GEOGRAPHY STANDARD 5

The geographically informed person must understand the origins and functions of regions. Regions are human creations used to manage and interpret the complexity of Earth’s surface. They help us understand and organize the arrangements of people, places, and environments. People’s lives are structured within multiple regions.

Therefore, Standard 5 contains these themes: The Concept of Region and Regional Change.

A region has characteristics that give it cohesiveness and distinctiveness and set it apart from other regions. The boundaries and characteristics of a region are derived from a set of criteria that organizes Earth’s complex surface on the basis of the presence or absence of selected physical and human charac­teristics. Regions can vary in scale from local to global; overlap or be mutually exclusive; be nested into a hierarchy (e.g., counties, states, countries); and exhaustively partition the entire world or capture only selected portions of it.

Geographers recognize three types of regions. The first type is the formal region characterized by a common human property, such as the presence of people who share a language, religion, nationality, political identity, or culture; or it is characterized by a common physical property, such as the presence of a type of climate, landform, or vegetation. The Rocky Mountain region, the Corn Belt, and Latin America are examples of formal regions.

The second type is the functional region. It is organized around a node or focal point, with surrounding areas linked by transportation systems, communication systems, or other associations such as manufac­turing and retail trading. Chicago, with its highways, railways, Great Lakes shipping, airlines, and telecom­munications, is a focal point in the north-central region of the United States.

The third type of region, the perceptual region, is based on human feelings and attitudes about areas and is defined by people’s shared subjective images. Southern California, Dixie, the Riviera, and Australian Outback are perceptual regions. These spatial units may be without precise borders or even commonly accepted regional characteristics and names.

All types of regions are dynamic, changing as the physical and human properties of Earth’s surface change. Thus, with global climate change, ecosystem and biome patterns will change. With economic glo­balization, structural relationships between trading regions will shift, as capital and people move to take advantage of changing opportunities.

Students must understand the meaning and complexity of regions, their physical and human char­acteristics, and how geographers use and analyze regions to interpret and organize Earth’s surface. Understanding these themes enables students to put people, places, and environments into multiple spa­tial contexts.