POPULATION GEOGRAPHY
María Carmen FAUS-PUJOL and
Antonio HIGUERAS-ARNAL,
Department of Geography and Spatial Organisation,
University of Zaragoza (Spain).
GEOGRAPHY – Vol. II - Population Geography - María Carmen FAUS-PUJOL and Antonio HIGUERAS-ARNAL ©Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems(EOLSS)
Keywords: Ageing, demographic structure,
demographic transition, demography, emigration, fecundity, geographical
systems, immigration, mortality, new geographies, population geography, way of
life.
Contents
1. Introduction to Population Geography
2. The current state of
Population Geography
3. The world population
4. The agricultural models
5. The
demographic transition
6. Evolution of the European pattern of growth
7. The
American pattern of growth
8. The models of quick transition
9. Perspectives on
Population Geography
Glossary
Bibliography
Biographical Sketches
Summary
Geography of the Population is one of the most well established branches of
General Human Geography. Although there are endless tendencies and currents
within Geography, many geographers, following the geographical tradition of the
beginning of the 20th century, maintain that Geography studies the relations of
humans with their environment. For many of these geographers, Geography is,
above all, Human Geography, where population constitutes practically the only
topic of study, although with many centers of interest. One of the questions
most studied by Geography of the Population is the distribution of human beings
over the surface of the earth and the numerical growth rate of humankind. This
growth is not even. Whilst in some regions the population grows exponentially,
in others it remains the same and even decreases. This has permitted
establishment of different geographical models of population growth, defined by
the different levels of relative importance that demographic variables, such as
birth, death and migrations have in them, all of which is generally related to
socio-economic and even political factors.
1. Introduction to Population
Geography
In a generic sense, Geography is in charge of the distribution of
facts and phenomena over the terrestrial surface. In a more concrete sense,
Geography consists of the “study of the terrestrial surface and of the
phenomena that mutually affect it”, according to the classic definition of
Richthofen. Extending this definition to Population Geography, we can accept
that Population Geography studies the distribution of the human population over
the terrestrial surface and tries to explain the differences that such
populations of some places present compared to others, like
structure, internal dynamics, space mobility, way of life, activity, etc.
Like
most disciplines, what we today know as Population Geography has had a
prescientific stage as long as human history. Human beings have always felt
curiosity to know who thier neighbors were, how they were organized and what
they could expect or to fear from them. The discovery of America
In 1882, Ratzel published the first volume of his Anthropogeography
or Geography of Humans, which is considered as the first modern treatise on
Human Geography. This treatise has a subtitle “Foundations of the Application
of Geography to History.” But the second volume, published in 1891, was
subtitled “The Geographical Distribution of Humans.” From then on, the Human
Geography has been enriched with the study of a host of facts that are the
material and social expressions of human activity on earth. However, this
activity is conditioned by the characteristics of the different populations and
its technical capacity and of social organization, from there the importance
that at the moment is given to Population Geography. Most geographers agree in
this appreciation. Hettner, one of the great theorists in Geography of the
first half of the XX century, ends up insinuating that population is the
foundation of geographical studies.
In the last third of the XX century,
coinciding with the appearance of what are called “the new geographies”, a deep
debate was raised that has still not concluded, about the nature of population
Geography in general, and of all the branches of Geography in particular, among
them, Population Geography. The debate was justified by several reasons. In the
first place because of the publication of the Theoretical Geography of Bunge in
1962, young geographers believed to have suddenly discovered the scientific
paradigm. This put them under an obligation to use technical and “scientific”
procedures of analysis, which, according to the positivism principles, should
be preferably quantitative. This made the population's many geographers fall
into the domain of the demography.
If we ignore Physical Geography, it is not an
exaggeration to say that the development of Geography in Europe during the
first half of the XX century was conditioned, implicit or explicitly, by the
role attributed to the population in the configuration and development of the
geographical systems. The great geographers of the French geographical
tradition, Vidal de la Blache, Demangeon and Brunhes, among others, gave a
capital importance to population studies, although with different focuses.
Demangeon defines Human Geography as “the study of the relationships of humans
with the physical means” or rather “ study of the human grouping in its
relationships with the geographical means.” In both cases, Population
Geography, as a fundamental component of Human Geography, always has a close
relationship with the physical means. These relationships are not necessarily
causal, like it pointed out the determinism decimononic. It is interdependent
relationships that are established among the elements of the system and of
these with everything to which they belong. Vidal de la
Blache, in his posthumously published work “Principes de Géographie Humaine”
dedicates more than half of the work to questions relating to the world
population. Brunhes on the other hand, is very concise when describing the
world population's characteristics, but gives great importance to the human
activities that leave their mark on space, those which, logically, depend on
the population's technical and cultural capacities.
The geographical systems,
like all the systems, according to the traditional definition of Bertalanffy,
are heterogeneous, complex, dynamic and open. But the geographical facts are
characterized, in turn by the territory or space. “The geographical thing” it
is always identified, even in the colloquial language, with the space thing.
For that reason, in spite of the new average epistemológics that arise in the
environment of Population Geography after the Second World War, many
geographers remain faithful to the geographical tradition that goes in the
foundation of geography. In this way, Woods maintains that “Population
Geography (. . .) is the study of Population using the spatial perspective.”
Pacione, in turn, insists on the same idea when saying that “Population
Geography is characterized by its particular perspective in spatial aspects of
populations.”
The epistemológic debate opened up in the last third of the XX
century about the nature of Geography and tried to clarify if the population's
Geography should be considered as an autonomous discipline or if, on the
contrary, it should continue being a branch of Human Geography. The debate has
not still concluded and has seen many zig zags. Although with a winding
direction, the debate has opened new horizons to Population Geography and it
has consolidated its scientific profile. On the one hand, they have
incorporated study topics related to the social and cultural organization of
the towns, sustainable development, the internal and external mobility of the
populations, etc. Likewise, it has shown the need to use in the study of the
technical populations of quantitative analysis similar to those that demography
uses. The introduction of new quantitative techniques of analysis has given
scientific consistency to Population Geography, even at the risk of making a
mistake with other disciplines, such as Demography. Geographers have discovered
the value of demographic techniques and the demographers, in turn, have
discovered the value of space as a differentiating element of the demographic
phenomena. Hauser and Duncan (1959) give the following definition of
Demography: “the study of the size, territorial distribution and composition of
population, changes therein, and composition of such changes, which may be
identified are birth rate, mortality, territorial movements and social mobility
(change of status).”
This definition incorporates most of the elements that
Population Geography studies, but the disciplines, demography and Geography,
haven’t made a mistake. Demographers have made an eminently statistical science
of their discipline. Geographers, without giving up the use of rigorous
mathematical procedures for the analysis of populations, center their interest,
on the relationships that are established among the elements of the
geographical systems in which, the population is an element more than the
system. The demographic systems cannot be dissociated from other geographical
and territorial systems. For that reason, Population Geography often finds the
explanation of the facts that one studies in economy, political science,
sociology, demography and other disciplines. With the result
that Population Geography, as happens in other branches of Geography, lacks its
own limits.
2. The Current State of Population Geography
Although traditional
Geography gave great importance to population study Population Geography hardly
had relevance, until after the Second World War, perhaps for the lack of a
solid theory about the nature and purpose of this part of Geography. In the
fifties, a first generation of geographers tried to give a scientific content
to Population Geography as an individualized branch of Human Geography, but
without disrupting it from the common trunk: Pierre George (1951 and 1959),
Jaqueline Beaujeu – Garnier (1965 and 1966), Glenn Trewartha (1953 and 1969),
John Clarke (1965 and (1971), Wilbur Zelinsky (1966) and many others. To this
first generation of the population geographers other generations have already
appeared which are very numerous, among which we find the following names:
Noin, Chandna, Sidhu, Ortolani, Kuls, Bähr, Levi, Mertins, Woods, White, Jones,
Pacione, Casas Torres, etc..
The consolidation of Population Geography as a
branch of Human Geography has favored the appearance of numerous methodological
and conceptual tendencies and it has diversified the study topics. The first
current that we can name is traditional. Their centers of interest keep a close
relationship with the questions always approached by Human Geography: the
population's distribution, growth and demographic structures, migrations, etc.,
although the current focuses are different from those in the past. In this way,
the population's quick growth, especially in the less developed countries, or
the migrations, is not perceived now as a local problem, but global.
The modern
currents are more difficult to frame, but in general lines there are two very
fertile and promising study environments for Population Geography: that of
ecology and that of sociology. Both tendencies are not new in Geography. Population
studies carried out from the ecological point of view are as old as Human
Geography and periodically acquire greater or smaller importance than the
environmental paradigms acquire. In the last decade of the XX century,
Population Geography leaned with determination towards studying the population
in its own territorial context. In the International Congress of the IGU which
took place in The Hague
Ecology is usually defined as the study of live beings in their
environment. In their condition of being alive, man is unwrapped in a certain
natural atmosphere, for which man's natural ecology exists. But contrary to
what happens to other species, the bonds that are given between humans and
their means are not fixed. Man is able to adapt to any natural means, of
modifying it for his own benefit and even of creating it former ex novo, when
the natural conditions are clearly adverse, if he has the technical instruments
for it. Man is also able to be organized socially and of creating his own
social environment. As a result, next to natural human ecology, very far from
Geography, there exists a field of social ecology that attracts the interest of
many human geographers. Already in the first third of the XX century, Barrows,
the creator of the School of Human Ecology of
Chicago, maintained that Human Geography was not, in fact, more than Human
Ecology.
In the first states of the civilization the relationships man-means
was defined by the prepotency of the physical means on the man. But as the
civilizations have evolved social and technically, the pre-potency has changed
sense: at the moment, in most of the world the subordination of the natural
means to the man is almost absolute. This has made that the population
geographers have found new centers of interest in the study of the negative
effects that man's pre-potency originates in the natural means. Next to the traditional
questions of the geographical studies on the population, in the specialized
magazines it is frequent to find works that are about the environmental impacts
due to degradation of the environment that it produces, the sustainable growth,
etc.
The role of the physical means on man has always attracted the attention
of geographers, which has made progress in the knowledge of the human
populations. However, it has also fed some average epistemológics, like the
geographical determinism, already mentioned that had a great predicament in the
second half of the XIX century and first decades of the XX century. The
Geographical Possibilism attributed to Vidal de la Blache and the concept in
way of life in fact sought to look for an alternative to the determinism.
Another tendency very developed in current Population Geography is the
sociological current. All the geographers coincide in pointing out that in the
study of the human populations what interests us is not the individual, but the
socially organized man. This is, in fact, the idea that underlies the
definition of gender of life of Vidal de la Blache. Although not explicitly,
Vidal attributed to those “good” or “bad” the condition of the physical means
that some areas of the terrestrial surface were more populated than others.
Man, socially organized, Vidal says, takes advantage of the possibilities that
nature offers him and he takes advantage of them in one or another way
according to his cultural level and civilization type. The effectiveness in a
certain way of life depends, according to Vidal, on the technical and
organizational capacity of the socially organized groups.
This idea stayed
during the whole first half of the XX century, but immediately after the second
world war, inside the renovating movement of Geography, new tendencies appear
in the Human Geography and, consequently in Population Geography. Modifying the
concept in the way of life of Vidal, Derruau maintains that, at the moment,
given the development degree reached by most human societies, the possibilities
are not in nature, but with the socially organized man. Le Lannou, on the other
hand, defines Human Geography as the “study of inhabitant man”. And he still
sums up more his definition saying that “to inhabit is to live in a portion of
the planet and thus to have to satisfy the primary needs and, in a certain
measure, a certain number of secondary or acquired needs.”
The definition of Le
Lannou has opened new horizons in population study. It is evident that the
human populations live in some place of the terrestrial surface, but it is also
certain that not all the populations have the same capacity to satisfy their
primary needs (feeding, housing and dress) and much less to satisfy the
secondary or acquired needs. During the first decades of the XX century it
became fashionable among the geographers, to speak of the ecoumene
and of the anecoumene, that is to say of the populated and uninhabited portions
of the terrestrial surface, trying to relate the intensity of the population
with the natural conditions. Although it cannot refuse the influence of the
physical means on the intensity and distribution of the population, the natural
means, as Derruau points out, are not already the absolute determinant factor
of the population distribution. Historically, the economies of subsistence
depended almost completely on the physical means, but in a global world like
the current one those hardly have meaning on a world scale. Globalization is a
process that facilitates the convergence of the demographic variables, but it
is still necessary to wonder why a great part of the surface of the earth is
uninhabited, in some areas the population grows vertiginously and the densities
exceed 1000 h/km2 , while other are deforested.
The traditional question of
“where people live” that gave origin to the concept of population density, has
given way to another much more interesting concept from the sociological point
of view that is “how people live.” It is not to overlook the first question,
but of analyzing the conditions of that population life that, generally, keep
some relationship with the discharge or low population density. In the densely
populated towns of Southeast Asia and in the
urban environment of the big cities, the bad living conditions are attributed
from, to the excessive demographic concentration on the space. But the living
conditions are also faulty in the rural areas that age quickly as a consequence
of the emigration and the drop in fecundity. In the first case, the living are
degraded by inadequacy of the socio-economic system to satisfy the population's
needs; in the second, the degradation of the living conditions is the
consequence of the inefficiency of the productive system for abandonment and
the population's inability to maintain a sustainable growth, due to the scarce
population and to its high rate of ageing.
Traditionally, an indirect way to
refer to the living conditions was by means of the comparison of the rent per
capita of the different countries. Although this practice is still being used,
population geographers now introduce other variables in their studies, like the
composition of the family, the reached instruction level, the prevalence of
certain illnesses, the activity type, etc. that express much better than the
rent per capita what we have denominated living conditions. They can give a
host of examples. On a world scale humanity has enough resources so that nobody
dies from hunger. However, the daily experience indicates that, on a regional
scale, the shortages are very severe and that for diverse reasons periodic
famines take place in some parts of the world. Epidemics and endemic of
difficult eradication are manifested by the impossibility that affected people
consent to the appropriate medication, and people's massive and involuntary
displacements as a consequence of confrontations taking place among towns, or
cultures.
The study of the living conditions constitutes one of the centers of
interest more worked by the population geographers from the sociological
perspective. The human populations are unwrapped in an evident dichotomy: a)
developed countries and b) less developed countries. The population of the
first is equal to a third of humanity but has access to 80% of the world
resources. The seconds that harbor humanity's other two thirds have to live
with the rest, that is to say, with 20% of the world resources.
For the same nature of the facts, the centers of interest that
attract the population geographers and the methodologies that they use for the
study of the same facts in the developed countries and less developed have to
be necessarily different.
Apart from evident historical reasons, this
socio-economic dichotomy obeys the condition that the population's distribution
over the terrestrial surface and the areas of more production of resources do
not correlate with each other strongly. The traditional solution to this
problem has been emigration. In fact, among the traditional topics of
Population Geography, that of the migrations today acquires new meaning. The
universal declaration of human rights that equips all the men in dignity,
rights and obligations, suggests that migration is man's natural right, since
it is usually a suitable instrument to improve the living conditions. However,
every day it is more difficult to exercise that right. The current territorial
conception of the national states hinders the international migrations that
outline enormous difficulties in the entire world vastly.
The differences
between the states of well-being and of possibilities of the developed
countries and less developed have never been perceived with so much clarity as
now. The time of the great discoveries that took place in the XVI century raised
some philosophical-anthropological currents that questioned the anthropological
unit of mankind. In the XIX century, in spite of the great contribution that
the French Revolution had made to the recognition of human rights, it ended
speaking of “inferior races” and of “superior races”, which, really was a way
of ethically justifying the consolidation of the colonial empires of the time.
At the moment nobody maintains these positions. All accept the essential
equality of human beings, although the differences of all types that exist
between some populations and others are recognized. These differences manifest
themselves in many ways, but from the point of view of the Population Geography
they are usually analyzed through “living conditions.”
The study of living
conditions has been one of the most fertile conceptual and methodological
advances inside the sociological environment of Population Geography. The
living conditions establish the reference mark for the study of the
populations. One doesn't live in the humid tropical areas as people do in the
deserts, in the big cities or in the small rural villages, either in the
mountain areas or next to the sea. The “inhabitant man”, according to the
expression of Le Lannou, looks to satisfy his primary needs, in its biological
bigger part, plus a group of secondary or acquired needs that, for their
“cultural value”, end up becoming primary needs. The “welfare society ” which
is one of the achievements most appreciated of the developed countries, is
based to a great extent on the widespread satisfaction of these needs. The
satisfaction of human needs, primary or secondary, constitutes one of the
reasons of concern for the governments, economists, sociologists, ecologists,
etc. on a world scale. In many countries, those which are less developed, the
concern is centerd on the satisfaction of the primary needs, while in the
developed countries that on the whole have sufficiently satisfied their primary
needs, the social demands and the government politicians go toward the
satisfaction of the secondary needs.
The primary needs have a physiologic limit
that you can measure and to calculate inside very narrow intervals: each person
needs to consume a certain quantity of foods that is expressed in calories
daily. But the acquired needs do not have limit, for which they are very
difficult to satisfy. The governments and politicians that try
to please their citizens often outline problems of degradation of the
environment, and of something sustainable, as was defined in the summits of Tokyo and Rio . The
studies of social welfare and the sustainable development constitute two of the
study topics often worked by the young generations of population geographers.
Figure 1. Map of World population ( by Daniel Noin. UNESCO, 1997)
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Bibliography
Beaujeu- Garnier, J. (1956 – 58). “Geographie de la Population,
Vol. I, 435 pp. Vol. II , 574 pp. Paris
Clarke, J.(1965). “Population Geography”. 175 pp. Oxford
George, P.(1951).” Introductión a
L’étude geographique de la population du monde”, 288 pp. Paris
_________ (1959). “Questons de
Geographie de la population”, 232 pp. Paris
Noin, D. et al.(1997).
“Distribution of the word’s population,” Map Scale 1/15.000.000 in “L’humanité
sur la planète”, 46 pp. Paris
Trewarta, G. (1969). “A
geography of population”, 185 pp. New
York
Zelinsky, W. (1966). “A prologue to
Population Geography”, 150 pp. Englewood Cliffs NJ.: PrenticeHall. [It is a
fundamental work that it mainly raises questions related to the growth of the
population and the demographic policies]
Biographical Sketches
María Carmen
FAUS-PUJOL . (1976) Dr. in Geography. (1982) Prof. Tit. of Geography. University of Zaragoza Union .
(IGU) and Associated member (1992- 1996). Advisory in Spain Belgium ) and (1998) “two examples of
environmental transformation in dry Spain
Antonio HIGUERAS-ARNAL is Professor of Geography since 1965.
Firstly in the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and later in the
University of Zaragoza (Spain).At present he is Emeritus Professor in the
University of Zaragoza with docent and research responsibilities in the
Department of Geography and Spatial Organisation, where directs a group on
Population Geography. Most of his extensive investigating work has been
directed to study the causes and the effects of the depopulation in the rural
areas. Their last works talk about the consequences of the relative aging of
the population in Western Europe and the probable
evolution of the European model of population increase.
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