Discuss the future of human geography with reference to the approaches that have emerged since the 1950s.

Geography found its roots during periods of exploration when man's knowledge of the world was still subject to the imagination. For many decades, Europe and the British Empire in particular formed much of what cartography is today, and environmental determinism was widely used to serve imperialist needs. Many ideas and theories were highly influenced and composed by upper class academics and soon critiques were formed. During the mid 1930s, environmental determinism lost much of its support and regional geography fell into to favour. Soon however, regional geography was also criticised due to its limiting scope and constricting
Towards the end of the 20th century, physical geography had had a number of successes and was frequently having science group’s works published in the pages of Nature or Science (N.Thrift, 2002). Human geography was also finding success in its own right. Human geographers were having their works published in numerous credited journals. However the problem that was arising was that geography needed to branch itself out, away from its own circulating community. So in order to evolve and adapt to its every changing environment, geography took a technological leap forward. After the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, new interest emerged in geographic information systems (GIS) to help with the response to hazardous events (S.L. Cutter, R.Golledge, W.L.Graff, 2002).

As a result of this, large public interest began to become prevalent in geography, maybe not necessarily as an academic subject but as an overall discipline. An example of this can be seen in online phenomenon surrounding the Haiti earthquake of 2010. Within days of the hazard occurring, the people of Haiti created a real time map via Openstreetmap thus allowing the emergency services to act quickly to effect areas. This is an impressive display of how geography is being used to engage the mass audience as well as being an