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Critical insurance studies recognises insurance as not purely actuarial and calculative. From this recognition, this theoretically informed research pays attention to the reproduction of power in insurantial discourse and practice, and possibilities for equitable change. To extend geographical contributions in this regard, I review critical insurance research and describe three intersecting foci – governmentality, materiality and spatiality. I also contribute new insights in considering insurance as co-constituting fluid and fire space – as flowing and adapting within everyday complexities, and as fiery and constituted through multiple flickering realities. These contestable multiplicities and mobilities may contribute to more equitable configurations beyond the hegemonic.

This article discusses the relation between human geography and European Studies and critically questions the role of geography in producing knowledge on ‘Europe’ and shaping debates about it. It lays out how geographic contributions to European Studies can roughly be grouped into three broad categories: Europeanization and economic geographies of integration; urban, regional and spatial planning; and critical (geopolitical) approaches to the European Union. They lack, however, an engagement with future processes of European (dis)integration. This article, thus, offers an approach to visionary geographies that seeks to strengthen both geography’s theoretical input and applied contributions to European Studies.

For 25 years, China has staked its development on domestic and global infrastructure expansion. This third progress report on geographies of infrastructure explores what China’s far-reaching infrastructure venture means for critical infrastructure studies. Reviewing China’s infrastructure-driven urban growth, the Belt and Road Initiative and their links, three recommendations are advanced: (1) a reengagement with the state that takes its geographical and temporal diversity seriously, (2) an approach to infrastructure as part of a complex network of state projects with long-term ends, and (3) a concern with infrastructures of repression and confinement in wider processes of making things ‘flow’.

In this second report, I discuss the role of newness in GIScience, drawing distinctions between ‘the new’, as a state of emergent technology and technical situation, and imminence, a state of happenings and becomings. I suggest that GIScience often reduces the two to each other – what is imminent is that which is new – with specific implications for the use of geospatial techniques and technologies in explicitly radical, critical, and anti-racist projects. To engage in this work means often to make do with what is available and accessible, with no less need for experimentation and innovation.

Mobilities scholars have shown how injustices may arise from forced movement or stillness. However, with notable exceptions, these studies tend to collapse analyses of race into a simplistic binary of immobility as an inherent characteristic of non-white people and the possibility of movement as only granted to white people. In this article, I call for an expanded approach that is inclusive of both the controlling forces of white supremacy and life-affirming resistance against and despite these constraints. Drawing from Black studies and Black Geographies, I argue for a more unified Black mobilities research agenda.

This report draws on the burgeoning geography literature on ‘big tech’ and how scholars have responded to its spatial impacts. First, it traces the revival in locational geographies and the role of global platform firms in shaping urban market geographies; second, it traces work on the urban governance and regulatory challenges posed by different types of capital; and technology entrepreneurship and start-up firms; third, it identifies work that has traced the impact of apps and platforms on the conduct of urban life, from delivery drivers to taxis to dating to real estate rental.

Political ecologists focus on power relations across scales to develop assessments of systems that produce and maintain crises, such as the overlapping conjunctural crises of the coronavirus pandemic and climate breakdown. Such analyses clarify processual and interconnecting factors, exposing the contours of uneven differentiations and coproductions, while offering possible alternative futures. This report engages recent scholarship wherein conjunctural analysis raises issues for how we understand socionatural processes and outcomes, lessons learned, and the exigencies of critical publics in academia and beyond.

As pressures around academic writing mount, human geographers have developed critical strategies to resist and rework the institutional politics of research writing. Overlooked, until now, is the role of pedagogy. We advance an engaged pedagogy of research writing and use this concept to propose three practical strategies: (1) understanding writing as social practice; (2) reimagining the temporalities of writing; and, (3) reimagining the spatialities of writing. We argue that an engaged pedagogical approach expands the possibilities of how human geographers can critically and practically respond to the institutional politics of research writing.

Proposed as an urban pedestrian practice in French texts of the 1950s, the current vogue for English-language references to psychogeography dates from the 1990s. Sampling this corpus, much of it outside academic geography, this article examines some of psychogeography’s trajectories, connections and affinities, notably with nature writing. In minding gaps, the article considers gendered, decolonial and Muslim registers that extend the range of sites and protagonists, heralding other priorities and opportunities both within and beyond the North Atlantic. Finally, reflecting on what lessons lie in psychogeography and its margins for human geography, the article reconsiders questions of narrative and scale.

Refugee camp geographies vary greatly; however, the most fleeting informal camps and decades-old institutional settlements have in common that they are meant to be temporary. While research on camps has been attentive to their spatialities, relatively little work has focused on closures. However, we consider the permanent possibility of closure as a constitutive element of life-in-the-camp. Closures, then, must be situated within the exclusionary landscapes in which states manage migrants custody, protection and displacement. We accordingly present camp closures as manifestations of sovereign power and the study of camp afterlives as key to critical understandings of camp geographies.

This article is the first of three reviews in which economic geography is viewed through the lens of crises. This article focuses on the resurgence of uneven development as a political problem, which has led to public policy debates and responses in which economic geography is an underpinning construct. The article focuses on the UK where public policy responses have engaged with the problems caused by uneven development. Arguments made over many years about the long-term damaging impacts of geographical inequalities in opportunity and income have broken through into the political mainstream and gained traction. The article explains how this happened, as an already unbalanced regional economy was exacerbated first through growth led by financial services and then austerity-led decline. There are opportunities for economic geography in this public policy conjuncture, although it will require an ability to engage competently and critically with mainstream economics, and a willingness to work with political actors and a challenging, frustrating, and uncomfortable political process. Moreover, it also requires that the problem of uneven development remains adequately defined and attended to, so that appropriate public policy responses may be formulated, and continues to garner sufficient political attention, to allow both time and opportunity for intervention in public policy.

Social network analysis has become a popular methodology in human geography. This article develops three propositions – connectivity, contextuality, and reflexivity – for relational analysis to overcome the dualism between universalist network science on the one hand and idiosyncratic network stories on the other. Building on a detailed meta-analysis of over 300 network studies published between 1990 and 2018, we offer a sympathetic critique of the actual use of network methods in human geography. To unleash further potential of network research, we propose several research strategies for more inclusive relational analysis, including informed pre-specification, triangulation, and communicative validation.

Urban political ecology (UPE) focuses on unsettling traditional understandings of ‘cities’ as ontological entities separate from ‘nature’ and on how the production of settlements is metabolically linked with flows of capital and more-than-human ecological processes. The contribution of this paper is to recalibrate UPE to new urban forms and processes of extended urbanization. This exploration goes against the reduction of what goes on outside of cities to processes that emanate unidirectionally from cities. Acknowledging UPE’s rich intellectual history and aiming to enrich rather than split the field, this paper identifies four emerging discourses that go beyond UPE’s original formulation.

Despite renewed interest in suburban studies and a decentring of geographies of sexualities, the queer suburban remains a neglected arena of inquiry. This article argues for greater attention to ‘queer’ suburbanisms to deconstruct suburbia as implicitly heterosexualized. It critiques the persistent heteronormativity of key concepts – suburbanization, suburban diversification and suburbanisms – in Anglo-American-Australian suburban studies. It then remaps the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ+) urban by highlighting inconsistencies in queer metronormativities critiques and evaluating census studies and gay ethnographies to decentre the queer metropolis. The article concludes by complicating how queer metronormativities conceive of their margins and destabilizing the sexual contours of heterosuburbia.

This article rethinks processes and practices of urban temporariness in a more agile, localised and context-specific way, where rhythms and dynamics of the everyday are clearly acknowledged. It discusses the directions of research required to theorise ‘temporary urbanisms’. To do so, three overlapping literatures are used: Lefebvrian conceptualisations of rhythms and the everyday; evolutionary analyses of path of change and path creation; and geographies of architecture. This article recognises that although temporariness is (evidently) a universal urban condition, diverse discursive and practical dynamics exist directing urban temporariness along particular channels and shaping space significantly while impacting people’s living environments.

This article argues that work on geographies of Blackness and Black Geographies emphasizes different aspects of Black experiences and relies on different methodologies in making these emphases. I focus on the work of six prominent geographers who engage with questions of Blackness and examine the different data sources they draw on. I show that they all employ a multi-method, interdisciplinary approach in their scholarship and that all of them, regardless of emphasis or method, foreground the experiences of black populations. I argue that this collective multi-method approach pushes the conceptual boundaries of the wider discipline of Geography.

In a world of accelerating environmental crises, global pandemics and seemingly unstoppable datafication of anything that moves, thinks or feels, the politics of science and technology are pervasive. In this first of three progress reports on the geographies of science and technology, I home in on some definitional questions which an account of anything like a new or emerging subfield must necessarily concern itself. I examine how geographers have addressed the spatial effects of the making and unmaking of boundaries between science, technology and their various outsides. While work on historical and contemporary geographies of technoscience has often pulled in slightly different directions, I identify some promising convergences around questions of political economy and on the topic of scale as an emergent property of technoscientific practices. New attention is also falling on the spatial practices through which technoscience gets plugged into wider worlds, such as politics and policymaking, while geographers have also been busy disrupting, in a more experimental mode, conventional boundaries and hierarchies of technoscientific practice. Finally, the report examines recent and welcome efforts to convene new conversations around the geography of technology but cautions against the potential seduction of the new, the innovative and the ‘disruptive’. Important recent work in cultural geography has purposively unsettled assumed hierarchies of ‘high’ and ‘low’ tech, new and old, and suggests that any nascent subfield of ‘geography of technology’ needs to reflexively attend to how boundaries get drawn around ‘technology’, and with what effects.

Cities in the Global South are quintessential sites for climate adaptation; many are rapidly expanding, struggle with increasing inequalities and experience unprecedented harm from climatic extremes. Despite scholarly recognition that adaptation pathways should reduce multidimensional vulnerabilities and inequalities, current adaptation efforts largely preserve the status quo. Many benefit powerful actors while further entrenching the poor and disadvantaged in cycles of dispossession. We bring together scholarship on adaptation pathways, politics and practice to deconstruct adaptation trajectories. We propose three conceptual steps – acknowledging injustices, embracing deliberation and nurturing responsibility for human and more-than-human others – to chart inclusive pathways towards just climate futures.

Digital technologies are profoundly reshaping how people relate to unknown others, yet urban studies and geographies of encounter have yet to adequately incorporate these changes into theory and research. Building on a longstanding concern with stranger encounters in social and urban theory, this paper explores how digital technology brings new possibilities and challenges to urban life. With examples ranging from GPS-enabled apps for sex and dating to sharing economy platforms that facilitate the peer-to-peer exchange of services, new practices mediated by digital technology are making many stranger encounters a matter of choice rather than chance, and they are often private as much as they are public. This paper examines these changes to develop a conceptualisation of stranger intimacy as a potentially generative form of encounter involving conditional relations of openness among the unacquainted, through which affective structures of knowing, providing, befriending or even loving are built. We offer an agenda for researching stranger intimacies to better understand their role in generating new kinds of social and economic opportunity, overcoming constraints of space and place, as well as generating dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, privilege and disadvantage. The paper concludes by considering what critical attention to these encounters can offer geographical scholarship and how an emphasis on digital mediation can push research in productive directions.

Community geography is a growing subfield that provides a framework for relevant and engaged scholarship. In this paper, we define community geography as a form of research praxis, one that involves academic and public scholars with the goal of co-produced and mutually-beneficial knowledge. Community geography draws from a pragmatist model of inquiry, one that views communities as emergent through a recursive process of problem definition and social action. We situate the growth of community geography programs as rooted in two overlapping but distinct traditions: disciplinary development of participatory methodologies and institutional traditions of community engagement in American higher education. We then trace the historical development of these programs, identifying common themes and outlining several challenges that community geographers should prioritize as this subfield continues to grow.

Population geography is rightly recognised for its quantitative expertise. Yet, the methodological and epistemological diversification that has taken place within the sub-discipline alongside decades of theoretical developments has gone largely undiscussed. In this report, I suggest that population geography is methodologically multilingual and thus well placed to embrace mixed methods. This would bring epistemological opportunities for population geographers, advancing the sub-discipline and engagement beyond in academia and elsewhere. The confluence of theoretical and methodological developments, and global challenges that demand attention of population scholars, means the time is ripe to broaden the lens of population geographies through deliberate pursuit of mixed methods agendas. Publisher PDF

This paper argues for a sustained study of knowledge-intensive or liberal professions in geography. I review existing work in political geography and related fields to identify a gap in the study of knowledge-intensive professions, especially those that are popularly associated with elites. I draw from sociology, anthropology, and international relations to explain why we need to better understand such professions. By the geographical study of professions and their expertise I mean the examination of the places, spatial networks, and travels of ideas that shape these professions and the expertise created therein.

Despite three decades of this vibrant sub-discipline, this is the first progress report on lesbian geographies. They are crucial to contemporary sexualities focusing on female-identified same-sex lives, relationships, desires, practices and discriminations. Lesbian placemaking explores intersections of sexualities and gender, and race, class and age that are central to the mutual reconstitution of people and place. Overall, this report demonstrates both the vibrancy of lesbian geographies and the importance of exploring the intersections of gender and sexualities in engaging with the underpinning premise of human geography, namely the mutual constitution of people and place.

Humans kill and care for animals in a multitude of contexts. These themes – killing and caring – form the focus of this second report on animal geographies research. Most notably, killing and caring take place through conservation and the production and consumption of food. Other realms of recent research include killing through climate change, formal arrangements of care, how animals are made killable, and the significance of the individual and collective. Further to these two major themes, the review identifies other approaches to animal geographies research in recent years; namely, political and relational. Finally, the propensity for humans to kill and care for animals is highlighted by crisis. I open and close the review by considering connections between animals and two contemporary emergencies: the fires that burned south-eastern Australia over summer 2019–20 and the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this first report, I overview research on storytelling of the histories of GIS. I suggest that these efforts reveal important pathways for thinking the current moment and conditioning technoscience futures. I argue that these stories around technology illustrate various disciplinary crucibles around technical practices and knowledge work. To report on progress in GIScience is also to narrate the moments of change in the discipline, whether marked as quantitative, qualitative, radical, critical, black, feminist, Marxist, indigenous, environmental, postcolonial, queer, or minor, among others. I suggest ‘minor GISciences’ to encourage attentiveness to the historical conditions and social implications of geographic technologies.

This article identifies new geographies of commemoration. These draw on non-representational perspectives that foreground the experiential aspects of commemorative sites and events, drawing these together with methodologies alive to the subtle but excessive feelings that arise in such settings. It argues that one aim of commemoration – to reinforce the contours of national identity – is disrupted by a focus on the experiential world because of the unpredictable and excessive nature of sensory and affective feelings. New research in geographies of commemoration also draws together different temporalities, holding the potential to unsettle and complicate national narratives.

Some epistemologies remain marginalized in political ecology. Here I demonstrate why it is important to learn from various relational margins to further advance the field. Insights and critiques from feminisms and decolonial theories have enriched and expanded political ecology in nuanced ways, yet they continue to remain relegated to the margins. I contend that it is vital to engage and advance different forms of intersectional, interdisciplinary, and international feminist inquiries to address ongoing socioecological crises at the current conjuncture. Different epistemological, methodological, pedagogical, and praxis insights showcase how and why representation matters if we are to pursue decolonial futures and solidarities.

Despite a flourishing evolutionary economic geography, the cluster evolution literature has been somewhat left behind, and remains somewhat simplistic and deterministic. This article seeks to form a synthesis from recent conceptual advancements in the evolutionary and institutional economic geographies, in pursuit of expanding the cluster evolution literature. In the process it produces a novel way of exploring cluster evolution, through the concept of cluster institutional configurations, which focuses on the ability of different actors to navigate potential lock-ins and to drive cluster evolution, and connects it to broader debates in economic geography.

Although geographers have long argued that time and space are interwoven in everyday life, far less attention has been paid to complex and multiplex connections among temporal rhythms/cycles, the experience of temporal relations and a sense of temporal modalities in the domestic sphere. This article harnesses the notion of ‘timescape’, which emphasises the association between practices in space and time, to seek the time-spaces and temporalities in the domestic. It argues that geographies of home need to pay more attention to the links across everyday time and temporality, life-time and large-scale time and their wider implications in diverse contexts.

In this second progress report on infrastructure, I concentrate on the evolving infrastructures of our digital worlds, or ‘cloudfrastructures’. While there is an extensive literature in geography on the digital, less attention has been paid to its infrastructures. In this report I explore their relationships to other infrastructures, to nature, and to flow. I argue that paying attention to cloudfrastructures calls for new thinking on the axiom of (in)visibility in infrastructure studies, alerting us to (in)visibility as layered, multiple and orchestrated. Thinking of (in)visibility in this way also calls for an engagement with infrastructure beyond materiality.

Social justice is regarded as a key underpinning principle of social geography. This report focuses on social justice in social geography and related issues of inequality, discrimination and intolerance. I appraise debates about social justice in social geography and then pay specific attention to issues of poverty and welfare, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity. I argue for social geography to be committed to social justice and conclude by calling for action to commit to promoting social justice in our teaching, research, in our professional practices and in how we challenge our universities to operate.

The assertion that ‘ecosystems are infrastructure’ is now common in conservation science and ecosystem management. This article interrogates that claim, which we argue underpins diverse practices of environmental investment focused on the strategic management of ecosystem functions to sustain and secure human life. We trace the genealogies and geographies of infrastructural nature as a paradigm of investment that coexists (sometimes in tension) with extractivist commodity regimes. We draw links between literatures on the political economy of ecosystem services and infrastructure and highlight three themes that hold promise for future research: labor, territory, and finance.

While practice theories and diverse economy approaches are widely employed by human geographers, the two literatures have developed in parallel, rather than in dialogue. This article argues that this has constrained understandings of postcapitalist social change and traces an emerging theoretical conversation between these traditions. It outlines the potential of scholarly engagement with what we term ‘diverse practices’, especially when discussing the scalar possibilities and constraints of community activism. By grounding diverse economic scholarship in practice-theoretical conceptions of power, politics, and scale, the article proposes a materialisation of postcapitalist possibility and explores the barriers and facilitators of transformative geographies.

Political ecology has grown rapidly over the past four decades, incorporating insights from wide-ranging swaths of the academy. One topic it has not yet substantively engaged with, however, is religion. This article argues that the failure to critically engage with the study of religion has led political ecologists to neglect important factors in their analyses and has resulted in incomplete conceptualizations of interpersonal power relations. It does this by first reviewing the scattered literature across political ecology engaging with religion before suggesting potential paths for scholars interested in further incorporating religion into political ecology.

Digitality is deeply implicated in sociospatial processes of exclusion, adverse incorporation, impoverishment and enrichment. Theorizing digital practices of life and thriving is politically and epistemologically urgent, and more robustly intersectional theory in digital geographies scholarship offers crucial pathways. I argue for theorizing digital geographies at the intersection of feminist relationality and Black, queer and feminist code studies. I demonstrate these theoretical horizons through an analysis of ‘glitch politics’ that refuse normative digital-social-spatial relations of technocapitalist urban life, and catalyze sociospatial relations of thriving otherwise, drawing examples from digital practices of street newspapers sold by unsheltered people in cities worldwide.

This final report highlights the increasing attention to precarity, including academic precarity, within geography. After briefly discussing the implications for approaches to agency, I argue for attention to debates about racialized and racial capitalism from labour geographers. I suggest that theorizations of racial capitalism emerge from particular standpoints, and that geographers are well placed to explore racial capitalisms in a plural sense if we are willing to grapple with the standpoints from which we theorize in labour geography itself. I draw on the ‘infrastructural turn’ to illustrate how labour geographers can start to think with relational approaches to racial capitalism.

The study of land use change in urban and regional systems has been dramatically transformed in the last four decades by the emergence and application of cellular automata (CA) models. CA models simulate urban land use changes which evolve from the bottom-up. Despite notable achievements in this field, there remain significant gaps between urban processes simulated in CA models and the actual dynamics of evolving urban systems. This article identifies contemporary issues faced in developing urban CA models and draws on this evidence to map out four interrelated thematic areas that require concerted attention by the wider CA urban modelling community. These are: (1) to build models that comprehensively capture the multi-dimensional processes of urban change, including urban regeneration, densification and gentrification, in-fill development, as well as urban shrinkage and vertical urban growth; (2) to establish models that incorporate individual human decision behaviours into the CA analytic framework; (3) to draw on emergent sources of ‘big data’ to calibrate and validate urban CA models and to capture the role of human actors and their impact on urban change dynamics; and (4) to strengthen theory-based CA models that comprehensively explain urban change mechanisms and dynamics. We conclude by advocating cellular automata that embed agent-based models and big data input as the most promising analytical framework through which we can enhance our understanding and planning of the contemporary urban change dynamics.

This report considers a burgeoning strand of scholarship that foregrounds the mundane in engagements with the digital. Research concerned with the digital mundane attends to the ordinary and often taken-for-granted digital objects, practices, productions, and sites that significantly both mediate and are mediated by everyday lives and spatialities. Methodological innovations are advancing new techniques for researching mundane digital objects that participate in the internet of things, everyday spaces of the smart home, banal landscapes of data and digital infrastructures, and quotidian quantifications/datafications of the self. The proliferation of these methods also informs feminist scholarly praxes of digital iteration.

This report focuses on the imaginaries and practices that demarcate space at the international and supranational scale. I will first review political geographic scholarship on region-making and regionalism, using the studies of Europe and the Belt and Road Initiative as examples, and I will then highlight some central themes in the current research on international borders. The report highlights the flexibility of bounding practices and the polymorphic character of borders. It underscores the resilience of state power and the transformations of sovereignty currently under way. It concludes by underscoring the interdisciplinary character of the relevant work.

The symbiotic, environmentally destructive relationship between passenger air transport and economic output remains inadequately theorised by both transport geographers and mobilities researchers. This article attempts to bridge the two fields by considering passenger air transport as a branch of value production whose useful effect – the movement of people across space – is a ‘connecting artery’ necessary to multiple consumption and production processes. Air travel is socially necessary to multiple class projects, including the reproduction of labour power, the competitive reorganisation of capital at the global scale, and the consolidation of transnational capitalist class power. A corresponding environmental politics of resistance is outlined.

Energy is increasingly used as a lens to study wider social processes. For political ecologists, ‘energy’ has usually been seen as a resource or socio-technical system that gives rise to contentious social relations. This article instead thinks of energy as a materiality with thermodynamic properties. At once, energy becomes an analytical concept with physical and political-economic dimensions. Developing this perspective, the article examines the notion of ecologically unequal exchange and unpacks discussions on how energy systems are co-productive of politicised environments. The outcome is an expanded definition of political ecology set out in relation to three modes of social power.

Statistics are central to the state’s capacities. However, with the advent of ‘big data’ some argue it is being undermined in favour of a new configuration of corporate power. We need to understand statistics both historically and geographically to understand how it is intertwined with the geography of power today. Three strands to the geography of statistics are proposed: the geography of statistical institutions and agencies; the geography of ‘datafication’; and the geographies produced by statistics. Tracing the geography of statistics demonstrates its role in the construction of a hierarchical world and explains the consequences of changes in statistical practice.

The first of these three reports reprised human geography’s theoretical and quantitative revolutions’ origins, covering the philosophy, focus and methods that dominated their early years. Over the subsequent decades the nature of work categorised as quantitative human geography changed very considerably – in philosophy, focus and methods. This second report summarises those changes, highlighting the main features of the extensive volume of work published over the last five decades, as a prelude to the final report that will focus on the contemporary nature of quantitative human geography and its likely futures.

In this second report on research about race and ethnicity in geography, I build from growing scholarly interest in the geographies of white supremacy to consider white women’s central role in the production and maintenance of white supremacy in the United States. I discuss some of the conceptual approaches and critical interventions of Black and antiracist feminist scholarship in theorizing white supremacy. After reviewing key themes and theoretical insights about gender and white supremacy, I expand on the notion of possessive geographies as a means of examining discourses and rationalizations of ownership and white propertied power. I emphasize the importance of engaging with Black and antiracist feminist scholarship that has long provided the tools necessary for understanding white women and the possessive geographies of white supremacy.

This paper argues that retail spaces, such as marketplaces, are increasingly becoming sites of urban contestation. The globalisation of retail, online shopping and the redevelopment of cities has pushed marketplaces to the margins, but they still serve millions of people, particularly the urban poor. Concurrently, marketplaces are branded as authentic consumption experiences for tourists and residents. Building on these contradictions, I propose a novel framework with three analytical lenses to reposition marketplaces as marginal city spaces that serve as productive sites for studying urban transformation processes across the Global North and South.

Developing the concept of kinaesthetics, this article undertakes a critical re-description of amateur sports and fitness to explore the topographies, materials, innovation, and socialities that make up urban environments. Extending work on affect and urban materiality within geography and elsewhere, we argue that amateur sport and fitness animates many cities in ways that are frequently overlooked. The paper aims to 1) broaden understandings of amateur sport and fitness practices; 2) reframe perspectives on the kinds of environments cities are; 3) develop a prospective politics of provision involving the design and maintenance of a social infrastructure of amateur sport and fitness.

The study of regional growth paths is a key theme in economic geography and of elemental interest for regional development. This paper addresses the interplay between path-dependent, structural forces and the construction and utilization of opportunities through agentic processes. Extending the evolutionary framework, it is argued that not only history but also perceived futures influence agentic processes in the present and thus shape regional development paths. The paper discusses the relevance and interdependencies of three types of agency with distinct theoretical roots, namely Schumpeterian innovative entrepreneurship, institutional entrepreneurship and place-based leadership, as main drivers of regional structural change. publishedVersion

This is the first in a series of three reviews that scrutinise the conventions of doing and describing qualitative research that currently predominate in human geography. Since we find that interviews are the most widely used method in this field, we begin with an examination of how they feature in the work of today’s human geographers. How many people do geographers speak with and what do they say about their interviewing procedures? What do they imagine their interviews to be in terms of the social occasion? And how do they present the empirical material that is thereby generated?

The potential benefits of developing a research agenda that explicitly reconstructs a world regional political ecology are explored through a focus on climate change mitigation and adaptation in the Asia Pacific. Through an examination of scale in political ecology, world regional political ecology is identified as a promising analytical and political approach to understanding and addressing the current challenges associated with climate change. In light of this, political ecology scholarship in the region is reviewed to identify current strengths and lacunae. Whilst there is indeed a rich tradition of political ecology research across the Asia Pacific, much of this research focuses upon local/national/global dynamics with relatively little attention devoted to supra-national processes, missing important social, political, financial and material processes constructed at the world regional scale. It is argued that a world regional political ecology of climate change should build upon strengths in previous political ecology work yet extend these in three generative directions: comparative analysis of place-based, single issue research; generation of diverse counter-narratives at the regional scale; and consideration of flows and networks. We argue a rescaled political ecology that incorporates world regional scales opens a range of possibilities for practicing and pursuing more just and progressive climate politics and initiatives.

This progress report explores economies of infrastructure, concentrating on questions of financialization. Interest in infrastructure financialization has grown with concern about financialization more broadly, coming to dominate discussions on economies of infrastructure. Below, I engage with research that explores what infrastructure financialization entails, its scope, as well as the mathematical infrastructures that support it. Questioning the common presentation of financialization as a complete break with past economies of infrastructure, I bookend this report with its links to – and continuities with – debt-led infrastructure development, which prevailed in the post-war period and remains of great importance in contemporary economies of infrastructure.