterns of birth, marriage,
and death, and less interested in the influence of migration and spatial
variations in general.
Within the discipline of geography, population study
has long been important, and increasingly the boundaries between geography and
other disciplines interested in population matters–economics, sociology,
history, psychology, and biology, as well as demography–are blurred. Population
geography is not concerned exclusively with spatial distribution, or with
description over theory: it can encompass, for example, the explanation of
regional and national levels of fertility, detailed patterns of disease
diffusion, and advanced modeling of interregional population growth. Population
variables also form a key component in Geographical Information Systems, which
allow the processing of large amounts of data for discrete geographical units.
Nevertheless, population geographers are more concerned with migration and
spatial variation than with other matters. The International Journal of
Population Geography,founded in 1995, is a useful indicator of the scope of
the field.
Development of Population Geography
Lesek Kosinskî traces the origins of population
geography back to the German and French schools of human geography of the
second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. These schools
had a particular concern with population mapping and with the relationship
between population and the environment. It was only after World War II,
however, that the sub-discipline began to take its modern shape, following the
publications of Pierre George (1951) in France (reflecting that country's
particular interest in demographic issues), and Glenn T. Trewartha (1953) in
the United States. Germany, where demography had been discredited by
its association with Nazi policy, and some other countries were slower to
follow, although there was significant progress in the Soviet Union,
Japan, and India. For Trewartha, "population is the point of reference from
which all other elements are observed and from which they all, singly and
collectively, derive significance and meaning. It is population which furnishes
the focus" (1953, pp. 6 and 14). His "tentative system of content and
organisation" for population geography defined the field broadly,
including historical population geography, the dynamics of population growth,
distribution, migration, population structure, and socioeconomic
characteristics. At the core of population geography was a fascination with the
global pattern of population distribution and the way it reflected both
demographic processes and the wider human and physical environment.
The postwar growth in the field was facilitated by the
increased availability of demographic data and impelled by the very obvious
relevance of population issues in both the developed and developing countries.
Publication of a number of influential textbooks–such as those by John Clarke
(1965) and George Demko, Harold Rose, and George Schnell (1970)–gave population
geography a firm place in the geography curriculum in many countries. The field
was strengthened by an improved institutional environment, marked by the
activities sponsored by the Commission on Population Geography of the
International Geographical Union (especially from the late 1950s), the
Population Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers (from
1980), and the Population Geography Study Group of the Institute of British
Geographers (from 1963). Population geographers have had some, though more
limited, involvement with multidisciplinary groups such as the International
Union for the Scientific Study of Population.
These early foundations of population
geography were quite different from (and indeed had relatively little effect
on) demography, but from the 1970s it was increasingly argued that geographers
needed to focus more clearly on demographic methods. Thus, texts such as Robert
Woods (1979) gave greater emphasis to the central demographic phenomena of
fertility and mortality and rather less to migration. The idea was to merge
population geography and spatial demography around a core of theory derived
from demography. This coincided with the greater use of quantitative methods in
geography generally, with texts such as Philip Rees and Alan Wilson's (1977)
focusing on the use of population accounts and models for spatial demographic
analysis, and Peter Congdon and Peter Batey's (1989) bringing an
interdisciplinary view of "regional demography."
Contemporary Population Geography
Although standard texts such as Huw Jones (1981) still
took a broadly based view, for some geographers this attachment to the methods
of demography signaled an unwelcome narrowing of population geography,
distancing it from the rest of geography just at the time when debates about
critical social theory in geography were intense. Some population geographers
called for a greater awareness of social theory in population geography, for a
more critical view of established data sources and theories, and for a move to
qualitative as well as quantitative methods. Interestingly, though their
impetus came largely from the discipline of geography, their concerns mirrored
ones expressed within demography. These critical geographers would agree with
the demographer-anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh's view that "reflexivity
about the politics of demographic praxis is notably lacking in the field….
Neither the globalpolitical economies of the 1970s, nor the postmodernisms and
postcolonialities of the 1980s and 1990s, nor the feminisms of any decade have
had much perceptible impact" (1996, p. 27).
However geographers choose to define their field at a
particular moment, their abiding interest is in spatial variations at different
scales. Patterns of population growth through time and space, and particularly
the demographic transition, have been considered fundamental to the
understanding of wider geographical processes of urbanization,
industrialization, and the use of resources. There has been a continuing
interest in the links between the physical and human environments, for example
in the impact of natural disasters.
Attention to fertility and mortality has been directed
in particular to highlighting the spatial dimension of patterns and their links
with environmental or social conditions–for example the spatial incidence of
mortality and disease or fertility. Others have combined demography and
geography to produce persuasive portraits of countries or continents.
Demographers such as Ansley J. Coale and Susan Cotts Watkins have themselves
taken an interest in international and national patterns of demographic change
that have clear geographical dimensions. Geographers have also shared with
historians an interest in historical geographies of population, reconstructing
patterns of fertility and mortality as well as household and family formation
through techniques such as family reconstitution and the detailed manipulation
of past census, registration, and ecclesiastical records.
Yet population geographers have given most attention
to migration, estimating gross and net flows at various scales; building models
of interregional flows; and analyzing economic and social causes and
consequences. Studies of migration have included international movements,
rural-urban, urban-urban, and intra-urban flows, as well as seasonal and
diurnal movements. Geographers like Russell King, Paul White, and John Connell
have also looked at the subjective experience of migration, drawing on in-depth
surveys and creative literature.
Population geography, through its content and
approaches, serves to remind both demographers and practitioners with
population interests in other disciplines that demographic changes have spatial
as well as temporal dimensions. At the same time it reminds geographers that
population characteristics are a key ingredient in the character of places.
Bibliography
Clarke, John I. 1972. Population Geography, 2nd edition. Oxford: Pergamon.
Clarke, John I., ed. 1984. Geography and Population: Approaches and Applications. Oxford: Pergamon.
Cliff, Andrew, and Peter Haggett. 1992. Atlas of Disease Distributions. Oxford: Blackwell.
Coale, Ansley J., and Susan Cotts Watkins, eds. 1986. The Decline of Fertility in Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Coleman, David, and John Salt. 1992. The British Population: Patterns, Trends and Processes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Congdon, Peter, and Peter Batey. 1989. Advances in Regional Demography: Information, Forecasts, Models.London: Belhaven.
Demko, George J., Harold M. Rose, and George A. Schnell, 1970. Population Geography: A Reader. New York: McGraw-Hill.
George, Pierre. 1951. Introduction à l'Etude Géographique de la Population du Monde. Paris: Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques.
Gould, William T. S., and M. Brown. 1996. "Research Review 2: Fertility in Sub-Sahara-Africa." International Journal of Population Geography 2: 1–22.
Greenhalgh, Susan. 1996. "The Social Construction of Population Science: An Intellectual, Institutional and Political History of Twentieth-Century Demography." Comparative Studies in Society and History 38: 26–66.
Jones, Huw. 1990. Population Geography, 2nd edition. London: Paul Chapman.
King, Russell, Paul White, and John Connell, eds. 1995. Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Migration.London: Routledge.
Kosinskî, Lesek. 1984. "The Roots of Population Geography." In Geography and Population: Approaches and Applications, ed. John I. Clarke. Oxford: Pergamon.
Noin, Daniel, and Robert Woods, eds. 1993. The Changing Population of Europe. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ogden, Philip E. 2000. "Population Geography." In The Dictionary of Human Geography, 4th edition, ed. R. J. Johnston, Derek Gregory, Geraldine Pratt, and Michael Watts. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rees, Philip, and Alan Wilson. 1977. Spatial Population Analysis. London: Edward Arnold.
Trewartha, Glenn T. 1970. "A Case for Population Geography" (1953). In Population Geography: A Reader,ed. George Demko, Harold Rose, and George Schnell. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Woods, Robert I. 1979. Population Analysis in Geography. London: Longman.
SOURCE: "Geography, Population." Encyclopedia of Population. . Encyclopedia.com. 18 Feb. 2019
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