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AP Human Geography tutor

Thinking Geographically

The toolkit the rest of the course uses: reading and choosing maps and projections, knowing where geographic data comes from and how decisions made with it reshape places, the core spatial concepts (location, place, distance decay, time-space compression), how people and environments shape each other, what changing the scale of analysis reveals or hides, and how regions are defined. Topics: Maps and Projections, Geographic Data and Its Uses, Spatial Concepts, People and the Environment, Scales of Analysis, Regional Analysis, Geographic Reasoning Skills.

Population and Migration

Where people live and why, how populations are measured and compared (density, composition, birth and death rates, natural increase), the models that explain growth and decline (demographic transition, epidemiological transition, Malthus and his critics), the policies and social changes that shape fertility and aging, and why people migrate, what kinds of migration exist, and what migration does to the places people leave and the places they go. Topics: Where People Live, Population Composition, Population Growth and Decline, Policies, Women, and Aging, Migration.

Culture and Its Spread

What culture is and how geographers read it in the landscape: culture traits, attitudes toward cultural difference, the layered evidence of past and present groups in a cultural landscape, and how ethnicity, gender, and indigenous identity shape the use of space. Topics: What Culture Is, Cultural Landscapes, How Culture Spreads, Language and Religion.

Political Geography

How the world is divided into states and why the lines sit where they do: the kinds of political entities (nations, states, nation-states, stateless nations, multinational and multistate arrangements), sovereignty and self-determination, the colonial and independence processes that drew today's boundaries, and how power is expressed over land, people, and resources. Topics: States, Nations, and Power, Boundaries, Governance, Devolution, and Sovereignty, Centrifugal and Centripetal Forces.

Agriculture and Rural Land

How people farm and how farming shapes the countryside: the intensive and extensive systems that fit different climates, rural settlement patterns and the survey systems that divided the land, where farming began and how crops and animals spread, the second agricultural revolution and the Green Revolution, and the economic forces (subsistence versus commercial production, land costs, economies of scale, commodity chains, the von Thunen model, global supply chains and export dependence) that decide what is grown where. Topics: Farming Systems and Physical Geography, Rural Settlement and Land Survey, Origins and Diffusion of Agriculture, Agricultural Revolutions, Economic Forces in Agriculture, The von Thunen Model, The Global Food System, Consequences of Agricultural Practices, Contemporary Agriculture and Food.

Cities and Urban Land Use

Why cities exist where they do and how they grow: site and situation, the forces behind urbanization and suburbanization, megacities and metacities, edge cities and exurbs, and the world cities that steer globalization. Topics: Why Cities Grow Where They Do, Megacities, Suburbs, and Sprawl, Cities and Globalization, Size and Spacing of Cities, Internal Structure of Cities, Density, Land Use, and Infrastructure, Sustainable Urban Design, Reading Urban Data, Challenges of Urban Change, Urban Sustainability.

Industry and Economic Development

How industrialization began and spread and why development is uneven across the world: the Industrial Revolution and its links to population growth, cities, class, and imperialism; the economic sectors and the factors (labor, transport, break-of-bulk points, least cost theory, markets, resources) that locate manufacturing in core, semiperiphery, and periphery; how development is measured with economic and social indicators, the Human Development Index, and the Gender Inequality Index; how women's roles change with development; the theories (Rostow, Wallerstein, dependency, commodity dependence) that explain spatial variation in development; the basis of trade and the neoliberal organizations, tariffs, debt crises, and lending agencies that tie economies together; the restructuring produced by outsourcing, new manufacturing zones, and post-Fordist production; and the sustainable development policies, ecotourism, and global goals meant to remedy industrialization's environmental costs. Topics: The Industrial Revolution, Economic Sectors and Industrial Location, Measuring Development, Women and Economic Development, Theories of Development, Trade and the World Economy, Restructuring of the Global Economy, Sustainable Development.