Possible courses of study

I believe human geography is the study of why people live where they do, or are found where they are found, on a large sort of scale. As in, not why they go to a particular nightclub in London, but why they settle in London and the South East. In this particular example, economics comes into it. (Economic Development? Political Economy? Economic Migration? Perhaps I’ll follow this errant strand of thought in a different essay.)

The question of why people live where they do is also one of cultural study, especially when the way they live their life comes into it. There’s a certain set of basic questions around the things that influence the way in which we live, which start to define means of living, quality of life, choices – together forming a study of lifestyle and of lifestyle aspirations.

Pursuing human geography (and cultural study) is one way of looking at civilisation from a distance. Is the aim to establish patterns? Are there patterns? Modern life, as in life right now in the 2000s, is seriously complex, and to my mind there’s no way of comparing it to human life in earlier millennia. (Maybe it can be compared to when Neanderthal man turned into Homo Sapiens, but that’s getting into Palaeontology now.) The study of civilisation probably aims to make sense of the world we are in, to find recognisable shapes and colours in the howling wilderness of knowledge about the modern condition. (I always love saying the modern condition, because it makes modernity sound like a disease.)

Human Geography is a particular way of studying civilisation; rather than starting with trends in income, or health, or population, it focuses first on the spatiality of civilisation – the place people are in, and what their actions do to it. As if people were little ants, marching in columns and scattering anthills all over the landscape. Humans are somewhat robbed of their individual properties and abilities, and lumped together, classified by virtue of where they are, or whence they came.

You could look at features of the land as causes of settlement patterns – rivers for example. London’s three early cities were all by the river, but all with different personalities. You could look at man-made structures as causes of subsequent human action, slowly solidified into urban form – the Regent’s Canal for instance. A navigation channel for trade, which led to a second waterfront in London, different from the father Thames experience. The Regent’s Canal spatial story is one of soft whispers and wind in the hushed trees above the quiet waters, bobbing in and out of brick and stone tunnels. Warehouses, most logically, were the dominant land use near it to start with. Once rail took over the trades, dereliction and despair threatened the waterway, but early gentrification saved the day. Someone decided they’d like to live in a tall attic with visible beams and rafters, with great views on to the Canal. Boom – ground rents exploded. But I digress. Now, neighbourhoods bordering the canal are spatially as various as imaginable, from the western stretch to Limehouse Basin in the east. A walk along the canal is like watching a film about the city.

This spatial dimension of an essentially social science is really wonderful; a truly sexy form of framing the human subject in her environment. The study has unending depths - What the human then does or what the environment then becomes or what then happens to the human… und so weiter.