Geography and Futures Presidential Address to the Institute of Australian Geographers Conference, Adelaide, April 2004

摘要

In this talk, I want to comment on geography and 'futures' in two different senses. First, I will take up some matters of research practice, and reflect upon the question of how geography (really critical human geography which has long been my own part of the discipline) copes with undertaking research with implications for the future — situations in which a future can be explicitly designed, to a degree. This issue confronts me all the time because I work in a professional faculty of architecture, urban planning, property and construction technology, and urban design, where built futures are being shaped. So, I don't mean the long-term prediction of societal futures — of the 'future shock' or Malthusian variety — though I do note that corporations engage in this and have been known to ask geographers to help them predict what people will want by way of workplaces, leisure, cities, and, of course, products in the long term. Rather I mean futures as on-going adjustments to our daily lives, and improvements in social justice, distributional questions, access and the like.