ABSTRACT
A well-known professor of geography has written that his subject is similar to the city of Los Angeles in that it sprawls over a large area, merges with its neighbours and has a central area that is difficult to find (Haggett 2001). However, it did not take him long to alert his readers to the fact that geography is basically concerned with three broad themes, namely (1) the location and spatiality of terrestrial phenomena, (2) human-environment relations, and (3) regional differentiation. Two recurring concepts in geography are therefore space and place. The subject is popularly associated with ‘knowing where places are’ or ‘knowing what places are like’. Because the academic discipline of geography is a human construction, its character and content vary considerably between individual geographers and national ‘schools’ of geography. Some scholars are more concerned with physical than with human geography; some geographers adopt descriptive approaches, others are more analytical. But while it is common to resort to the old saw, ‘geography is what geographers do’, the two recurring concepts of space and place are rarely far away from the geographer’s task.
