You Are Here: A Brief Guide to the World

The view from L1: The origins of earth and a broad view of how the different geographies and atmospheric down to biospheric layers work together.

"let's embrace these bulging urban brains, these massed flowerings of opportunity and potential. The frontiers of exploration have spread from deserts, forests and mountain ranges to include centres of human population whose increasing scale demands new research, new ideas, new policies; fresh symbolism . Urban jungles are greener than we think. Th... See more

Age of Geography: The field of geography and its changes over time, starting with map construction to the humanitarian work geographers participate in today. This chapter discusses Universal Basic Income, Sustainable Development Goals, and climate change contingencies that may be viable options, such as rewilding.

"So it's taken some 4.6 billion years for a cosmic swirl of gas and dust to evolve into a planet fit for butterflies and children...This intricate web of life exists because Earth operates as a system in which everything is connected and interdependent. The word 'complex' does not begin to describe the workings of this system ."

Water World: From glaciers to rivers to our relationship with water across cultures and history. This chapter covers water cycles and our influence on the future of water.

"Our ability to engage with geographical science will determine our future."

" Historical geography depicts the river as a conduit for human interaction, a linear attractant for hunters and gatherers, for camping and for cooking hazelnuts, for erecting staked roundhouses and processional ways, for building civilisations and launching an Industrial Revolution."

Neuropolis: Our relationship with cities from Mumbai to Manhattan. As our cities change, they inspire a change in us: "A new generation of explorers, cyclists and psychogeographers are remapping urban landscapes through non-places. In this expanding urban maze, waymarks — as ever — are key to community cohesion ." Cities are described as "an immens... See more

"If stories are linked with regularly repeated spatial practices, they become mutually supportive, and when a story becomes sedimented into the landscape, the story and the place dialectically help to construct and reproduce each other. Places help to recall stories that are associated with them, and places only exist (as named locales) by virtue o... See more

"We need political leaders, business leaders and policymakers who understand the interactive nature of the planet's systems and who recognise the geographical nature of the challenges we all face. The courage and ambition of those leaders will depend upon the demands made of them by us. So we need to be informed, too . Never has geography been so i... See more