Social geography studies space with its social organization, structure, and social processes. It deals with the study of the interconnections and relationships between people, places, and the environment, and how they vary spatially and temporally across and between locations. Social geography has five main fields of research. The first four – economic, social, cultural, and political – reflect the main areas of contemporary life and the disciplines of social sciences with which geographers interact (for example, economics, sociology, anthropology, political science, and international relations…); fifth is historical geography.

Economic geography has a traditional focus on the distribution and patterns of various production activities – with numerous subdisciplines, such as agricultural geography, industrial geography, and service geography – and on exchange patterns such as transport geography. Contemporary economic geography deals with spatial analyzes of economic activities, such as decision-making processes about the locations of individual companies and their facilities, regulatory regimes of individual states (including policies designed to attract and retain investment), and their impact on spatial patterns of economic activity. Economic geographers investigate how markets for goods and services are culturally created and changed, and the implications in places of production and where jobs are created and destroyed.

Political geography deals with the study of the state and its territory – with the state’s external relations and relations between the government and citizens. Its significant subdisciplines are the geography of conflicts and the geography of elections.

Social geography deals with the study of divisions within society, primarily class, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and age, from a spatial aspect. Mapping where different groups are located with detailed cause-and-effect studies is a common activity, especially in urban areas, such as research on inequality and conflict.

Other subdisciplines associated with social geography are sometimes viewed as separate. Demogeography or population geography studies, among other things, the three most important demographic characteristics: fertility, mortality, and migration. Medical geography focuses on patterns of disease and death—how diseases spread spatially and how variations in morbidity and mortality rates reflect the local environment.

As part of cultural geography, places and locations have a central position when researching cultural changes that involve the mixing of people from different cultural areas. Interpreting different cultural landscapes in accordance with the opinion and work of the local population is one of the tasks of cultural geography.

Some of the most popular research within social geography is part of urban geography, and concerns models and analysis of locations within urban areas and the study of contemporary problems of urban areas and life in them. In recent times, special attention has been drawn to the research of rural geographies such as rural development, poverty, homelessness, social exclusion, and access to communal infrastructure.

Historical geography deals with locational analyzes in order to reconstruct the real and imaginary world of the past. Historical geographers have been researching changes in the landscape for a long time, and their work today also talks about global environmental changes in the past.