Introduction to Human Geography: A new semester begins!

It is always an adventure to teach first year courses. Completely new faces with new group dynamics and new curiosities. Always a nice encounter!

The term has started in RA 2 weeks ago. The Introduction to Human Geography course began with 20 fresh members, new young souls, to get into the magic world of geography.

We've started, as usually, with 'vegetables' metaphor to learn that a city is not only a physical entity. It is shaped by social, economic, political and cultural processes and dynamics. We explore these dynamics with Childe's "urban revolution" concept with reference to Soja's work. It is a nice framework to understand the development of cities and urban communities through the time.

We have diverse topics in this course, as it is an introductory course, to touch at least the most important fields of interest of human geography. But first we need to understand how cities are formed and developed...We have a political economy approach to understand the transformation of cities, meaning that we're exploring the development of the capitalist economic system by looking at the main political economic processes that had an influence on the decisions of actors of urban development. We will, as you will notice soon enough, explore the influence of how the formation of capitalist system has been shaping the urban development. We need to understand the relationship between the economic, political and social transformations and the transformation of capitalist political economic system. And that's why we start with a historical adventure to understand how capitalist system is established and has been changing through time. We started last week with really the beginning of the settled human communities and tackled their social, spatial, economic and political characteristics. We've looked at Catalhoyuk in Turkey, for instance, as one of the first known urban civilization (which also gave us a chance to look into the very first human made map).

After a brief introduction to the conceptual framework and approach of the course and the story of how first hanger gatherers began to settle down, I took the students for a walking tour in Middelburg. It's always nice when the weather is cooperating. The walk has a couple of purposes. First of all I want the students to learn how to 'observe' the physical built environment and connect it to historical knowledge. I call this 'reading the city' exercise. While walking I talk about certain historical facts of course but the main idea is to show them how to look around and understand the transformations that have been taking place in the city. I introduced some terms and concepts like gentrification, urban regeneration, suburbanization, etc., which will be later on discussed and explored in series of lectures. It's always good to have a visual clue about what we're talking about. Another interesting point about Middelburg is that since it's medieval urban pattern is still very visible, it makes it easy to understand the medieval urban structure as a case study.

The walk helped us in the next lecture for two reasons: First we could easily imagine the 'medieval city' in the case of Middelburg, secondly, we could discuss certain spatial concepts on the basis of our experience in the city. We had a class exercise about map reading, which forced the students to think about certain concepts like 'urban form', 'patterns', 'development zones', and 'land-uses'. We discussed those on the basis of Middelburg map and of course our experiences from the walk have really helped us to visualize these concepts.

In the last lecture we've looked into the transformation from feudalism to merchant capitalism and the impact of this change on the urban settlements. We're now about to start the third week of the semester and next lecture is going to be about the urban dynamics triggered by the transformation from merchant capitalism to industrial capitalism.

See you on Monday!

Dr. Tuna Tasan-Kok

Associate Professor in Human Geography, Roosevelt Academy, University of Utrecht
Senior Researcher, OTB Research Institute for the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology

t.tasan-kok@roac.nl, m.t.tasan-kok@tudelft.nl