Why study Regional Geography?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The most obvious way to answer this question is to refer to the geography curriculum standard that states "people create regions to interpret Earth's complexity." One way to organize human activities is to divide the Earth into the regions. This book studies one global region, North America. However, it also approaches this region through dividing that region into 13 separate subregions (Figure 1.7). So, a key geographic concept to discuss is scale, and how the scale at which we study something impacts how we view the object of study. In the study of North America, we can make broad generalizations about North America in contrast to other regions of the world such as South America or Europe, but we can also understand that such generalizations may hold true to a greater or lesser extent within different subregions of North America. The text gives the example of California and discusses the variety of places within the state and then within Los Angeles. Your class might have a similar discussion of the regions and places within your state and then, at a smaller scale, within your city. Understanding regions and scales is a very useful way to approach discussions of stereotypes, as stereotypes are in fact generalizations that may hold within them some truth, but also fail to capture the diversity within. So your discussion of regions and subregions could include some discussion of stereotypes of people in those regions.