Geography Curricular Inventory Project
Geography 207: Economic Geography
Objectives and Outcomes
Supporting & Related Pages:
This course introduces you to basic concepts,
frameworks, explanations, analytical tools and information resources
in Economic and Business Geography. Introductory overviews are
presented in the context of selected current issues at
local to global levels. Through project-related assignments,
we also have specific opportunities
to relate these ideas and skills to your personal, academic and
Upon completion, you should have a basic understanding as to how
society organizes its economic activity in space, how interregional
differences in economic well-being may come about, and how
such processes affect your own daily life and professional plans. You
should have developed some basic conceptual, explanatory, analytical,
research and writing skills useful for pursuing interests not just in
geography but also in all other social sciences, business, urban
planning and other fields.
You will have had opportunities to learn how
information is organized and accessed in the social sciences,
the Internet and other modes. In addition to developing your information
skills, you will have been exposed to various modes of inter-personal
communications and collaborative teamwork mainly in the context of
The project will be distributed over the full quarter and will enable
you, individually and
collaboratively, to develop a field of concentration within
Economic Geography, and then to apply what has been learned in
class to a "real-world" context ("Consulting Proposal") with which you
are familiarizing yourself through a job, an internship, a
service-learning arrangement and related
library research in preparation for and support of such an arrangement.
Student Learning Objectives with Examples of Expected Learning
It is expected that,
at this end of this class (and hopefully for some time thereafter), a
student completing this class with a 2.0 or better:
(Learning Objectives) Week 1:
- Appreciates and articulates the general nature and scope of this
introductory economic geography course, including its general objectives,
the nature of its content, its embeddedness within the Social Sciences,
its learning tools and resources, and its logistics.
(Learning Objectives) Week 2:
- Recognizes the need for sharply defined concepts and
conceptualizations in the pursuits of topics and issues in the social
sciences, in general, and economic geography, in particular.
- Defines the conceptual meaning of approximately 100 terms
and identifies their conceptual uses and the significance(s) of such
concepts in the context of class content and related learning objectives.
- Articulates the process by which we advance from "terms" to "concepts"
to theories and conceptual frameworks.
(Learning Objectives) Week 3:
- Accounts for different ways in which time is an important
dependent or independent variable in economic-geographic analyses and be
able to articulate instances where time and space interact
and constrain each other.
- Explains some of the ways in which the costs of physical
transportation are more directly a function of time than of space.
- Identifies and explains the constraints upon which Hagerstrand's
time-space model rests and the conceptual link between this model and the
class framework for Geography 207.
- Articulates a few of the ways in which an economic development process
can be broken down into changes over time and variations across space.
(Learning Objectives) Week 4:
- Recognizes different kinds and levels of "complexities" in a regional
economy and in the spatial facets of the economic composition of, and
interdependencies within such an economy.
- Understands concepts of the "region" as applied
to analytical, planning, policy and marketing tasks.
- Suggests appropriate levels of aggregation or disaggregation
for describing and analyzing patterns and processes in Economic Geography.
- Differentiates between different conceptual meanings of the
terms "structure" and "structural"
- Understand the statistical/analytical meaning and use of "probability",
"coefficient" and "quotient", mean and median.
- Explains and applies the "location quotient".
- Identifies the significance (usefulness, downsides etc.) of
"assumptions" made in particular types of analysis (e.g. when using
"location quotients" to derive interdependence insights).
- Recognizes, describes and quantifies simple forms of "indirectness" in
the context of flows and interdependencies involving transportation,
marketing, procurement or communication activities within and between
regions using elementary
network-analytical, multiplier or input-output procedures.
- Accounts for the effects of geographic scale on spatial
processes: Is able to provide examples for principles and dynamic
processes which apply (with or without modifications) at
different geographic levels.
- Compares and contrasts trading patterns (including their causes and
consequences) which occur at the local level
with those involving global transactions.
- Regularly accesses and selectively reads the economic or business
sections of at least one
newspaper, news service or magazines (on paper or online) and is able to
select and relate some of the content to class materials in the form of
- Derives information from the frequent local newspaper
articles on (for example) Microsoft as to the different categories of
social impacts of this corporation on the Puget Sound region.
- Understands the
(Learning Objectives) Week 5:
- Articulates why and how economic geographers
use introductory micro-economic concepts, principles and analytical tools
the spatial outcomes of economic behaviors, and, therefore, why and how
micro-economic theory can help students become better geographic
analysts, consultants, planners, managers and entrepreneurs.
- Explains how "economies of scale" act as a powerful
- Expresses verbally and via the use of simple graphs (with coordinates)
how to determine
(theoretically) the optimal size of a market area by
applying a spatial demand curve and production cost functions.
- Differentiates between linear and
non-linear functions in a variety of production, consumption and spatial
contexts (e.g. in the context of the spatial consumption implications of
Engel's Law or the locational repercussions of different transport cost
- Articulates some of the relationships between an economic
actor and her/his decision environment which may be relatively simple or
complex, certain or uncertain, local or global, placid or turbulent.
- Identifies the attributes of the minimax-maximin strategy, provides
geographically significant examples and evaluates results of simple
examples in light of the recognized strength and limitations of game
- Describes the role which "access to information" and "ability to use
information" may play in coping with uncertainty often associated with
complex, turbulent or distant environments.
(Learning Objectives) Week 6:
- Appreciates the diversity and complexity of the economies of cities
has some understanding of the way in which general principles of economic
geography can be applied to urban economies, their functions and spatial
- Explains how different economic activities perform different functions
and play different roles within the urban economy as well within systems
- Suggest how partial equilibrium and other theoretical
propositions can contribute to
the explanation of complex urban location patterns and land use conflicts
and the spatial distribution of activities among urban centers.
- Discusses agglomerative and dispersive tendencies and divergent
implications associated with the pervasive utilization of
information technologies in many different urban contexts.
- Recognizes the importance of (access to) information sources and the
need to evaluate critically the quality and reliability of such sources in
light of the research question(s), the costs (including limitations) and
benefits of that
information and the information from
alternative sources and (last not least) the possible availability of
alternative conceptual frameworks and analytical methods with different
- Differentiates between "numbers", "data" and "information".
- Is able to review some piece of online or paper literature pertinent
to the student's project interests and to compose a brief report
on this literature which explicitly includes an evaluation of the source
and its credibility.
- Accesses, evaluates, extracts and utilizes information from a
sources available on campus, in the community or electronically for
preparing and executing rudimentary forms of locational or regional
analyses in the context of a student project.
(Learning Objectives) Week 7:
- Appreciates the complexity of tangible and intangible, traded and
interdependencies and linkage systems within modern economies and is able
to give examples for ways by which at least some of such interdependencies
can be conceptualized, traced and modeled.
- Uses relevant concepts to describe the structure of
transportation networks and inter-industry linkages.
- Articulates the nature of economic interdependencies underlying
regional income and employment multiplier processes.
(Learning Objectives) Week 8:
- Expresses how society and its economic actors organize
themselves in space, how spatial, economic, institutional and other
variables interact in the evolution of such organizational structures, and
how organizational configurations in space have, in turn
important implications for the economic and social well-being of
affected groups and societies.
- Outlines alternative scenarios of the ways in which the merger of two
corporations may affect local communities which contain components of
(Learning Objectives) Week 9:
- Has an understanding of some of the relationships between
technological change (including change in information technologies) and
regional economic development.
- Explains the concept of a "product/technology cycle" as it relates,
for example, to the local labor force.
- Is able to suggest some of the reasons why some "high-tech" regions
grow economically while
others stagnate or decline, and provide examples for processes which
lead to such differentiation.
(Learning Objectives) Week 10:
- Appreciates the complexity of economic development processes anywhere
in the world, the difficulty of describing such processes and the
impossibility of ever reaching a total agreement on how to explain such
processes satisfactorily and fully.
- Compares and contrasts at least two different perspectives or
"theories" of economic development.
- Practices old and newly acquired skills in writing, communication,
project-development, information resourcing and
presentation (online and live)
- Selects one of the following forms of presentation and acquires the
necessary knowledge to apply the method to the class tasks and portfolio:
- Overhead transparencies AND Poster
- Online hypertextual format
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