ABSTRACT
The study of the social aspects of geography was more ambitiously conceived thirty or forty years ago than now. Migration has long been recognized as a key to the understanding of the social aspects of geography. Basic therefore to the idea of man and environment is the view that 'every area with a given relief, location and climate, is a composite environment where groups of elements—indigenous, ephemeral, migratory, or surviving from former ages—are concentrated, diverse but united by a common adaptation to the environment'. Land use survey has a direct scientific appeal as it is based on field observations. The recent advance in urban geography has been remarkable, but much more remains to be done, and then re-done, for the world's towns are changing rapidly. And this is hardly less true of the rural areas of the world: in every country there are changes of production, farm population, the relations of the farmers to villages and towns and the like.
