Arild Holt-Jensen [Holt-Jensen - Geography: History and Concepts

Geography

History and Concepts

Fifth Edition

To my grandchildren Elisabeth, Mathilde and Selma with the hope that geographical research and dedication will help to save a sustainable life on earth for the future

Geography

History and Concepts

Fifth Edition

Arild Holt-Jensen

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Arild Holt-Jensen 2018

Second edition published 1988

Third edition published 1999 and reprinted twice 2007

Fourth edition published 2009, reprinted in 2011, 2012, and twice in 2014

This edition first published 2018

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017952949

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-5264-4014-3

ISBN 978-1-5264-4015-0 (pbk)

Editor: Robert Rojek

Editorial assistant: Catriona McMullen

Production editor: Katherine Haw

Copyeditor: Neil Dowden

Indexer: Arild Holt-Jensen

Marketing manager: Susheel Gokarakonda

Cover design: Stephanie Guyaz

Typeset by: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed in the UK

Contents

List of Figures

About the Author

Arild Holt-Jensen

(born 1937) is professor emeritus at the Department of Geography, University of Bergen, Norway. He has been teaching geography in Bergen since 1965 and is the author of a number of books and articles on history and concepts of geography, environmental, urban and regional planning as well as general textbooks for high school geography. In 2000 he was awarded the Modeens Minnemedalj by the Finnish Geographical Society for achievements in geographical education. He has served as department chair, a member of the university senate, a member of the editorial board for GeoJournal , and as a member of the Council in the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP).
He has long experience in setting up and organizing cross-disciplinary courses in environmental science and planning. His research in settlement geography, environmental, local and regional planning covers studies in Norway and the Nordic and Baltic countries. He has been a guest professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. He has also led a number of field courses for BA and MA students in Norway and the Baltic countries.
In 20002004 he coordinated the NEHOM (Neighbourhood Housing Models) project, financed by the EU 5th framework programme, involving 11 partners in 8 European countries, which was followed up in the period 20042008 by a NordicBaltic project financed by the Nordic Council of Ministers. One result of this project has been Urban Sustainablility and Governance; New Challenges for Nordic and Baltic Housing Policies (Holt-Jensen and Pollock (eds), 2009, NOVA, New York).
From the start of his university studies Arild has been active in local and national politics: as a member of the Norwegian Liberal Party he headed its Environmental Commission from 1968 to 1975 (national), was a member of Bergen City Council from 1971 to 1979 and later functioned as chair of Lands City District board for twelve years. From 2004 he shifted his membership to the Bergen Socialist (Labour) Party.

Preface

Geography is intriguing because it is there all around you; the world that is an inextricable part of your everyday life. The fascination of the discipline is that it gives you keys that can help you to understand and explore that everyday world. To explain this fascination I will briefly outline my own personal road to involvement with the discipline.

I started primary school in 1944, when Norway was closed off from the rest of the world, as a result of German occupation. It was forbidden to own a radio and to listen to the BBC. My father, however, somehow managed to keep track of the changing war frontiers, which he marked with a thread of wool thumb-tacked to an old map of Europe. Then came May 1945, when Montys young soldiers, who had actually taken part in the movement of that frontier thread, paraded our streets on National Day (17 May), wading through flowers thrown by we citizens who thronged the pavements to greet them. Europe happened once more around us and the world opened, as witnessed by the first American lorry (a Fargo) to arrive in our schoolyard, and the docking of the first boat loaded with bananas. Then, in the summer of 1945, five volumes of National Geographic Magazine arrived which my father had subscribed to before the war. I had learnt to read Norwegian but not yet English. I could, however, read the maps that were included in every second issue. Capital cities were marked with a star and these star cities I learnt by heart! We were no longer geographically excluded; the world was once more ours to explore.

Maps of the Pacific Ocean were particularly intriguing in 1947. In that year, Thor Heyerdahl and his crew drifted on a balsa-wood fleet from Peru to French Polynesia. Heyerdahls book The Kon-Tiki Expedition was the first grown-up book I read. My road to geography, however, was for a while diverted to botany: my school herbarium acquired some really good additions as a result of a hiking tour I undertook into the Norwegian mountains. So my university studies started with botany, but to complete my BA I would study geography which unified physical and cultural geography in a so-called basic discipline of geography. At first, physical geography was the easier to understand. At Kolss, a mountain close to Oslo, I got my first thrill of understanding. Here I realized that the layers of rocks I climbed over, created 600300 million years before present and hence before the age of dinosaurs, still had an important bearing on the landscape of today. I learnt to interpret the geomorphologic features of the landscape. Travelling became much more interesting. Having learnt some oceanography and climatology, it became clear how the Humboldt Current could transport the Kon-Tiki fleet across the Pacific as well as provide the crew with all the fish they needed.

Geography had fired my imaginationeven more so after Pierre Gourou and Torsten Hgerstrand, who were both human geographers, had visited us as guest lecturers. Gourou lectured in French, which I could not speak and hardly understood. Even so, I can still recall his lecture on Belgium because of its gradual, systematic progression, documenting Belgiums problematic political geography and the multifaceted divisions between Wallonia and Flanders. Hgerstrand brought exciting new ideas on research methods, including the simulation of geographical diffusion employing advanced statistical tools. Silly me, why hadnt I studied statistics which would have been possible as I was registered as a student at the faculty of natural sciences. But engaged as I became in student policies and regional development I chose to work on an MA thesis in human geography. How this worked out is presented in (pp. 6973).