Each person must choose a core area from their assigned region to analyze and describe in a 3-4 page essay illustrated with at least one map. You don't have to make an original map, but you should find maps that show the site and situation of the core and illustrates the main points of your essay.
You must include proper citations and a full bibliography at the end.
Please address all of the following questions:
"Averages for individual states are not very meaningful unless we know
something about the agglomeration, the clustering of the people. This brings
us to the notion of the state's core area, the heart of the country. A state's
core area is its cornerstone, its national focus. Here lie its major cities,
probably including the capital, its largest population clusters, its densest
and busiest transport networks, and, often, its most intensively cultivated
farmlands . . .
Thus we want to know not only the total population of a nation-state, but
the way this population is distributed over the national territory. When
we have this input, then our knowledge of states' spatial forms takes on
more meaning."
Human Geography Culture Society and Space De Blij New York: John Wiley and
Sons 1993 p.476
"States' core areas are presumably their heartlands, containing their
most developed economies, densest and most urbanized populations, best-articulated
transportation systems and communication networks, and-at least formerly
if no longer-the resource base that sustained them. Away from national cores
all of these characteristics are eroded. Transportation networks thin, urbanization
ratios and city sizes decline, and economic development is less intensive.
The outlying resource base may be rich, but generally it is of more recent
exploitation, with product and benefit tending to flow to the established
and distant heartlands. The developed cores of states, then, can be contrasted
to their subordinate peripheries."
Human Geography Landscapes of Human Activities Fellmann/Getis/Getis 1990
DuBuque William C. Brown Publishers p.400
"Generally, core areas possess a particularly attractive set of resources
for human life and culture. Larger numbers of people cluster there than
in surrounding districts, particularly if the area has some measure of natural
defense against aggressive neighboring political entities. This denser population,
in turn, may produce enough wealth to support a large army, which then provides
the base for further diffusion from the core area.
During this diffusionary state-building process, the core area typically
remains the state's single most important district, housing the capital
city and the cultural and economic heart of the nation. The core area can
thus be regarded as the node of a functional culture region . . .At the
end of this process, the core area may remain roughly at the center of the
national territory, or if diffusion occurred mainly in one direction, it
may lie at the edge of the nation."
The Human Mosaic T. Jordan et al New York: Harper Collins 1994 p.151