Henri Nicolaas ter Veen

Henri Nicolaas ter Veen (19 February 1883 – 7 November 1949) was a Dutch social geographer. He was born in Amsterdam in a simple working class family from the Jordaan. In 1901 he became a teacher at a primary school in Amsterdam. While studying geography het met Sebald Rudolf Steinmetz (nl), the founder of the Dutch school of sociography. In 1925, he earned his doctorate under Steinmetz with a dissertation about the colonisation of the Haarlemmermeer, a polder in the Netherlands, consisting of land reclaimed from water.

Illness forced him to relinquish his post prematurely in 1948, and he died in 1949. He played an important role in popularising social geography in the Netherlands. From its founding in 1925, he served as editorial secretary of the academic journal Mensch en Maatschappij (People and Society). In 1940 he founded the Instituut voor Sociaal Onderzoek van het Nederlandse Volk ((ISONEVO), Social Research Institute of the Netherlands) the first applied social research facilities in the Netherlands.