Before knowing the five themes of geography, one needs to understand what geography is. Geography studies places and people’s interactions with their surrounding environment. The field of geography is to identify the physical properties of the Earth’s surface and the human societies living on it. Geography examines how humans interact with the natural environment and how locations affect human life.
Thus, geography tries to understand the reason for finding any particular character in a particular place and how humans live in that place. The five themes of geography help for a better understanding of the subject matter of geography. They are locations, the character of a location, human-nature interaction, human movement and interaction, and region. Knowledge of the five themes of geography is inevitable for spatial analysis.
Where is a particular place located? Location has two meanings: one is the absolute location, which is the latitude and longitude, or it is also called coordinates. It indicates where it is located on the earth. Another important thing is relative location. Relative location is what surrounds any location or its surrounding environment. For example, any place may be along a road or river, near the city, in the shadow area of a mountain, near the coast, etc.
If the latitude is lower or in any location near the equator, it is hot, which decreases the temperature as the latitude increases. The polar region (high latitude) is very cold. Singapore, Congo, and the Amazon are hot because of their location near the equator. Inversely, Antarctica, Alaska, northern Canada, and the northern part of Russia are very cold because of their location near the polar region.
1. Location of a place
In the case of longitude, there is only a difference in time. For each 15-degree longitude, eastern longitudes have an earlier time than Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), and western longitudes have a later time than GMT. Singapore time is ahead of Congo and Amazon.
2. The character of a location
wildlife conditions. One place may be a steep or plain area, the climate may be cold or hot, rainy or dry, etc. Places are surrounded by dense forests or cultivated land. That place may be a village or a city. Additionally, geography is concerned with human character and their activities. What types of people are at that place, which means their economic activities, religion, culture, behavior, etc.?
The pictures below show several types of location characteristics: dense forest-covered areas, deserts without vegetation, snow-covered mountain areas, and flat land. Similarly, somewhere people live in an isolated small village working in the agricultural field, and somewhere there are large cities and millions of people live together. Thus, one theme among the five themes of geography is to describe the location’s characteristics, what it looks like, or what are the characteristics of the locations whether they are natural, or human-made.
3. Human-nature interaction
Geography studies the interaction between the natural environment and humans. This is the study of how humans act according to environmental conditions. For example, people grow their cereal crops where fertile soil, flat land, and irrigation facilities are available. In the Alpine region, people adopt nomadic herding because of the open pastureland available for grazing. Coastal people engage in fishing because more fishing opportunities are available. The dressing of the people depends on the climate. People wear warm clothes in cold regions. But people can modify nature to some extent. For example, they make it hot in the cold season, irrigate dry areas for cultivation, transport materials to difficult places, and can travel long distances by transport facilities.
4. Human movement and interaction
Geography is concerned with the relationship between different places and the people located there. People share knowledge and facilities by interacting with each other. Rural people supply raw materials and labor to the city. A city generates employment and income by consuming industrial raw materials from the surrounding villages and creating employment for the villagers. Many cities and villages are interdependent in the world. The emergence and decline of a settlement depend on its interaction with other places and people located around that settlement or with each other.
Interaction between rural and urban areas shows that rural people go to the city for employment and administrative work like municipalities, district offices, etc. Similarly, the urban area provides transport, education, and communication services to rural people, and urban areas supply several manufactured or processed products for rural people. Instead, rural area supplies industrial raw materials, foods, and recreational places to urban people. Due to the demand and supply chain, they move from one place to another and interact with them.
Highland and lowland people also interact with each other because of their dependency. Food crops are produced in lowland areas and supplied to the mountain people too. In the mountain areas, there is wide pastureland for livestock. Thus, they produce wool and meat for other areas mostly lowland. High Mountain is rich in herbal production and tourism activities. In this way, peoples of highlands and lowlands have inter-dependencies, which self-generate movement and interaction among these people living at different geographic locations.
5. Region
A region is a homogenous area that can be distinguished from other areas. For example, mountains are different than plains and cold areas are different than hot areas. The city is different than a village. Geographers are not concerned only with the differences between particular locations, but also with regional differences on the earth’s surface. In other words, geography is the study of regional variation in a broad context.
