What is human geography?

What Does human geography Mean

Before going fully into the meaning of the term human geography, we are going to proceed to discover the etymological origin of the two words that give it its shape:

-Geography, first of all, comes from the Greek. It is exactly the result of the sum of several components of that language: the noun "gene", which means "land"; the word "grapho", which is synonymous with "record" or "write", and the suffix "-ia", which is used to indicate relationship.

-Human, secondly, it is a word that has its etymological origin in Latin. Specifically, it emanates from the sum of “humus”, which can be translated as “earth”, and from the suffix “-ana”, which is used to indicate belonging.

The geography is the science devoted to describing the planet Earth . Human , meanwhile, is that which is linked to man as a species .
The idea of human geography , in this framework, refers to a branch of geography focused on the study of human communities from a space- related perspective . In this way, it analyzes how people relate to the physical environment in which they reside.

Each society develops its environment from the transformation of the surface and its social structures according to its interests and needs. Political, economic and cultural processes, for example, influence these modifications. Human geography is specifically dedicated to studying the geographic systems that arise from the relationship between individuals and the physical space they inhabit.
It is often said that human geography is responsible for describing human landscapes in a scientific way. For this, it performs an analysis of the population distribution on the planet's surface , which is uneven and has effects of all kinds (economic, demographic, etc.). It cannot be ignored that the physical environment offers specific resources and that the distribution of human beings in the environment is related to the possibility of accessing these resources.
Notably human geography intertwines with other geographic branches, such as economic geography , the political geography and cultural geography , among many others. All of them, together, allow us to know the interactions between the human being and his physical environment, which influences economic activity, urbanization and political organization, in addition to other issues.
In addition, from all the above, we cannot ignore the existence of a literary work that bears in its title the term that concerns us and that is written by one of the most important Spanish authors of the last decades. We are referring to the novel "Atlas of human geography", which is made by the Madrid writer Almudena Grandes.
It was in 1998 that this book was published, which revolves around four women (Rosa, Fran, Marisa and Ana) who work together in a publishing house, specifically carrying out the preparation of a world atlas. Women who are very different from each other and who have different personal experiences, which will gradually become known to the reader.