Mabuhay sa inyong lahat! We are on the second year of revitalizing the Geography Curricular Programs in the University of the Philippines. Initial responses from university students who have joined us in studying the different places and cultures of the world through our classroom explorations indicate that we have made some major strides in advancing and popularizing the discipline. The Department has also taken some initial steps to expand the reach of Geography and make it more accessible and relevant to other non-academic sectors of our society. We have opened the Geographic Information Systems Laboratory to other government institutions and non-government organizations so that they can make use of the analytical capabilities of the technology in finding solutions to a number of problems that affect their constituents on a daily basis.

So far, this is the only Geography department in the Philippines. We will do our best to bring Geography to where it should be, and that is to the center of decision-making in our country. We also plan to take this vision further by bringing Geography to the countryside so that every locality will take center stage as it faces the challenges of an increasingly globalized environment.

SAUER NAMED MOST POPULAR GEOGRAPHER

American Carl Sauer was voted "Most Popular Geographer" according to a survey of 100 geography undergraduate students of the University of the Philippines in Diliman. Sauer bested 30 other geographers from a list of well-known and widely acclaimed foreign and Filipino geographers.

Born to parents of German heritage, American geographer Carl Sauer served as professor of geography at the University of California at Berkeley for over 50 years. In UC Berkeley, Sauer built a distinguished graduate school and a career that became a great influence on generations of geographers. Sauer sought to unify the areas of physical and human geography through an essentially historical methodology. Sauer advocated a humane use of the environment, pointing to ancient and modern rural cultures as examples. He is widely known for his extensive research on cultural landscapes - the segments of the earth's surface that show evidence of human activity. http://www.slider.com/Enc/S/Sap/Sauer-Ca.html

In second place is French geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache, followed by German Walter Christaller, Canadian Paul Knox and American Yi-Fu Tuan. On the list of Filipino geographers, Dr. Telesforo Luna was the most popular among students followed by Dr. Domingo Salita. Faculty members of the UP Department of Geography were excluded from the survey list.

Based on the survey, human geographers enjoyed greater popularity among UP geography students. In fact, majority of the undergraduate thesis and student papers are on topics and issues under human and cultural geography. This maybe caused by the strong orientation of geography faculty members on human-environment and culture-environment studies. Geography in the Philippines is also experiencing pressures to highlight its distinctive identity apart from geology, which is why most of geographic research tend to move away from studies bordering on geology-physiography. This could explain why physical geography lags behind human geography as far as students’ interests are concerned.

Top Foreign Geographers

Paul Vidal de la Blache
French geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache is the father of French human geography. He was educated at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and had an avid interest in history and geography. He taught geography in Nancy and Paris and was a member of the Faculté des Lettres, Paris, holding the geography chair. He was also the founder and editor of Annales de géographie. Vidal was one of the first scholars to bring forward the idea that there exists an interrelationship between the natural environment and human activities. He stressed the importance of viewing human conditions in relation to their physical and cultural milieu.
http://wwwstage.valpo.edu/geomet/histphil/test/vidal.html

Paul Knox
Internationally renowned geographer Paul Knox was recently named the Dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies in Virginia Technological Institute in the USA. The teachings of Paul Knox centers on urban and regional development, with an emphasis on comparative study. In addition to authoring several books on aspects of economic geography, social geography, and urbanization, Knox is the co-editor of an international journal, Environment & Planning, serves on the editorial boards of several other scientific journals, and is co-editor of a series on World Cities.
http://www.prenhall.com/divisions/esm/app/
knox/html/authors.html

Walter Christaller
German geographer Walter Christaller introduced quantitative and statistic methods for the first time to geography. In the 30s he studied agrarian geography and city planning in South Germany. He is famous for the “Central Place Theory” a theoretical work that explains the spatial spread and dimensions of urban centers. In this theory, Christaller claims that the role of large cities and towns is to coordinate within the regions, the supply of goods and services. He wrote the famous book “The Central Places in South Germany” in 1933 which, although highly criticized, remains one of the most significant and most widely referenced theories in the field of geography.
http://www.uwec.edu/bfoust/155/
G155_RS3/tsld002.htm

Yi-Fu Tuan
Yi-Fu Tuan is as much a psychologist as he is a geographer, concerning himself above all with the ways human beings respond to their physical environment. Tuan's work often transcends and ties together ideas from the seemingly unrelated scholastic worlds of philosophy, psychology, urban planning landscape architecture and anthropology. He has spent his career researching how humans fashion personal and cultural realities, and how those processes reflect our collective and personal ideas of what a good life is. The topics of his writings range from the cultural role of pets to the moral implications of urban design to pondering what the 'good life' is. One conclusion that Tuan has come to after years of study is that societies moral code has the potential to help unify the culture. He thinks that including moral studies in college curriculum might provide similar unity for higher education.
http://www.cwu.edu/~geograph/yi_fu.html

http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/meetinarticles/
plenaries.html

Telesforo W. Luna, Jr.
Telesforo W. Luna, Jr. is one of the pioneers in the field of geography in the Philippines. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Foreign Service from the University of the Philippines-Diliman in 1953 and finished his M.A. (Physical Geography) and Ph.D (Economic and Urban Geography) at Clark University, USA at the age of 25. He completed his post-doctorate degree in Demography as a Population Council Fellow at Pennsylvania State University. He served more than 40 years as a professor in UP-Diliman and became the longest serving chairperson of the Department of Geography. He has written numerous researches on resource conservation and management, physiography, urban geography, and economic geography. He is fondly remembered by his colleagues and students for his emphasis on discipline and academic excellence.

Domingo Salita
Doming Salita has a rich and varied educational background but he is best known as one of the founding pillars of geography in the Philippines. Dr. Salita started teaching in UP Diliman in 1939 and became Chairperson of the Department of Geology and Geography, and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1972-1976. One of the most prolific geographers in this part of the world, Dr. Salita also served as Chair of the National Research Council of the Philippines and the National Committee on Geographical Sciences. He wrote the famous article "Manila" which was published in the 1974 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and authored the book "Geography and Natural Resources of the Philippines. National Research Council of the Philippines