ABSTRACT
Schmithusen (1976:22) describes the methodological peculiarity of geography, with which we try to understand the complex features of particular unities like landscapes and regions, as ‘total-special reasoning’. A geographer seeks to describe, understand and explain the complexities that exist together and interact in a part of the earth, creating its particular regional character. This is the basis of geography as an independent science. No other discipline concerns itself with the earth’s surface and its special parts in their totality, with the connections between different features within the same area. The central geographical question is ‘Why is it like this here?’
