Bachelor’s Degree Programme in Geography

The jeans in your wardrobe? Retail trade in the city? The landscape before our eyes? The river that forms part of this landscape? The distribution of poverty in Germany? The effects of migration and displacement? The development of rural spaces? All of these are geographical topics and therefore part of your studies. Jeans are the result of a complex global supply chain and are studied in economic geography. Historical geography trains your eye to spot traces of humans carved into landscapes and also explores the temporality of spaces and territories, while geomorphology can explain the development of river courses and terraces. Social geography deals with the spatial differentiation of social inequalities and reveals the development potentials of places and regions; it analyses the problems of urban retail, caused by increasing online shopping and the greenfield approach towards relocating shops. Population geography looks at the consequences of demographic change and migratory movements across municipal, regional and national borders.

All of this is just a small snippet of what geography is all about and what geographers engage in. On the website of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geographie (the German Society of Geography), the discipline is outlined as follows: broadly speaking, geography deals with the Earth’s surface, with people and with their material and cultural environment. In general terms, geography is about the world that we live in.

Physical geography, which centres on the natural sciences, examines the structures and dynamics of our natural environment. Human geography, which has a focus on social sciences, looks at the structures and dynamics of cultures, societies, economies and the spatiality of human behaviour, taking into consideration specific local, regional and global influences. It reveals the varied spatial differences and processes of socio-economic structural change and, at the same time, illuminates the causes and effects of social inequalities with a spatial perspective. Geography puts findings about physical and social processes into the specific context of places and regions and thus conveys a differentiated picture of various cultures, economic systems, political systems, lifestyles, environments and landscapes around the world.

Physical geography and human geography work closely together to resolve numerous current and historical spatial issues. In view of the great significance that the physical environment has as the natural foundation of human life, and given the fact that the viability of this foundation is increasingly being disturbed and threatened by human activities, it is undoubtedly of particular importance to be able to consider the various contexts involved with all of their interrelations. This overarching, synthesised perspective can be considered the core of geography as a discipline.