Henri Nicolaas ter Veen 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, 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.