Socio-spatial indicators
Introduction
Human geography constitutes the second major division of general geography. As a discipline, it is responsible for studying societies from a spatial perspective "Space (physics)"), the relationship between these societies and the physical environment in which they live, as well as the cultural landscapes and human regions that they build. According to this idea, human geography could be considered as a regional geography of human societies, a study of human activities from a spatial point of view, a human ecology and a science of cultural landscapes. It analyzes the unequal distribution of the population on the earth's surface, the causes of said distribution and its political, social, economic, demographic and cultural consequences in relation to the existing or potential resources of the geographic environment at different scales.
It is based on the premise that human beings are always part of broad social groups. These societies create a social and physical environment through processes of transformation of their own social structures and the land surface on which they are based. Their actions modify both aspects depending on the needs and interests of the social agents that form them, especially the dominant social agents. These transformations are due to economic, political, cultural, demographic processes, etc.
The knowledge of these geographical systems formed by society and its physical environment (human regions, cultural landscapes, territories, etc.) is the object of study of human geography. We can consider Elisée Reclus in France as the initiator of human geography, having as a precedent the work of Karl Ritter in Germany.
It was Vidal de la Blache who defined geography as a science of synthesis that studies the interaction between human beings and their environment, a definition that has endured to this day in the French school of Geography.
Conceptions about human geography
Although the first work on Human Geography appeared in Germany in the century under the name of Anthropogeography, the work of Friedrich Ratzel, it was several French geographers who gave a great boost to this branch of geography at the end of that century and in the first half of the century at the level of empirical research. More recently, Human Geography at the university level has been divided into more specific and applied subdisciplines. In some universities, it appears under the name Geography simply when Physical Geography disappears as a discipline or passes to other schools and faculties, and the same can be said of other geographical branches such as Regional Geography in this case due to absorption or confluence to a common point of view. Among the French geographers who have developed works on Human Geography we can mention Vidal de la Blache, Albert Demangeon and Max Derruau, as well as Eliseo Reclus, whose work constitutes the first work of Human Geography with a carefully and exhaustively developed ecological orientation and which constitutes the starting point of the French geography that was developed later.