Place (geography)
The terms location and place in geography are used to identify a point or an area on the Earth's surface or elsewhere. The term location generally implies a higher degree of certainty than place, which often indicates an entity with an ambiguous boundary, relying more on human or social attributes of place identity and sense of place than on geometry.
The distinction between space and place has been addressed by scholars such as Yi-Fu Tuan,Doreen Massey, Nigel Thrift, and John Agnew. Earlier humanistic approaches to place as a site of subjective experience have triggered Marxist, post-structuralist, and feminist criticisms, which have informed more recent accounts of place as socially produced and politically contested.
A relative location, or situation, is described as a displacement from another site. An example is "3 miles northwest of Seattle".
A location, settlement, or populated place is likely to have a well-defined name but a boundary which is not well defined in varies by context. London, for instance, has a legal boundary, but this is unlikely to completely match with general usage. An area within a town, such as Covent Garden in London, also almost always has some ambiguity as to its extent.
An absolute location is designated using a specific pairing of latitude and longitude in a Cartesian coordinate grid — for example, a Spherical coordinate system or an ellipsoid-based system such as the World Geodetic System — or similar methods. For instance, the position of Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela can be expressed approximately in the WGS84 coordinate system as the location 9.80°N (latitude), 71.56°W (longitude). It is, however, just one way. Alternative ways can be seen in this Geo Hack link: 9°48′N 71°34′W / 9.80°N 71.56°W.
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