Geoforum 33 (2002) 291–298

www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

The future of geography

Nigel Thrift
School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1SS, UK
Received 7 March 2002

Abstract
This paper is an attempt to assess the current state and future prospects of Geography especially but not only in Britain. It is
quasi-polemical and should be read in that spirit. The paper looks first at the notable successes of physical and human geography. It
then considers how these successes are being buttressed by current events taking place in the world. Next, the paper considers the
main problems that beset geography. Finally, however, the paper ends on another positive note by considering some of the exciting
new developments that are now taking place in the discipline which will allow it to relate to more of the many worlds that make up
geography’s vocation. Ó 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Geography; Theory; Methodology; Politics; Optimism

1. Introduction our side: things are becoming ‘more geographical’. But

not all the news can be good: I will also note some of the
My relationship with geography has been rather like problems that are going to have to be faced in the next
that of a child with its parent: an underlying love but 10 years or so that should give us all some pause for
interspersed with periods of sulking and waywardness. I thought. Then, in my concluding section, I will set out
will leave it to the reader to decide which phase I am what I think are the most exciting intellectual develop-
currently in! ments currently going on in Geography on which I think
One thing that the reader can be sure of is that I have much of our future depends. If I can convey even half
no privileged insight into the future of Geography. the excitement that I feel about these developments, then
What I do have is a reasonably broad knowledge of I think I will have done my job.
British human and physical geography – and a set of
fairly strong (though not I hope rigid) opinions. What I
will try to do is to put this knowledge and these opinions 2. The successes of geography
together to provide a kind of synopsis. Inevitably, that
synopsis is very partial, strongly biased to the situation Let me start, then, with the undoubted successes. And
in Britain and even then to examples drawn from close I think there have been a lot of these of late.
to home. But one thing that struck me in writing this Let me begin by addressing the topic of physical geo-
piece is just how many other convincing examples I graphy. Recently, physical geography has come out
could have chosen which would have been just as illus- fighting and the battleground it has chosen has been
trative – one more testimony, I think, to the extraordi- mainstream science. In Britain, for example, there are
nary richness of geography as a discipline at this point now a series of science groups who are regularly getting
in time. their work in to the pages of Nature or Science in sub-
I want to begin this piece with the good news – all the jects as diverse as glaciology, geomorphology, Quater-
things that I think it is possible to be justifiably proud nary studies, and the like. This success is built on the
of. And, as will become clear, there are a lot of things to basis of a different model from the one of everything
be proud of. Further, as I will point out, the times are on model which tended to operate in the past. Now de-
partments are trying to build up science groups of five or
six good people and appropriate technicians who can
then seek out large amounts of research money with
E-mail address: n.j.thrift@bristol.ac.uk (N. Thrift). which to fund equipment, postdoctoral fellows and

0016-7185/02/$ - see front matter Ó 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
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292 N. Thrift / Geoforum 33 (2002) 291–298

postgraduates. And the money they have been able to meter), dedicated sample preparation laboratories
draw on has produced some spectacular scientific and specialist technical support. Edinburgh is therefore
product. Let me point to just two examples. One is the one of the few cosmogenic nuclide science groups in
exciting work currently being done in the Bristol Gla- the world. But it is repaying the investment in it by
ciology Centre by Martin Siegert and others on Lake producing some remarkable results on erosion rates,
Vostok as part of an international programme of re- including measurements of inselberg lowering and es-
search (see, for example, Siegert et al., 2001). carpment retreat rates, erosion rates on a passive con-
At the base of the Antarctic ice sheet, 4 km below the tinental margin, erosion rates in Antarctica, glacier
Russian Vostok research station, lies an extraordinary fluctuations in the northwest Himalayas, and so on. For
accumulation of water about the size of Lake Ontario – the first time, in some cases, it has become possible to
230 km long, 50 km wide and as much as 500 m deep in put numbers to some of the classical geomorphological
places, hidden under about 4000 m of ice. The largest models.
subglacial lake in the world persists despite surface A second success has been the increasing visibility of
temperatures that are regularly around )60 °C. Lake human geography. Human geography has been able to
Vostok was discovered in the 1970s as a result of the use make its presence felt across the social sciences and
of airborne radar. The exact size of the lake was not able humanities, buoyed up by a more general spatial turn
to be determined until the 1990s using satellite imagery. which it has in part created. That spatial turn has pro-
What is intriguing, of course, is what is down there. No duced a considerable interest in what human geogra-
one expects to find fish or other large creatures but there phers are doing and a platform outside the discipline for
may well be numerous new bacterial forms which will them to show off their wares in the shape of the large
have evolved in isolation for many hundreds of thou- numbers of interdisciplinary journals in which geogra-
sands of years, helped by life-giving geothermal heat, phers now regularly publish. Just recently, I have seen
sediments and ice melting from above. The problem, of papers by geographers in journals as diverse as Theory
course, is how to get in to the lake without contami- Culture and Society, Cultural Studies, Review of Inter-
nating it. Russian drillers have penetrated to within national Political Economy, Isis, and Political Studies. In
100 m of the lake, but then wisely gave up since the lake turn, geographical journals also have a much higher
would have become tainted with the antifreeze which is profile. For example, according to the new Prestige
used to lubricate the drill and to keep the hole above it Factor social science citation rankings, out of nearly
from freezing. Martin Siegert and others in the inter- 1500 journals, one geography journal is in the top 100,
national programme are working on solutions to bring four geography journals are in the top 250 and 12 geo-
pressurized, untainted samples of lake water to the sur- graphy journals are in the top 500, a very creditable
face. In all likelihood, the project will take several years. performance for a discipline which has many fewer
In the meantime, of course, the lake will continue to be journals than Goliath subjects like Economics.
studied remotely, using airborne radar samples, seismic Interest has been shown in a number of areas of
experiments and satellite-based measurements. And, of work. Here I will have to mention just two. One has
course, Lake Vostok will not be the only focus of been landscape and nature. For a considerable period of
this kind of activity: so far another 69 subglacial lakes time, work on landscape and nature tended to be of a
have been found in Antarctica with who knows what relatively conservative cast, concerned with beautifully
ecologies. honed, largely historical pieces extolling the virtues or
The other is the work being done on landscape evo- parading the vices of ‘classic’ landscapes, which were
lution in geography at the University of Edinburgh by chiefly places in which nature was regarded as ordered
Mike Summerfield and his group using cosmogenic and subservient or sublimely out-of-control. But in re-
nuclide dating. This is a relatively new technique – cent years both the type of landscape and the approach
available for only 15 years or so – which can date sam- to it have changed. Human geographers have become
ples of minerals from 103 to 106 years, and which much more interested in urban and suburban landscapes
therefore allows dating to take place at the timescales and the kind of nature to be found there. They have
that geomorphologists are usually most interested in (for become much more interested in taking nature as not
a review see Greensfelder, 2002). Cosmogenic nuclides just a mirror of man but as having its own powers
are produced in exceedingly small quantities by the (hence the enormous interest in animals). They have
interactions of cosmic rays with target atoms in com- recognized the key role of science as a means by which
mon rock-forming minerals. Since they are only pro- landscapes are both produced and culturally framed.
duced close to the surface and since the longer a rock is And they have tried to work towards an ethic which
exposed the more nuclides it accumulates, they provide might recognize the essentially mixed, hybrid character
an ideal dating standard. But this is no straightforward of the world, and the fact that what is ‘natural’ is a series
technique. It requires very expensive instruments (a of ethologies made up of things which are often quite
noble gas spectrometer and accelerator mass spectro- unalike yet still function together.
 N. Thrift / Geoforum 33 (2002) 291–298 293

One example of this kind of work is research by Sarah of the growers and source countries, and on the aching
Whatmore of the Open University. She has been con- backs of workers in the fields. In turn, geographers are
centrating recently on the whole phenomenon of urban attempting to make these kinds of commodity chain
wildlife (see, for example, Whatmore, 2002). With a visible. So, for example, the geographers Ian Cook and
colleague at the OU, Steve Hinchliffe, she is now in- Peter Jackson and the anthropologist Danny Miller are
volved in a major study of urban nature in two large currently attempting to get the subject of commodity
British cities. The project presents all kinds of problems. chains introduced into school curriculums, with the idea
For example, cities are cosmopolitan habitats made up of using permanently sited webcams which would allow
of many fauna and flora that may be neither ‘native’ nor schoolchildren to see each part of the commodity chain,
‘flagship’ species and so are not easily valued according thereby not only registering the geography of the com-
to conventional scientific or economic criteria. And be- modity but also making them think about their own role
cause British cities are currently undergoing something as responsible consumers since they are able to see ex-
of a renaissance, the brownfield sites in which these actly what labour they are in part responsible for.
kinds of species are thriving are coming under pressure. A third success has been to produce a discipline
But what is especially interesting is the way in which the with high skills levels. The rise of qualitative methods
presence of these fauna and flora in cities is producing like ethnography and focus groups has been paralleled
new lay and scientific knowledges of urban biodiversity by renewed levels of sophistication in quantitative
which are challenging what is conventionally meant by methods. Techniques like multilevel modeling, geo-
nature conservation and care for the environment. In graphically weighted regression, microsimulation, data-
particular, the value of these fauna and flora for civic life mining using generative algorithms, various Bayesian
(for example, as the focus of community associations, methods, and now the new sequencing methods taken
various enthusiasms and expertises, and conservation, from genetics, have produced new and much more
restoration and cultivation activity) is only just becom- subtle methods of analyzing large and sometimes in-
ing part of a coherent political agenda. complete or dirty spatial data sets, especially the large
The second area of work I want to point to is the longitudinal data sets upon which so much attention is
general field of consumption. In retrospect, it is difficult now being fixed. So, on one side, we have some fine
to believe that until quite recently such a central element ethnography being produced, whilst, on the other, we
of human life could have been ignored (after all, we all have new generations of work with very large-scale
go shopping) – but it was. However, over the last 10 surveys. In some areas (e.g., the geography of health and
years or so, human geographers, along with anthropol- health-related studies) it has even started to become
ogists, have probably been the leaders in work on con- possible to combine quantitative and qualitative ap-
sumption in the social sciences and humanities. In proaches effectively.
particular, I want to consider here the element of this A fourth and final success has been geography’s in-
work which has shown up how geography is a vital el- tervention in public policy, broadly understood to in-
ement of consumption through the so-called commodity clude involvement in the public realm as a whole and
chain approach. What this approach tries to do is to not just advising government and business. Geographers
show the massive effort that has to be continuously in- have been involved in activities as diverse as setting up
vested in constructing the flows of the commodities banking facilities for the financially excluded and sitting
which end up on supermarket shelves, so that each on Royal Commissions on Environmental Pollution,
commodity now turns up with a kind of shadow geo- advising on political boundaries and intervening in key
graphy behind it, a geography that has become more economic debates, and even becoming (in the case of
extensive, complex – and energy inefficient – over time. I Doreen Massey) public intellectuals. Surely one of the
will take just one example: the case of cut flowers. Geo- most heartening outcomes of the 2001 Research As-
graphers like Hazel Barrett and her colleagues (Barrett sessment Exercise in Britain (see Research Assessment
et al., 1999), Alex Hughes (2000) and Verena Meier Exercise, 2002) must have been that the Committee of
(2000) have looked at the way that the cut flower in- Users who looked at the body of research that was
dustry links the shifting aesthetic tastes of western submitted that claimed policy-relevance (which included
consumers (from the desire for new kinds of flowers to representatives from business, government and the
the growing global popularity of St. Valentine’s Day) charitable sector) all argued that they most appreciated
with the flower fields of countries like Kenya and Co- considered research that told them something new, not
lombia through an enormous global geography that quickfire work emanating out of consultancy. They
constantly flies flowers to the flower markets of Am- wanted intellectual bite.
sterdam and on to supermarket shelves or, in some Again, I will use an example from my own department
cases, directly from grower to supermarket. This chain to show just what is possible. Professor Elaine Kempson
imposes standards of presentation on flowers which and her colleagues in the Personal Finance Research
have direct effects on the economies and environments Centre have become the leading figures in Britain on
294 N. Thrift / Geoforum 33 (2002) 291–298

matters of personal finance, working on topics as diverse that ignorance of the world is no excuse. Geographical
as consumer credit, insurance, household money man- knowledge is crucial. But the argument goes farther than
agement, micro-finance and community re-investment. simply knowing more about the world. These events
But, perhaps their best-known work has been on financial have also underlined the need for producing new forms
exclusion; the tendency for financial systems to deny ac- of ethic that will allow for peaceful co-existence on equal
cess to people with lower incomes, often because there are terms. And the literature on post-colonialism – which
no financial facilities close to them (see, for example, geographers have contributed so much to – is particu-
Kempson and Whyley, 1999, Collard et al., 2001). Here larly useful here, seen as a series of meditations on what
they have been instrumental in bringing the problem kinds of identities might be able to both assert their
of financial exclusion into the public eye through a series existence and reach out to others in a world in which
of carefully researched reports – and in getting the British crossing cultures has become normal and in which, as a
government to persuade the leading banks to offer ba- result, very few cultures are therefore able to be de-
sic bank accounts to anyone who wants them. Signifi- scribed as separate, bounded and uniform. In particular,
cantly, even in the first few months of its operation, this literature, in its constant de-privileging of the per-
hundreds of thousands of customers have signed up to spective of the metropolitan subject, has developed a
these accounts. remarkable emphasis on the inter-weavings of geogra-
But this was hardly a fly-by-night piece of policy- phy as central to the decentralized world it is trying to
making. To have influence took persistence and stamina, conjure into existence.
as the saga of Elaine Kempson’s involvement with basic Another change is also important. Geography is one
bank accounts shows. That saga began in 1997 with a of the few disciplines that is not dominated scientifically
meeting with the Social Security Minister and repre- by the United States. Because US geography is weaker
sentatives of the leading banks to discuss widening ac- than many other US disciplines on the world stage, there
cess to banking. That meeting led to two linked studies is a certain room to breathe and develop other styles of
which tried to identify the characteristics of people academic work. So, for example, European human geo-
without bank accounts, and how that absence affected graphy is gradually finding a distinctive voice based
their lives. In turn, these studies led on to further work around a much greater emphasis on the contingencies
on the best ways of tackling financial exclusion. Elaine and sheer hard work of constructing social systems and
Kempson was then appointed to a Treasury team on much less emphasis on the kind of hectoring theoretical
access to financial services which gave the imprimatur to stances that often seem to come from the United States.
the idea of basic bank accounts. She then worked with This does not mean that European geography is any less
the leading banks and the Post Office to design the new political but it is clearly trying to do political in a dif-
accounts. This phase included testing the basic bank ferent way. Similarly, I think it is possible to see Asian
accounts in one area of Bristol. In turn, the Personal human geography taking different kinds of views on the
Finance Research Centre became involved in a Finan- world, aware of what is going on elsewhere but also
cial Services Authority initiative to promote the new spinning its own stories.
accounts, including even helping with the design and Then there is one more piece of favourable back-
testing of new leaflets. Now Elaine Kempson has been ground. The world is becoming doubly geographical.
seconded to the British Bankers Association on a part- Like a number of other geographers, I now work a lot
time basis where she will have real influence. One of on the social impacts of new telecommunications tech-
the interesting aspects of doing policy work is that nologies. What is striking there is how the geographical
it can lead to unexpected by-products. So work by data and techniques needed to produce and track such
Elaine Kempson that showed that the variable that had telecommunications systems (the kind of data and
the greatest effect on not having a bank account was techniques used by GIS, GPS, and the like) is itself be-
being in receipt of government benefits was an impor- coming a part of the production of new and fast-grow-
tant stimulus to the government decision to pay all ing geographies. I am thinking especially of all the
benefits and pensions by automatic transfer beginning in different and thriving informational geographies, from
2003. the myriad interconnections of the world-wide web to
the new possibilities of ‘hyper co-ordination’ arising
from wireless technologies like mobile phones and radio
3. The increasing relevance of geography frequency identification tags. In turn, these informa-
tional geographies are producing new geographical
These four developments have to be seen against a possibilities. Take the case of the automobile industry.
backcloth of wider change which has made geography a Here a new spatial model of ‘distributive manufacturing’
peculiarly relevant discipline at this point in time. Take is starting to take hold in which large numbers of
the case of recent geopolitical change. If nothing else, smaller and very flexible assembly plants are being built
the events of September 11 and after have made clear close to the main nodes of consumer demand, replacing
 N. Thrift / Geoforum 33 (2002) 291–298 295

the old giant manufacturing plants. What we can see in changes in scientific thinking (e.g., complexity) form a
examples like this are a whole set of new territories common ground for thinking about the nature of the
coming into being which we are helping to make and are world and for imagining new forms of space and time
also studying. which do not rely on old-style models from physics.
Similarly, a number of human and physical geographers
have been meeting together to try to thrash out a new
4. Some problems in geography treaty in London. And the Annals of the Association
of American Geographers has tried to partition the
In other words, my argument is that geography is journal so as to guarantee more physical geography
becoming more successful and at the same time, the input. I have to say that I am skeptical about these ef-
world is adding new and exciting geographies that we forts even as I support them. What I think is miss-
can study. But, of course, not everything in the garden ing most is mutual respect and I think that that kind
of geography is entirely rosy. It never is. I want to of trust is very difficult to build over the short-term. It
concentrate on four problems in particular. will need a long-term institutional project which in-
First, and most importantly, human and physical cludes much more in the way of common knowledge
geography are splitting apart. In part, this divergence is bases than exists now.
actually a product of success – as physical geography A second problem that I still see as important is a
has moved firmly into the sciences and as human geo- certain lack of ambition and general unadventurousness.
graphy has become more markedly social and cultural Some geographers would still, I suspect, like to hide
some divergence was probably inevitable. Yet, you away from these interdisciplinary days, spending large
might have thought that plenty of common ground amounts of time considering histories of the discipline,
could still exist. After all, this is a discipline that stresses circulating through the same old conferences and
the environment and in which more and more people thereby generally confirming geography’s presence as
have become interested in Nature. But, in my experi- themselves. I can think of nothing more lethal. My sense
ence, the divergence is growing apace. Part of the reason is that a modern discipline becomes good by constantly
is career-oriented. Younger physical geographers see exposing itself to competition from the best across the
their salvation in the mainstream sciences and therefore sciences or social sciences or humanities. Nowadays a
tend to publish in the mainstream science journals like discipline cannot work by attempting to consolidate its
Hydrological Processes, Earth Surface Processes and own territory; there are just too many other disciplines
Landforms, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series A, interested in its domain and they cannot be kept out (as
and so on. In contrast, younger human geographers still demonstrated, for example, by the increasing interest
tend to publish in human geography journals which of earth scientists in problems which were regarded as
have, as a result, become more markedly ‘human’ over in the domain of geomorphology or the increasing
time with the inevitable result that no younger physical interest of economists in producing a ‘new economic
geographer wants to put a paper in these journals since geography’). So instead we have to go for a model based
there is no audience. Another part of the reason is in- on respect for the quality of the work that a disci-
stitutional. The content of other science subjects like pline produces: that is what will keep a discipline in busi-
Earth Sciences has become more like that of physi- ness.
cal geography. Similarly, the content of other social A third problem is a general decline in the production
science subjects like sociology has become more mark- of learned books and monographs in favour of journal
edly spatial. So each part of the discipline is as likely to articles. The RAE 2001 Panel saw this as a problem in
seek allies (co-researchers, etc.) from outside the disci- the UK, not just because it tended to signify a general
pline as it is inside it, especially in such interdisciplinary erosion of longer-term scholarly projects (in contrast
times. A final part of the reason is frictional. As diver- to some other disciplines) but also because it meant that
gence takes place, so common zones of understand- geographers were producing too few of the kinds
ing become rarer. In the past, for example, human of books that could publicize the achievements and
and physical geographers had a common language in worth of the discipline more generally. Certainly, in the
quantitative methods. But now this only rarely exists. UK, learned books by historians and scientists (or at
Indeed, even those human geographers involved with least popular science writers) regularly top non-fiction
quantitative methods tend to increasingly use methods bestseller lists and do an invaluable job in popularis-
evolved for the assumptions and needs of the social ing those pursuits. Books by geographers should do
sciences. the same. Whilst there are problems to overcome (and
There have been attempts at a new rapprochement, of not least publisher conservatism), these are not insu-
course. So, for example, Doreen Massey (1999, 2000) perable.
has made strenuous efforts to bind the two sides of The final problem is keeping geography buoyant in
the subject back together by emphasizing how recent the schools. In many countries, geography in the schools
296 N. Thrift / Geoforum 33 (2002) 291–298

is in a fairly ragged state. It has been diluted by envi- different layouts of situation, context, event, can pro-
ronmental studies or has to compete with other disci- duce different effects (including emotional charges) on
plines like history for the same slot. Large efforts are those participating in and those watching them. A
being made to reverse these situations and they surely number of geographers are using performance both
deserve support. For without producing geography in to extend how their own work is communicated, to in-
schools, there will be no geography. vestigate how many key modern spaces (from theme
What seems certain to me is that the answer to this parks to shopping malls) impose their effects (which
latter problem will involve a difficult balancing act. is often, ironically, through the application of knowl-
On one side, the intellectual integrity of geography edges drawn from performance) and to build new rela-
needs to be constantly stressed. I am quite sure that it is tionships with respondents. For example, it becomes
vital to have a discipline which is acknowledged to be possible to use knowledge of performance to produce
producing knowledge at the cutting-edge of develop- other means of presenting research (after we all lecture,
ments in the sciences, social sciences and humanities which is just one of the many kinds of performance that
(much of which, by its very nature, will be controversial are possible), to analyse how and why certain spaces
and will necessarily be branded as ‘not geography’). On seem to have such powerful effects, and to co-produce
the other side, it is equally vital to be able, in these certain kinds of project in ways which genuinely even up
pragmatic times, to stress just how readily employable the terms of trade between researcher and researched.
geographers are. The broad portfolio of skills that ge- And this leads to a second area of excitement. Both
ographers have and their exposure to many different physical and human geographers are extending the
intellectual traditions make this a fairly easy argument registers in which they do geography and showing up
to make. Certainly, in Britain, geographers are highly different geographies as a result. So in physical geogra-
sought after by many employers for precisely these phy, the appearance of new kinds of radar and new
reasons. kinds of dating (such as the cosmogenic noble gas
spectrometry I have already referred to) are massively
extending the range of the world that we can detect. In
5. Prospects for the future of geography human geography, something similar has been going on.
So, for example, human geographers have become more
So where can I see geography going in the future? I and more interested in human senses other than vision –
think that geography is about to enter a very exciting sound to begin with (there is a thriving geography of
phase, one in which the discipline will make some gen- music) but now smell and touch as well. The emphasis
uine intellectual and practical leaps. on these senses has in turn led geographers towards
I want to start by considering methods. I think the trying to understand the geographies of all those cur-
methods used in geography have generally been boring. rents and impulses that have so often been placed to one
But I think that the next five years or so will see a re- side of the human in human geography even though
naissance of methods, based on two main sources: large- they define so much of what we are: emotions, certain
scale computing and performance. Let me start with kinds of deep-seated memory, the pre-reflexive reactions
computing. Large-scale computing power is now be- of the body (like the ‘half-second delay’), and so on.
coming routine and it is starting to open up new re- Human geographers are thereby making inroads into
search possibilities. In physical geography, we can see the world of a bodily ‘logic of sense’ that just as clearly
large-scale simulation becoming a way of life. But, in runs how and what we are as does the logic of cognition
human geography, the possibilities have been counted to and in doing so they are also showing how important
be less when they may actually be more. So, for exam- space is in constructing this logic.
ple, it will be possible to analyse moving imagery like This leads me to a third area of excitement. Geog-
film and video evidence using advances in machine vi- raphers are increasingly trying to communicate outside
sion. It will be possible to use computers extensively in the standard textual forms. As well they should. After
the field to supplement ethnographic or ethnomethod- all, geography texts have always been full of maps and
ological enquiry. It will be possible to use virtual reality diagrams which betray an ambition to do more than
simulations which respondents can interact with words. Now geographers are experimenting with all
and change. Web-based surveys will become stan- kinds of representation that can expand the range of
dard, and so on. Computing will add an extra layer of what can be communicated and what counts as com-
flexibility and possibility to most social sciences and munication. So, at one level, this has meant considerable
humanities research. Then there is performance. Human interest in all the possibilities being opened up by de-
geographers have become increasingly aware of a set velopments in computing. On another level, it has meant
of knowledges of space and time which they had hardly taking an interest in media like film and animation
registered before. These are the knowledges of how which because of the digital revolution are becoming
 N. Thrift / Geoforum 33 (2002) 291–298 297

cheaper and easier to use. On another level, it has meant 6. Conclusions

a willingness to be much more open to different textual
plays and formats of various kinds (as in the recent book So, let me conclude by stressing just how central ge-
I co-edited with Steve Pile, City A–Z or the journal, ography can be intellectually and practically to the
Soundings, Pile and Thrift, 2000). And, on another level, world we live in. This is not a weak-kneed discipline. It
it has meant a turn to the kinds of performance is a discipline which, though stretched for resources and
knowledges I have already mentioned. I think what is struggling with a number of problems, is going from
mainly being attempted is to allow academic works to strength to strength. And I like to think that it is doing
exist in a whole set of registers, as a paper, as a website, this both with a certain amount of integrity and without
as a performance, as an installation, and so on. A whole reneging on the promises of interdisciplinarity.
series of echoes, each adding something to what is Most of all, I think what is pivotal about geography
communicated, and to whom. In turn, this has led geo- now is that it has kitted itself out with the ideas and the
graphers in to all kinds of collaborations with people tools to be able to recognize and to understand the
who have skills in these other areas. For example, there myriad new geographies that are constantly being
have been a series of collaborations in the UK between brought into existence. We live in a world of worlds:
geographers and artists, a number of which have led to now geography has learnt to understand that fact and
exhibitions. not so much live with as live for it.
Then, there is one more area of excitement that I
want to mention. That is politics. I think we can start to
see in the recent work of some geographers an attempt Acknowledgements
to outline different ways of defining the political and, in
general, doing the kind of politics which can ‘deepen’ This paper was originally written as an address to the
what we mean by political activity. What is being at- 33rd Annual Meeting of the Geography Teachers’ As-
tempted is both to define new kinds of generous political sociation of Singapore on March 2nd 2002 and is meant
engagement which ‘fit’ the kinds of complex, multivalent to take the form of a quasi-polemic. The paper is a
societies we increasingly find ourselves in, and to invent product of my time as a Distinguished Visiting Professor
appropriate political practices which can appeal to and at the National University of Singapore and I would like
work across these many constituencies. Such expanded to thank the University and the Department of Geog-
forms of political practice, often inspired by the writings raphy for their hospitality. Henry Yeung, Andrew
of feminist geographers, should enable the growth of Leyshon, and Ron Johnston provided invaluable advice
more variety in public life and they should also recog- and encouragement. James Sidaway, Lisa Law, Tim
nize (to come back to a topic already mentioned) the Bunnell, Tim Oke, and Victor Savage all gave me useful
register of the emotions as an indispensable element of comments. Martin Siegert and Mike Summerfield did
political engagement, understood as a kind of ‘visceral’ more than supplement my physical geography expertise.
political thinking which we cannot do without. It is clear
that space is intimately wrapped up in these attempts to
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