Political Patterns/Processes
Narrow, strategic waterways or bottlenecks (such as straits or canals) that control maritime trade, energy transportation, and military movement.
Choke Point
Self-sufficient agriculture that is small scale and low technology and emphasizes food production for local consumption, not for trade.
Subsistence Agriculture
Large urban areas with populations of 20 million or more.
Metacities
Cluster of inventions and innovations that brought large-scale economic changes in agriculture, commerce- and manufacturing in late eighteenth century Europe.
Industrial Revolution
A religion into which people are born and whose followers do not actively seek converts.
Ethnic Religion
A region caught between stronger, colliding external cultural-political forces, resulting in persistent stress, instability, and fragmentation.
Shatterbelt
Intensified agriculture that uses engineered seeds, fertilizers, and irrigation to increase intensive agricultural practices.
Green Revolution
Observed statistical relationship that the population of a city will be inversely proportional to its rank in the hierarchy. For example, second largest city is half the population of largest city.
Rank-Size Rule
A measurement of a country’s wealth that includes the total value of all goods and services produced by residents of a country, including domestic and foreign production, in a year.
Gross National Product (GNP)
Transfer of power from central government to regional or local government within a state (country).
Devolution
This establishes maritime boundaries and resource rights for countries with coastlines.
United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS)
Land survey system that relies on descriptions of land ownership and natural features such as streams or trees. Commonly found on the east coast of the United States.
Metes and Bounds
Urban geography model that mathematically predicts the degree of interaction and probability of migration (and other flows) between two places.
Gravity Model
Economic development that meets the needs of the present while preserving environment and resources for future use.
Sustainable Development
Savings in cost of production that comes from increasing production of a good.
Economies of Scale
Manipulating electoral districts to give one political party unfair advantage.
Gerrymandering
Production of agricultural goods using fertilizers, insecticides, and high-cost inputs to achieve the highest yields possible.
Intensive Agriculture
The premise that the price and demand for land will go up the closer it is to the central city.
Bid-Rent Theory
Theory that states that industries choose locations to maximize profits by minimizing costs.
Weber's Least-Cost Theory
Renewal or rebuilding of a lower income neighborhood into a middle- to upper-class neighborhood, which results in driving up property values and rents and the dispossession of lower income residents.
Gentrification
A political border placed by powerful external forces (colonial powers or international agreements) over an existing cultural landscape, intentionally ignoring pre-existing cultural, ethnic, or tribal patterns
Superimposed Boundary
A model that explains the location of agricultural activities in a spatial pattern of rings around a central market city, with profit-earning capability the determining where a crop or good is produced in reference to the market.
von Thunen Model
describes the spatial, economic, and political inequalities between dominant, developed regions and dependent, less-developed areas. I
Wallerstein's Core-Periphery Model
Theory proposing that all countries pass through five linear stages—from traditional society to high mass consumption—as they modernize.
Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth
A composite metric measuring disparities between men and women across three key dimensions—reproductive health, empowerment, and labor market participation.
Gender Inequality Index (GII)