People’s perception of places and regions is not uniform. Rather, their view of a particular place or region is their interpretation of its location, extent, characteristics, and significance as influenced by their own culture and experience. It is sometimes said that there is no reality, only perception. In geography there is always a mixture of both the objective and subjective realms, and that is why the geographically informed person needs to understand both realms and needs to see how they relate to each other.

Individuals have singular life histories and experiences, which are reflected in their having singular mental maps of the world that may change from day to day and from experience to experience. As a consequence, individuals endow places and regions with rich, diverse, and varying meanings. In explaining their beliefs and actions, individuals routinely refer to age, sex, class, language, ethnicity, race, and religion as part of their cultural identity, although some of their actions may be at least partly a result of sharing values with others. These shared beliefs and values reflect the fact that individuals live in social or cultural groups or sets of groups. The values of these groups are usually complex and cover such subjects as ideology, religion, politics, social structure, and economic structure. They influence how the people in a particular group perceive both themselves and other groups.

The significance that an individual or group attaches to a specific place or region may be influenced by feelings of belonging or alienation, a sense of being an insider or outsider, a sense of history or tradition or of novelty and unfamiliarity. People’s perception of Earth’s surface is strongly linked to the concept of place utility—the significance that a place has to a particular function or people. For example, a wilderness area may be seen as a haven by a backpacker or as an economic threat by a farming family trying to hold back forest growth at the edges of its fields. The physical reality of the wilderness area is the same in both cases, but the perceptual frameworks that assign meaning to it are powerfully distinct. A place or region can be exciting and dynamic, or boring and dull depending on an individual’s experience, expectations, frame of mind, or need to interact with that particular landscape. The range, therefore, of perceptual responses to a place or region is not only vast, but it is also continually changing.

Some places or regions are imbued with great significance by certain groups of people, but not by others. For example, for Muslims the city of Mecca is the most holy of religious places, whereas for non-Muslims it has only historical significance. For foreign tourists Rio de Janeiro is a city of historical richness that evokes images of grandness, energy, and festiveness, but for many local street youths it is a harsh environment where they have to struggle for daily survival. Around the world the names of such places as Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Bhopal, and Chernobyl convey profoundly sad and horrific collective images, but for people who live there, the reality of life tends to be how best to earn a living, raise a family, educate children, and enjoy one’s leisure time. At another level, Disneyland or “my hometown” may evoke equally strong but positive and idiosyncratic images among local inhabitants. People’s group perceptions of places and regions may change over time. For instance, as settlement and knowledge spread westward during the nineteenth century, parts of what are now Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska went from being labeled as within the Great American Desert to being likened to the Garden of Eden. Then during the drought years of the 1930s, these same areas changed character yet again, becoming the heart of what was known as the Dust Bowl.

Culture and experience shape belief systems, which in turn influence people’s perceptions of places and regions throughout their lives. So it is essential that students understand the factors that influence their own perceptions of places and regions, paying special attention to the effects that personal and group points of view can have on their understanding of other groups and cultures. Accordingly, it may be possible for students to avoid the dangers of egocentric and ethnocentric stereotyping, to appreciate the diverse values of others in a multicultural world, and to engage in accurate and sensitive analysis of people, places, and environments.