Hall's concept of proxemics considers human uses of space within the context of culture. Implications relate to cross-cultural communication processes and to the design of built environments.

Semple is recognized as a pioneer in the study of human-environment interaction. Her research also foreshadowed contemporary concerns with cultural and political ecology in the social sciences.

Edge City and The Nine Nations of North America reflect observations by a journalist about the social and political forces transforming the geography of contemporary North America. Garreau's analysis has intrigued both academic and nonacademic audiences, especially his concepts of regionalization and ideas about the urban-regional transformation of landscapes at local and continental scales.

In the 1920s, Park and Burgess developed a distinctive program of urban research at the University of Chicago. In  projects focused on Chicago, they elaborated a theory of urban ecology that drew parallels with processes found in natural ecosystems, leading ultimately to  the division of the urban space into distinctive ecological niches or "natural areas" in which people shared similar social characteristics.

Mayhew approached his work on London Labour and the London Poor ethnographically, interviewing his subjects directly to render vivid biographical sketches of those who struggled to survive in Victorian London. He also completed a series of choropleth maps on the overall intensity of criminality, illiteracy, teenage marriage, and other social indicators. Mayhew's maps were among the earliest attempts to study crime using cartographic techniques.

Kurath's primary goal was to use the Linguistic Atlas to map the evolution of American English from the relatively "pure" forms of English brought to the United States by early settlers to the regional dialects that existed in the contemporary United States. He saw language patterns on maps derived from field surveys as a living record of events related to the growth of trade and transport systems, urbanization, and population movements.

In 1893 the U.S. Congress commissioned  a Special Investigation of the Slums of Great Cities to assess the extent of poverty in urban areas. Florence Kelley led a related effort in Chicago to create a series of maps similar to Charles Booth's (1840–1916) maps of poverty in London. The objective was to provide graphic evidence of the urgent need to address poverty and other social problems.

The Taeubers demonstrated the value of census mapping of residential and educational segregation in the United States. Their early attempt to integrate quantitative segregation research and cartographic techniques (Negroes in Cities, 1965), used the dissimilarity index to compare residential segregation in 207 U.S. cities.

Griliches' research demonstrated that the adoption of new technologies like hybrid corn was not a single event, but was instead a series of developments that occurred at different rates across geographical space.

Meade synthesizes ideas from  anthropology, ecology, medicine, and demography to construct an integrated model of the core dimensions of medical geography. This model sees health as the outcome of interactions among the dimensions of population, environment, and culture.