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This paper engages with digital urban futures prospectively, departing from most existing geographical work that has tended to explore the future retrospectively. I do so by first discussing a methodology that is sensitive to the meanings and significations of the future as well as future‐making as an active process, or as 'practised'. I argue that such an orientation is necessary to challenge the established view of the future as an endpoint or as a priori in social and cultural geography and, correspondingly, invite a more processual and emergent understanding of the future as multiple, never complete and always becoming. Using the example of Singapore's Smart Nation initiative, I then show how this methodological approach can be employed to study the way urban dwellers encounter, engage and evaluate possible futures in their everyday spaces and lives. Focusing on futures prospectively is significant insofar as it directs attention to their relationality and open‐endedness, which, in turn, provides the latitude to consider and construct different forms of futures. Beyond the methodological contribution, this paper offers an epistemological intervention that not only unpicks how knowledge about the future is currently produced in the literature but also multiplies our ways of studying futurity and future‐making. This paper engages with digital urban futures prospectively, departing from most existing work that has tended to explore the future retrospectively. Using the example of the E‐Payments programme in Singapore, I show how a prospective methodological approach can be employed to study the way urban dwellers encounter, engage and evaluate possible futures in their everyday spaces and lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2007, on the cusp of the economic crisis, a paper was published in Growth and Change (June 2007) entitled "Shadow Europe: alternative European financial geographies," which began to tackle the idea of shadow finance in Europe and the size and inseparability of what was regarded as "shadow" from "normal" financial flows. A number of the observations made have proved remarkably prescient and one particular phrase stands out in the light of the recent revelations about the so‐called Panama Papers in 2016: "Strategically important flows of capital derived from complex underground production systems that have seldom been analyzed in detail move through the European financial networks that connect to offshore tax havens (Christensen, 2003). These havens are not a separate and distinct entity from the financial networks that connect world cities but rather a vital counterpart on which the functioning of the cities connected via those networks depends" (2007, p. 319). The revelation of the Panama Papers constitutes a new critical juncture from which to re‐visit that 2007 paper and to re‐examine the state of knowledge on shadow and formal financial flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the origins of Tivers' 1978 paper "How the other half lives: the geographical study of women," tracing these through a consideration of societal expectations at the time, which were mirrored in the content and approach of 1970s Geography in the UK. Attention is given here both to this original context of the paper and to its context in subsequent publications and in the overall career of the author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short paper, we thank the authors of the papers in this special section, and briefly respond to their insightful and important contributions. We then each provide a brief account of how the 2004 paper emerged, and reflect on our fieldwork 'journeys' since its publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special section addresses the geographies of knowledge and expertise across contemporary environmental and planning challenges. Understanding the changing role of expert knowledge and how it weaves its way into policy and decision‐making is more important than ever given the mammoth challenges we face. Different forms of expertise can often be conflicting and competing with one another, reflecting the power relations underpinning their deployment. The four papers in this special section from geography and planning speak to the diverse knowledge claims and networks of expertise that shape and seek to challenge contemporary decision‐making. The special section reflects on how embedded expertise operates across different sectors and scales. It pays attention to how expertise can become destabilised across particular geographies, as the mobility of knowledge generated in one context is deployed elsewhere. By attending to the multiplicities of knowledge at play across environmental and planning challenges, the papers break down the assumption that there is a single form of expertise. This special section addresses the geographies of knowledge and expertise across contemporary environmental and planning challenges. The four papers from geography and planning speak to the diverse knowledge claims and networks of expertise that shape and seek to challenge contemporary decision‐making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on a digital public history project conducted by the authors in Madison, Wisconsin. It uses these reflections to show how digital methods can create new possibilities in the field of historic preservation, and to emphasise that new technology alone does not cut through old challenges relating to public engagement. The bias towards newness and fluidity in digital methods offers an instructive contrast to the bias towards permanence and continuity in historic preservation. Bringing these two worlds into dialogue offers the possibility of strengthening each. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Muddy glee' by Bracken and Mawdsley made an important contribution to highlighting gender discrimination in fieldwork and the heterogeneity of fieldwork experiences. In the past couple of years, the ability of many researchers to engage in fieldwork has also changed dramatically due to the COVID‐19 pandemic. Here, we reflect on Bracken and Mawdsley's paper and our own experiences and perspectives of fieldwork in recent years. We discuss a previous paper we co‐authored (entitled 'Pushing the limits': experiences of women in tropical peatland research), and the benefits that these papers (e.g., 'Muddy glee' and 'Pushing the limits') may provide. We highlight the value of sharing personal experiences in science (which is often seen as an 'objective' space), and how writing for ourselves can be an empowering and community‐building act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Classics Revisited section focuses on Jacqueline Tivers' seminal paper, "How the other half lives." Published in 1978, the paper sought to highlight the experiences of women, to combat the male‐centred nature of geography as a discipline, and to draw attention to inequalities that result from ascribed gender roles. Our introductory piece explains the rationale behind choosing this paper as an Area "Classic," provides an overview of the key arguments of the original paper, and briefly summarises the reflective pieces that follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lure of an unavailable world is becoming increasingly prominent in Geography and related disciplines. The concern is that much research today remains affirmational—still grasping and instrumentalising being and relation—and that, whilst no doubt modified in such developments as the relational and ontological turns, this nevertheless continues the legacies of the modern episteme in new ways. Indeed, there is a marked momentum, across the social sciences and humanities, from cultural geography to computer and Black studies, to read the reduction of the world to available ontic and ontological cuts and distinctions as a form of violence. In response, tropes of the non‐relational, non‐ontological, the negative, nothingness, the void, absence and the abyss, for examples—what could be called 'unavailable geographies'—are of growing appeal and interest. This paper, foregrounding the importance of tracking how the material forces of history are read as enabling for the emergence of any new problem space, provides a distinctive pathway into this sense of a critical shift in Western critique. By way of an illustrative example, it focuses upon how the proliferation of logistics (broadly framed here as the logic of obtaining the world by way of cuts and distinctions, from metric culture, to identity politics, to the grasping of ontology and relation) is increasingly understood to open up the power of an undifferentiating reality; one which expands and deepens the unavailable world as a problem space for critique. Thus, whilst geographers, like many others, are currently critiquing dominant approaches for being too affirmational, the key argument of this paper is that we should also be taking one step back, asking why now, and through what broader forces of history, the lure of an unavailable world today? The lure of an unavailable world is becoming increasingly prominent in Geography and related disciplines. The concern is that much research today remains affirmational – still grasping and instrumentalising being and relation – and that, whilst no doubt modified in such developments as the relational and ontological turns, this nevertheless continues the legacies of the modern episteme in new ways. Yet, whilst Geographers, like many others, are currently critiquing dominant approaches for being too affirmational, the key argument of this paper is that we should also be taking one step back, asking: why now, and through what broader forces of history, the lure of an unavailable world today? By way of an example, the paper explores the proliferation of logistics in contemporary Western societies and how this opens up the lure of an unavailable world for both supporters and detractors of logistical world‐making alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]