Sense of Place and the Everyday

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An excellent DirectionsMag piece co-written by Joseph Kerski - a legend.


It talks about the embedded nature of geography in our everyday lives.

It references an earlier Directions piece by Reginald Golledge called 'Geography and Everyday Life' from 2000.


I've mentioned the article before, and it was an interesting one to read when I was doing the reading around my GA Presidential theme. Here are some of the everyday geographical decisions which people make according to Golledge.

Choose where to live.
Select which way to go to work.
Learn where supermarkets, shopping malls, doctors' offices and local schools are located.
Choose a place to visit on holidays and figure out how to get there.
Understand local and global environmental changes so you purchase adequate clothing and plan long trips.
On a long car trip, estimate where the next town big enough to have a motel will be.
Understand where ethnic or cultural restaurants will be located in a city.
Understand where the events are occurring that are mentioned on the evening's international and national newscasts.
Prepare background material for the location (national or international) of your next job posting.
Walk around your neighborhood and return home safely.
Find your car in a parking lot or building.
Walk around your house in the dark without stumbling into furniture.
Find your way back to your hotel in a strange city.
Know where places of recreation can be found.
Select a sports team to follow.
Decide which newspaper to buy.
Appreciate the international interactions and flows of goods that keep fresh produce daily in your favorite supermarket.
Appreciate why it's difficult to build houses on steep slopes with unstable soils.
Wonder why people continue to live in places where they experience floods or hurricanes or tornadoes or fires or earthquakes or emissions from chemical or nuclear industrial plants.


A few passages from the article for you:

Every day people process geographic information and practice geography. Some are good at it. Some are not. Those that are good at it have what we call "high spatial abilities." Those who are not so good at it have "low spatial abilities." The aim of geography as an educating science is to give instruction to improve the way people can use their spatial abilities and in so doing, increase their understanding of how to recognize and use geography concepts to enable their daily activities.

Geography is a science that emphasizes the learning of locations and the learning of places. The skills that are taught to learn location patterns of cities in the USA, rice fields in China, gold mines in South Africa, or the sources of outbreaks of epidemics in Africa are essentially the same as those we use to learn the location of schools, shops, recreational areas, churches, and dining establishments. We absorb these types of information visually via newscasts on TV and in movies and videos; we get written descriptions of them in newspapers and journals; we hear the information from radio broadcasts; or we gather it multimodally as we walk or otherwise travel through an environment. The information you are absorbing about places and their location is geographic - it is locationally referenced or place-based. And when engaging in a conversation about current events, you quote that information by recalling it directly from memory, or you internally manipulate it to obtain further insights by engaging in spatial information processing. This requires integration of separate bits of spatial information so as to better understand a situation or problem environment.


Golledge's article finishes by saying that "we are all geographers" and provides a Self-assessed Geography Skill Scale Test with 20 questions. 



These three pieces are well worth a read...

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