Mapmaking and remote sensing
The map was long the geographer’s main tool, with map construction and interpretation being the major practical skills taught in degree programs.
Mapmaking involved knowledge of surveying and projections, in addition to the arts of depicting point, line, and area data on maps.
Map interpretation involved their use not only in the field for location but also in the laboratory for identifying landscape and other features, with map comparison used to identify associations among distributions and to define regions with multiple criteria.
Alongside the map—especially after World War II—geographers increasingly used aerial photography to supplement these landscape-interpretation skills.
Overview
In human geography, the new approach became known as “locational” or “spatial analysis” or, to some, “spatial science.” It focused on spatial organization, and its key concepts were embedded into the functional region—the tributary area of a major node, whether a port, a market town, or a city shopping centre.
Movements of people, messages, goods, and so on, were organized through such nodal centres.
These were structured hierarchically, producing systems of places—cities, towns, villages, etc.—whose spatial arrangement followed fundamental principles.
One of the most influential models for these principles was developed by German geographer Walter Christaller in the early 1930s, though it attracted little attention for two decades.
