I have been asked many times what do geographers do or study because the last time many people thought about geography was in elementary school where the emphasis may have been on the location of countries, states, and capital cities or knowing the principal products of places. Well, that is like thinking of history as memorizing a list of dates associated with particular events without fleshing out their significance or broader context.
Geographers’ primary concerns are the distribution of phenomena at a human scale. Geographers study both natural phenomena and social or cultural phenomena in various ways. Three major ways of organizing geographic data are:
a. First by categories of natural phenomena such as climatology, geomorphology, and biogeography or by categories of cultural phenomena such as urban geography, agricultural geography or political geography.
b. Second by changes in the distribution of phenomena over time such as the changes in the distribution of urban blight in cities of the Northeast or of the spread deserts throughout the last 10,000 years.
c. And Third by looking at the characteristics of an area or place such as a wilderness area, an urban landscape, or the topography of a place. (Landscape studies.)
It is the latter geographic category that I will use tonight. I will describe the topographic history of Seville, Spain, through the uses of maps (another specialty of geographers).
Topography literally means the description of place from the Greek graphia ( writing) and (topos) place. I also want to use the metaphor of palimpsest with the meaning of a parchment or tablet which has been used and erased several times, literally from the Greek palim (again) + psestos (rubbed smooth). Seville is a landscape that has been used and built over again and again with traces of the older built forms still evident.