1.4 Spatial Concepts

Absolute location is an exact position, usually given in latitude and longitude, or a street address. New York City is at about 40.7° N, 74.0° W. It never changes.

Relative location describes a place by its connection to other places, like “on the Hudson River, at the mouth of a large harbor, along the Northeast corridor of cities.” Relative location can change. A town becomes more important when a highway or airport is built nearby, even though its absolute location stays the same.

Place means the specific human and physical traits that make a location unique: its climate, buildings, language, food and the feelings people attach to it. When you describe what it's like to be somewhere, you're describing place.

Space is the physical gap or area between things and how things are arranged within it. Geographers study spatial patterns, like how far apart hospitals are or how stores are arranged along a highway. A simple way to remember it: place is about what's at a location, and space is about how locations are laid out and connected.

• Flows are movements of people, goods, money, information and ideas between places. Migration, trade, remittances and internet traffic are all flows.
• Distance decay means interaction between two places decreases as the distance between them increases. You visit the grocery store down the street more often than one across town, and most migrants move short distances.
• Time-space compression means the time it takes for people, goods and ideas to move between places has shrunk thanks to technology, so places feel closer. The geographer David Harvey popularized the term. A trip across the Atlantic took weeks by sailing ship in the early 1800s and takes hours by plane today; a video call crosses it instantly.
• Time-space compression weakens distance decay but doesn't erase it. Distance still matters for things like commuting, shipping heavy goods and in-person relationships.

Pattern is the overall arrangement of things across space. Common patterns are clustered (grouped together), dispersed (spread out), linear (along a line, like towns along a river or railroad) and random. Spotting the pattern is the first step; explaining why it exists is what earns points.