Contemporary Foundations of Space and Place – serie

The volume brings together twenty-five of the most influential articles published in the field of development geography since 1960. The first part looks at the origins of development geography and the debates between modernization theorists and radicals that took shape in the 1970s. Thereafter, the book is organized thematically. Geographers have made key contributions to development studies in four major areas, all of which are represented here and include gender and households, development alternatives and identities, resource conflicts and political ecology and globalization and resistance. The book ends with three broad-ranging essays by leading figures in the field.

Mobility, accessibility, networks, and interactions across space are at the heart of how spaces and places are brought into being and continue to change. In a series of articles that chart the development of thinking about space, place, and transport, this book highlights the role that a geographic perspective has played in transport studies, raises questions about transport policy, and points to additional questions worthy of research. The volume is divided into four parts covering fundamental concepts, individual behaviour in urban spatial context, inter-regional transport and policy issues.

Spanning cultural and political ecology, the political economy of the environment, humanistic landscape interpretation, cultural studies of nature, and science and technology studies, this volume is the definitive guide to environmental studies in Human Geography over the past 30 years. The articles collected capture conceptual developments in the field for audiences within and beyond Geography, and illustrate the diversity and remarkable vitality of geographical research on society-environment relations.

This volume tackles the complex terrain of theory and methods, seeking to exemplify the major philosophical, social-theoretic and methodological developments - some with clear political and ethical implications - that have traversed human geography since the era of the 1960s when spatial science came to the fore. Coverage includes Marxist and humanistic geographies, and their many variations over the years, as well as ongoing debates about agency-structure and the concepts of time, space, place and scale. Feminist and other 'positioned' geographies, alongside poststructuralist and posthumanist geographies, are all evidenced, as well as writings that push against the very 'limits' of what human geography has embraced over these fifty plus years. The volume combines readings that are well-known and widely accepted as 'classic', with readings that, while less familiar, are valuable in how they illustrate different possibilities for theory and method within the discipline. The volume also includes a substantial introduction by the editor, contextualising the readings, and in the process providing a new interpretation of the last half-century of change within the thoughts and practices of human geography.

The rural has long been regarded as an important site of geographical inquiry even if our understanding of it has not always been treated as conceptually different from the urban. That said, rural research has pursued a number of distinct empirical agendas ranging from the operation and impacts of agribusiness, to local resistance to global food supply chains, to differing representations of the rural. In doing so, rural geographers have critically examined the relevance and significance of ideas drawn from numerous traditions including political economy, ecological modernization and cultural theory, amending them as appropriate, in their search to understand the nature and trajectory of rural areas. Up until the 1980s, attention remained largely focused upon agriculture as the primary land-use but increasingly new forms of rural consumption - housing, recreation, nature conservation - have taken centre stage as the primacy of local agricultures has been undermined by reduced state protection and 'new' rural populations which have migrated out from the city. More recently, research has been dominated by the 'cultural turn' with particular emphases upon society-nature relations, interpretations of landscape, marginalised others, and analyses of the relations between representation and practice. In the last decade, a more holistic view of the rural, bringing together different aspects of the two previous themes, has emerged through more politically-oriented studies of rural governance concerned with the functioning of interest groups, participation, protest and the allocation and management of resources. The volume is thus structured into three sections concerned with agriculture and food, the rural, and rural governance. The great majority of the selected papers combine both empirical material - often highly informative case studies - and important conceptual arguments about change in the rural condition that can be linked to ideas being employed elsewhere in Geography and the Social Sciences more generally. These critical reflections have been drawn very largely from research conducted in advanced economies which at least provide some commonality of experience allowing the transfer of ideas between what otherwise might be seen as very differing geographical contexts.

The spread of urbanization has transformed the concept of the city, but the way urban planners, urban scientists and, above all, urban dwellers address it has also changed, probably even more so. The city is thus a new topic for geography, a discipline that has experienced an ambiguous relationship to cities in the past. What kind of geography is required in order to bring fresh insight to this renewed field? Drawing together a wide range of texts from philosophers, sociologists and economist as well as geographers and urban planners, this volume provides a theoretical framework within which this question can begin to be explored.