Topography

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Translated literally from its Greek roots of topos (place) and graphein (to write), topography means “the writing of place.” In modern usage, however, the term has taken on more complex significance. As J. Hillis Miller notes (1995, p. 3), the term has come to refer to both the practice of accurate, scientific representation of particular places on the earth’s surface and the actual configuration of those places. In social science, topographies (both representational and actual) are of interest to researchers investigating relationships between societies and local environments. Such studies are common within the disciplines of geography, anthropology, archaeology, and sociology, and are sometimes found within economics and political science. As the diversity of disciplines with topographical interests reveals, the term topography addresses a fundamental aspect of human experience (place) and thus serves as a foundational category around which social inquiry can be organized.

The dominant modern usage of the term has been in reference to the material configuration of places on the earth’s surface, typically with an emphasis on physical geography rather than the built environment. As Robert Christopherson makes clear (2002, p. 338), topographical studies based upon this emphasis are marked by the observation and recording of landscape features such as hill and mountain relief (dramatic or modest), slope angles (shallow or steep), drainage patterns (wetlands and rivers), and terrain characteristics (rugged or smooth, vegetated or barren) for specific locales. The goal of such studies is to define regional topographies (in the material sense) and provide the environmental knowledge (through representation) needed to facilitate land use decisions appropriate to specific social and economic goals. For instance, as Scott Kirsch (2002) outlines in an essay on John Wesley Powell’s (1834–1902) survey of the Colorado Plateau and surrounding area in the 1870s, in the late nineteenth century the U.S. government was keen to gain knowledge of the arid region of the American West so that land and resource use decisions could be made for an expanding nation. In particular, Powell was charged with ascertaining the irrigation potential of the region for agrarian settlement. Due to the undulating and arid topography, he argued, the grid system of land allotment typical of the Midwestern United States was not suited to the area. Instead, he recommended that all lots should abut water sources, even if that resulted in the alienation of land in irregular shapes. By observing and recording the characteristics of the physical geography of the region and combining the information for presentation in cartographic form, Powell’s work provided distant decision makers with knowledge of local environmental conditions, thereby enabling the setting of social policies regarding land allocation and resource rights. Of course, this relationship between topographical information and land and resource use marks a variety of enterprises and activities. From hikers’ use of maps to navigate mountain ranges to military officers’ use of electronic geographical information to locate specific place-based threats and targets, understanding the material arrangement of the physical environment of certain locales is central to decision making and interaction with places.

While modern topographical studies have tended to focus on the material configuration of places on the earth’s surface in order to facilitate land and resource use, this has not been an exclusive orientation. The term topography has been seized upon by a variety of researchers in the social sciences and humanities who are interested in place-based human experience. The humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1974) has written about the centrality of place to human experience, the appreciation of which he terms topophilia. Eugene V. Walter, in an attempt to formulate a more general understanding of humans’ physiological attachment to place, has proposed the study of topisitics as a “framework to grasp the whole experience of space and place” (1988, p. 18). Asserting that “topostic inquiry seeks theories that represent and explain forces that make or break the integrity of located experience” (p. 18), Walter seeks to emphasize that places are more than the sum of their material components and that people’s interactions with places form a central front in inquiries into both environments and the human mind. And, in his work on the relationship between literature, philosophy, and place, Miller (1995, p. 4) deploys the term topography to question how particular ways of knowing places have been inserted into modern Western epistemologies through language. Noting that in modern usage topography shifts between signifying representations of places and signifying actual characteristics of places, he highlights the connections between the production of knowledge about places and the experience of them. In different ways, then, these authors and others have moved understandings of topographies beyond concern for merely the material configuration of places and instead highlighted the multiplicity of ways in which humans become attached to and interact with places.

In an essay that brings together the human and physical aspects of place through a historical materialist approach, Cindi Katz argues for a conceptualization of topography as the sociomaterial terrain produced by an ever-globalizing capitalism. She insists that topographical studies “encompass the processes that produce landscapes as much as they do the landscapes themselves, making clear the social nature of nature and the material grounds of social life” (2001, p. 720). Further, Katz argues, the production of topographies “simultaneously turns on, reveals, and specifies the intricate relations among discrete places.” As such, topographical studies “can provide literal and figurative grounds for developing a critique of the social and political-economic relations sedimented into space and for examining the range of social practices through which place is produced” (pp. 720–721). Ultimately, Katz points out that this framework enables the development of a series of countertopographies. She envisions these as “linking different places analytically in order to both develop the contours of common struggles and imagine a different kind of practical response to problems confronting them” (p. 722). In combination, Katz’s conceptualization of topographies and countertopographies provides a resource for critical analyses of place that takes seriously the impacts of political and economic history in shaping local terrain.

As is evident from this survey, topography is a malleable and widely used term. With its focus on place and human understanding of it, the term and the studies organized around it are central to a comprehensive pursuit of social science. Whether material, social, or both, topographies (both representation and actual) mediate the lives people lead and help to define the places in which they are lived.

SEE ALSO Anthropology; Archaeology; Architecture; Geography; Human Ecology; Irrigation; Natural Resources, Nonrenewable; Water Resources

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Christopherson, Robert W. 2002. Geosystems: An Introduction to Physical Geography. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Katz, Cindi. 2001. Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction. Antipode 33 (4): 709–728.

Kirsch, Scott. 2002. John Wesley Powell and the Mapping of the Colorado Plateau, 1869–1879: Survey Science, Geographical Solutions, and the Economy of Environmental Values. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92 (3): 548–572.

Miller, J. Hillis. 1995. Topographies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1974. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Walter, Eugene Victor. 1988. Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

David A. Rossiter

soils and topography Relief or topography is one of the five main factors that influence the way soils develop. The influence of topography on soil formation operates through three main elements: slope angle, slope position, and altitude. Slope angle influences processes such as the movement of the soil and water. Slope position governs whether soils are net receivers or net losers of soil and water. Altitude affects climate, which is also an important soil-forming factor. Areas of great relative relief, such as mountain areas, often experience different climate characteristics from lower to upper slopes, which are usually expressed in terms of different rainfall and temperature regimes. This generally results in a vertical zonation of soil types, which can correspond to a zonation of vegetation types. Thus, a typical sequence on tropical mountains is from lowland tropical forest, through submontane, montane, and subalpine vegetation zones to the alpine zones of grasses and shrubs.

It has been known for some time that soils vary systematically along a transect from the top to the bottom of a hill slope. The effect of topography is seen best on slopes developed on a single rock-type; it may otherwise be difficult to differentiate the effect of topography from that of rock-type. Soil differences are usually related to changes in soil moisture and availability of water. In any explanation of the way in which soils vary with topography, emphasis is placed on the difference between freely drained upper parts of hill slopes and imperfectly to poorly drained lower portions.

There is a continuum between those parts of a slope where the influence of soil moisture is at a minimum and those parts where maximum influence of soil moisture is felt. Slope steepness is one of the most important factors affecting soil moisture, because it influences the balance between the amount of water that infiltrates into the soil and the amount of water that runs off as surface flow. On steep slopes relatively less water infiltrates, thus reducing percolation and the intensity of leaching processes within the soil. On steep slopes more water within the soil will also flow downslope as ‘through flow’. If less water infiltrates, more will flow across the surface, perhaps resulting in soil erosion. Soluble minerals are leached from soils on upper slopes, move down the slope, and are often deposited at the foot of the slope (Fig. 1). This leads to different trends in soil properties on upper and lower slopes. Upper slopes are associated with processes of removal of soil and water, whereas lower slopes are associated essentially with deposition and accumulation. Some workers have made the distinction between ‘non-cumulative’ soils on upper slopes and ‘cumulative’ soils on lower slopes. The operation of such effects across the entire hill slope produces a series of systematic changes in soil properties and soil profiles. The greatest concentrations of certain soil properties, such as the amount of organic matter present, would be expected on the gentler areas at the top and bottom of hill slopes.

Variation in soil colour often provides a clue to the processes that are operating. Colour changes are especially prominent on many tropical hill slopes. Upland, well-drained soils are reddish-brown, the colour indicating the presence of non-hydrated iron oxide. Drainage is slower on middle and lower parts of hill slopes, partly because of moisture seeping downslope from upper soils. Middle- to lower-slope soils remain moist longer and dry out less frequently and less completely. This causes the iron to become increasingly hydrated, and the red colour changes to brown or yellow. Drainage is poor on the lowest slopes and part, or all, of the soil profile may be waterlogged, leading to chemical reduction of iron. Under waterlogged conditions bacteria obtain their oxygen from oxygen-containing compounds, which are then reduced to other compounds (see soil development). Such waterlogged soils are usually bluish-grey, greenish-grey, or neutral grey in colour, although if the water-table fluctuates, alternate oxidizing and reducing conditions will lead to the formation of red and grey mottles.

The recognition that there are clear patterns of soils on slopes and that these patterns repeat themselves on similar slopes in similar environments led to the formulation of the catena concept. A catena is a grouping of soils which are linked in their occurrence by conditions of topography and are found in the same relationships to each other wherever the same conditions are met. The concept was first developed in the 1930s by G. Milne, working in East Africa, and was used as a way of mapping soils over wide areas. The assumption made was that where slope patterns were similar, soil patterns would also be similar. Since then catenas have been recognized in a variety of areas and under a variety of climatic conditions, an indication of the strength of the relationship between soil and topography.

John Gerrard

Bibliography

Birkeland, P. W. (1984) Soils and geomorphology. Oxford University Press, New York.
Gerrard, J. (1992) Soil geomorphology. Chapman and Hall, London.

topography , description or representation of the features and configuration of land surfaces. Topographic maps use symbols and coloring, with particular attention given to the shape and elevations of terrain. Relief is portrayed by means of contour lines, hachures, shading, or coloring to represent elevations, depressions, and depths of water; natural and human-made features, such as rivers, forests, urbanized areas, bridges, roads, and power lines, are indicated by symbols and color overlays. Topography is often used incorrectly as a synonym for relief ; the submarine analogue is bathymetry.

to·pog·ra·phy / təˈpägrəfē/ • n. the arrangement of the natural and artificial physical features of an area: the topography of the island. ∎  a detailed description or representation on a map of such features. ∎  Anat. & Biol. the distribution of parts or features on the surface of or within an organ or organism. DERIVATIVES: to·pog·ra·pher / -fər/ n.

topography (tŏ-pog-răfi) n. the study of the different regions of the body, including the description of its parts in relation to the surrounding structures. corneal t. (videokeratography) a technique in which an image projected onto the cornea is analysed by computer to produce a representation of the shape and refractive power of the corneal surface.
—topographical (top-ŏ-graf-ikăl) adj.

topography •daffy, taffy •Amalfi •Cavafy, Gaddafi •Effie •beefy, Fifi, leafy •cliffy, iffy, jiffy, Liffey, niffy, sniffy, spiffy, squiffy, stiffy, whiffy •salsify •coffee, toffee •wharfie •Sophie, strophe, trophy •Dufy, goofy, Sufi •fluffy, huffy, puffy, roughie, roughy, scruffy, snuffy, stuffy, toughie •comfy • atrophy •anastrophe, catastrophe •calligraphy, epigraphy, tachygraphy •dystrophy, epistrophe •autobiography, bibliography, biography, cardiography, cartography, chirography, choreography, chromatography, cinematography, cosmography, cryptography, demography, discography, filmography, geography, hagiography, historiography, hydrography, iconography, lexicography, lithography, oceanography, orthography, palaeography (US paleography), photography, pornography, radiography, reprography, stenography, topography, typography •apostrophe •gymnosophy, philosophy, theosophy •furphy, murphy, scurfy, surfy, turfy