ABSTRACT Scholarship in the Geography of religion has expanded the study of religious space beyond formal places of worship to informal and temporary sites. This article reviews these developments while highlighting a persistent gap: the limited attention paid to the material agency of architecture. By revisiting debates on the ‘politics and poetics’ of religious space, the paper argues that architecture is often reduced to a symbolic representation of power or a passive container of practice. To address this, the article proposes an original framework that synthesises three established dimensions—Infrasecularity, Iconicity (and Iconic Aspiration), and Infrastructuring—to re‐materialise the study of religious buildings. Drawing on these extant concepts, the framework provides new tools to analyse how architecture actively participates in visibility and spatial negotiation. Applying this model to Sikh gurdwaras in Singapore and Italy, the article demonstrates how buildings act as catalysts in the material production of religious space and the assertion of a community's right to the city.
ABSTRACT In times of runaway climate change, it is as urgent as ever to develop effective communication strategies that encourage governments and citizens to cut carbon and foster socio‐ecological transformations, while avoiding a sense of despair and ‘apocalypse fatigue’ among recipients. This narrative literature review starts by presenting the evolution of climate communication before reflecting on three distinct communication approaches: the information deficit model, the fear and safety argument, and finally, more recent, action‐oriented approaches. The review offers a critical appraisal of these three approaches, highlighting their respective dynamics, communicative affordances, and limitations, as well as the integrative potential of storytelling. In addition, it considers the growing significance of social media as a powerful medium for climate communication and highlights voices from the so‐called ‘Global South’, who emphasize the need for situated climate communication to address justice concerns. Throughout the review, we emphasize how geographical perspectives can inform the design of communication strategies that are responsive to spatial, cultural, and social contexts, thereby helping communicators and policymakers engage more effectively with diverse publics and navigate political resistance.
ABSTRACT Urban agriculture (UA) in slums represents a vital yet under‐researched strategy for enhancing food security and community resilience in marginalised urban areas. This systematic review of 104 studies reveals stark contrasts in theoretical approaches: Global North scholarship frames UA through lenses of racial capitalism and gentrification, while Global South perspectives emphasise rights‐based access and survival strategies. A critical gap persists in applying resilience theory and everyday urbanism frameworks that could better capture UA's adaptive capacities in informal settlements. Empirical research remains disproportionately focused on caloric access and social significance (70% of studies), neglecting integrated analyses of economic, environmental, and health impacts (< 30%). Such fragmentation perpetuates narrow policy approaches that overlook UA's systemic potential. Key structural barriers such as land tenure insecurity, spatial constraints, and policy contradictions are particularly acute in African contexts, where informal UA practices thrive despite institutional marginalisation. Three priority research gaps emerge: (1) limited empirical understanding of extra‐legal UA's productivity and governance; (2) insufficient assessment of sustainability trade‐offs; and (3) inadequate inclusion of non‐farming community perspectives in impact evaluations. Addressing these through interdisciplinary, place‐based research could transform UA from an ad hoc coping mechanism into a cornerstone of equitable urban governance under the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11). This paradigm shift requires recognising UA's multidimensional role in slum contexts—not merely as food security intervention, but as integral to urban resilience and community empowerment.
ABSTRACT Recent scholarship has opened up the historical ‘black‐boxing’ of the body in geographical research. Developments in critical health and feminist geographies, together with new materialism, have countered long‐standing binaries perpetuated by the biomedical model of health. Contributing to health geographies, political ecology as a field has generated critical insights into the inter‐related, complex and multi‐layered nature of human‐environment relations, as manifested in the production of (ill)health. In accordance with feminist political ecologists, this paper pushes for the incorporation of the visceral, fleshy, fluid body into geographical enquiries to propose an all‐encompassing understanding of health and the body, that visibilises how intersecting structural vulnerabilities shape health outcomes. Building on feminist political ecology models, this article highlights how developments in new materialism ‐ when read geographically ‐ can re‐imagine understandings on the body, health and the environment. Contributing to geographies of the body and geographies of breathing, this paper integrates new materialist thinking into a feminist political ecology framework, to attend to affective corpo‐realities and the making of healthy environments and bodies, across time, place and scale. Through the example of breathing, this article highlights how intimate everyday metabolic processes are perpetually mediated by socio‐political factors, which change the body's very constitution. Employing a biosocial approach to bodily processes, such as breathing, highlights how health is deeply entangled in everyday sociopolitical life. Crucially, this article argues for a reconceptualisation of the place‐based relationship between air, breath and bodies to push for a preventative approach to the emergence of harmful, health‐depleting assemblages in the context of breathing. In doing so, this theoretical intervention problematises variegated health outcomes to lay the groundwork for an emancipatory respiratory politics, where everyone is afforded the right to breathe.
ABSTRACT With the rise of neoliberal globalised markets and large‐scale irregular migration, temporary migrant labour has become central to the economic growth of the global North within a changing global economy. However, the restructuring of national and regional economies has also brought about the informalisation of labour markets and the fragmentation of labour processes, with migrants being more exposed than other workers to the detrimental risks of wage squeezes and uncertainty associated with securing permanent jobs. Within this context, this review takes a critical look to explore the challenges migrant workers experience while using various digital labour platforms such as Uber, Uber Eats, DoorDash and Hungry Panda, to earn an income. After reviewing existing literature on migration, citizenship, precarious work and digital labour platforms, in this paper, I introduce the concept of ‘twin precarities’ to explore migrant workers' vulnerabilities arising from their non‐citizenship status and their involvement in the platform economy, where they often experience algorithmic management but many of them are less familiar with how to navigate or strategically engage with the algorithm, partly due to limited technological skills, a challenge that is also common among non‐migrant citizens. ‘Twin precarities’ is a new analytical frame for understanding the lived experience of migrant platform workers as well as for exploring the various and complex entanglements between precarious migrants' emancipatory practices enabled by digital labour platforms and the constraints created by these platforms.
ABSTRACT Human and physical geographers alike have long called for a shift toward the study of fire that re‐politicizes geographies of fire and pyrogeographies. Whether through centering the role of fire in the Anthropocene, proposing the pyrocene to interrogate our current epoch, or looking at the aftermath and governance of fire to better understand social inequities in post‐disaster contexts, geographers have taken up the spatial, metaphoric, and combustible properties of fire. Despite calls to re‐politicize geographies of fire, geographic inquiry into fire continues to focus primarily upon socio‐ecological approaches and a “wildland‐urban‐interface” land designation that stems from colonial definitions of land as “empty” or terra nullius . In addition, when fire is viewed within urban contexts to study the Anthropocene, these works often take the industrial revolution as a starting point and/or flatten urban spaces, leaving unattended the role that colonialism and imperialism have played in creating current geographies of fire. Yet, there is general agreement among human geographers, environmental historians, and fire ecologists that colonial governance and land policy have dictated pyrogeographies. Stemming from these observations, this paper asks: what could socio‐legal geographies of fire entail? Building from existing literature on fire geographies, I suggest that global orderings, and specifically logics underlying property, are rife with socio‐legalities which are spatialized through fire. Such critical interrogations of fire can lay bare the legal, social, and political settings and materialities of fire, including spatial inquiry into the lived and harnessed use, desire, and criminalization of fire, while revealing the underlying powers and authorities that have been naturalized in place.
ABSTRACT This article examines the cultural sector as complex, sprawling, and uneven spatial networks, shaped by the interactions of people, institutions, goods and services. At the intersection of network science and geography, it synthesises how spatial network approaches have been applied to the study of cultural and creative industries, including art, museums, heritage, publishing, film, and music. Core concepts, such as small‐world topology, preferential attachment, homophily, and brokering, are contextualised to illuminate mechanisms of clustering and persistent inequalities in global cultural flows. While network science offers a compelling framework for understanding the sector's dynamics, the review also highlights its limitations, especially a tendency toward oversimplification and a lack of engagement with geographical thinking. It concludes by outlining a research agenda that calls for stronger integration with geographical theory, methodological innovation, and improved data on local cultural participation and inequalities.
ABSTRACT Vertical urbanization is reshaping cities across the Global North and South, driven by population growth, land scarcity, and speculative development. This shift includes the proliferation of high‐rise towers, underground networks, elevated infrastructures, multi‐level public spaces, and self‐built settlements. As urban futures are increasingly imagined in vertical terms, the challenges and opportunities presented by distinct vertical urbanisms raise pressing questions about densification, equity, and the transformation of both urban space and life in 21st‐century cities. In this paper, we review a decade of scholarship marking a “vertical turn” in urban studies to assess how geographers have explored the spatial, social, and political dimensions of urban verticality. We organize this review around three themes: (1) vertical imaginaries, the ways height and depth are envisioned and symbolically understood; (2) vertical mobilities, tracing circulation through multi‐layered infrastructures; and (3) lived vertical urbanisms, examining experiences of stratification, security, and sustainability. In synthesizing these literatures, we highlight the uneven geographies of access and inequality that vertical urbanism produces and outline future research directions to address the complex social, ecological, and ethical challenges of life in three‐dimensional urban environments.
ABSTRACT This review critically examines the contradictions of the just energy transition while developing a theoretical framework for moving analysis forward. We address how the current energy transition is beset with numerous ecological and social contradictions. Renewable energy production is on the rise but has not substantively displaced fossil fuels while meaningful participation in this process is partial and limited. We review the literature on energy transition technologies and participation as elements of an energy transition while paying close attention to the different levels of analysis employed (moving from the individual to the institutional). These perspectives, while important, miss out on macro‐level, structural processes, neglecting systemic dynamics that impede just energy transitions. We argue that, through synthesizing the theoretical insights of Istvan Mészáros and Henri Lefebvre, we can develop a robust orientation for future just energy transition research. More specifically, we focus on the significance of placing the energy transition within the historically specific context of capital's social metabolism. Our discussion highlights how capital's adversarial class structure, in conjunction with its growth imperative, creates contradictory spaces limiting the potential of a just energy transition to address the climate emergency. Lefebvre's radical project of autogestion provides a guideline for the just energy transition to transcend capital's alienated socio‐spatial metabolism.
ABSTRACT Food is emerging as a geographical lens to investigate socioecological relations. A growing body of research is exploring food in the city, considering it not only as a commodity but also as an archive of practices and their spatial and ecological transformations. While land‐based foodways are increasingly questioned, the relationship between food, oceans, and urban spaces is largely overlooked. This essay provides an overview of the contemporary debate on food geographies, with a focus on relational approaches to urban foodways. Radical Food Geographies will be analysed as a theory and praxis that tackles food and spatial injustices, interconnecting critical geographical lenses and food studies. To foster the emerging focus within Radical Food Geographies on more‐than‐human relations, this review proposes contamination across ocean and food geographies, discussing the entanglements between food and oceans along urban waterfronts. Geographies of urban marine foodways are introduced to explore socioecological relationships mediated by food in urban natures. Highlighting the uneven processes that mutually construct oceans, cities, and foodways through feminist, southern, and political ecological perspectives, artisanal fishing is framed as a relational practice amid the ruins of extractive and neoliberal waterfront development. Drawing from the definition of food as a visceral and lively matter and grounding its material and political implications, this review invites food geographies to delve underwater, questioning artisanal fishing through the mirror of urban oceans.
Organised sport settings serve as key spaces for the potential production, maintenance, and experience of health. Although scholars have highlighted the problematic practices associated with health in these settings, it remains that participation in organised sport can offer opportunities for distinct health and wellbeing benefits across a range of physical, mental, and social outcomes. Yet, geographic research has rarely explored organised sport spaces in relation to health, instead focusing on the capacity of individualised exercise and fitness practices to promote or inhibit health. This paper considers how an integrated critical geography of health and sport could take inspiration from their respective sub-disciplines to explore how the organisation of sporting spaces influences and constructs experiences of health and wellbeing. In light of persisting structural inequities in health and sport, we propose a Lefebvrean Gendered Environmental Approach to understand the spatial production of inequitable sport environments and opportunities for participation, performance, and health. We argue that critical geographies of health and sport research could support enhanced geographical understandings of the maintenance and reproduction of health inequities in organised sport settings which could inform context-specific, equity-based interventions.
ABSTRACT Queer spaces, and, in particular, urban gay villages around the world—such as the Castro in San Francisco, the West Village in New York, and Soho in London—have been intensely researched by geographers since the early 1980s. However, although Shinjuku Ni‐chōme in Tokyo is internationally recognized as the world's largest gay district by number of commercial establishments, it has received far less attention from geographers in the English‐speaking world. This review explores how Japanese geographers and other social scientists who write in Japanese, influenced by Anglo‐American scholarship as well as Japanese ethnological ( minzokugaku ) intellectual traditions, understand the question of sexuality and space in Japan, and particularly, given its dominance in the Japanese queer geographic imagination, the ontology of nightlife spaces in Shinjuku Ni‐chōme. First, in contrast to Anglo‐American scholarship on gay districts in Western cities, where there is an increasing emphasis on the intersectional aspects of exclusion and oppression, and concerns about the decline of gay neighborhoods overall, I find that despite Japan's status as a highly‐developed liberal democracy Ni‐chōme continues to be considered monovalently as a place of refuge from the oppression of homophobia, and, for any Japanese person, the sole geographic location where the truth of the queer self can be disclosed. Second, precisely because they are narrated primarily as a place of refuge, there is a scholarly focus on gay bars as social spaces, with authors arguing that gay bar districts serve as sites for cultivating types of intimacy that are specific to the Japanese context. This includes a quasi‐familial form through the “mama” system, the importance of group identities, and the salience of the bar as a site of a particular form of social reproduction, but Japanese scholars interpret this differently than Anglophone scholars who have recently begun to explore queer social reproduction (e.g. Andrucki 2021) as a mode of radical antiheteronormative labor.
ABSTRACT This article presents a systematic review of Pacific collectives' responses to mobility disruptions during the COVID‐19 pandemic, examining how communities negotiated the relational dynamics of mobility and immobility. Guided by three review questions—(1) How did Pacific collectives navigate (im)mobility during COVID‐19? (2) What roles did digital mobilities and the Digital Vā play in sustaining connection? (3) What conceptual and methodological directions emerge for future Pacific mobilities research?—the review synthesises 20 publications (2020–2024). Sources were identified through database searches (Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar), journal archives, and relevant grey literature, using inclusion criteria that privilege Pacific perspectives and culturally grounded analysis. The thematic synthesis identifies five response areas—empowering networks, maintaining connections, strengthening intergenerational ties, mobilising educational collectives, and redistributing resources—and four cross‐cutting themes—reconnection, revival, redefining, and reimagining. Together, these demonstrate how families and communities indigenised immobility by renewing cultural practices, reshaping digital relational spaces, and creatively reconfiguring tā (rhythms of time) and vā (relational space). Conceptually, the review advances understandings of relational (im)mobility, by distinguishing general digital mobilities from the culturally grounded Digital Vā, which extends Indigenous ethics of reciprocity, care, and collective wellbeing into online spaces. By foregrounding Pacific‐authored scholarship, this article contributes to debates on mobility justice and digital mobilities, challenging deficit‐driven narratives and highlighting culturally embedded forms of resilience, adaptation, and collective agency that emerged during the pandemic.
ABSTRACT This review article key trends and debates in bioeconomy research, with a particular focus on the role of the meat industry. We begin by briefly introducing bioeconomy studies as a scholarly terrain on which projects of ecological modernization are both promoted and critically debated. The main part presents a thematic review of literature that explicitly addresses meat within the context of the bioeconomy. We then analyze how these studies reflect (or challenge) the paradigm of ecological modernization and assess the extent to which the meat industry features in these debates. From an economic geography perspective, we identify notable omissions in the literature concerning the political economy of this industry, as well as the resulting uneven socio‐spatial relations and environmental impacts. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research to better assess the implications of capital‐led strategies in the meat industry for broader goals of social‐ecological transformation within bioeconomy frameworks.
ABSTRACT This study examines how an inclusive public sphere was constructed at Erenler , a literary coffeehouse in 1980s Istanbul, amid Turkey's post‐coup authoritarian climate and deepening ideological fragmentation. In the aftermath of the military coup, a period marked by traumatic depoliticization and the suppression of public sphere, Erenler emerged as a vital contact zone for literati from disparate ideological backgrounds. Adopting a qualitative case study methodology, the study synthesizes 96 semi‐structured interviews with the surviving members of the Erenler literati community and a content analysis of eleven literary journals associated with the community, published between 1985 and 1993. Drawing on the notion of ecology of encounters, this study employs a multi‐scalar analytical framework across micro, meso, and macro levels. At the micro‐scale, affective encounters grounded in shared trauma established interpersonal trust among ideologically opposed literati. At the meso‐scale, these bodily proximities transformed into discursive production through collaborative journal publishing that transcended right‐left divisions. At the macro‐scale, Erenler operated as a lived space of resistance against both the state's suppression of speech and neoliberalism's commodification of public sphere. Interrogating the limitations of both Habermasian universalism and post‐Habermasian conflict‐oriented models, this study demonstrates how spatial practices of mutual recognition enabled dialog across Turkey's historical cleavages at the time. Erenler thus offers a critical counter‐narrative for political geographies of the public sphere, illustrating how embodied co‐presence and cultural production can generate inclusive publicness even within repressive political structures.
Geographers have investigated the multiple factors behind the current polarization of space that has led to the categorization of disadvantaged, structurally weak, or peripheralized places as "left behind." These places are also considered as the political strongholds of the radical right, which is currently becoming mainstreamed in the public sphere of the Western world. Following a conceptualization of the mainstreamed radical right and its approach to space, the current article presents the socio-spatial imaginaries circulated by this political group concerning left-behind places. It is argued that such places are not only nested locations where the radical right grounds its political power, but spatial objects of a global relational space co-produced by the mainstreamed radical right.
Ports facilitate vital global trade, operating as foundational linkages in the economic circulation through which nearly all consumer products pass. However, there is a need to conceptualize the local implications of these globalized networks. As international trade has intensified over the last few decades, the current international order has seen significant uncertainty due to both geopolitical turbulence and the lingering supply chain disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic. By focusing on the relationship between cities, ports, and their surrounding regions, this review situates the interlinked geographies through which global trade has continuously transformed various places. Earlier scholarship discussed ports as primarily commercial nodes responsible for economic prosperity. This paper highlights the importance of studying logistics-led urbanism through ports' role as central nodes in urban redevelopments, global supply chain disruptions, climate change impacts, and geopolitical tensions. We argue that logistics-led urbanism reconfigures the 21st-century city through transformations of infrastructure, labor, capital, and territory. We draw on frameworks that treat ports as contested, strategic, and deeply political spaces, and conclude with suggestions for a future port-city research agenda in an emergent era of economic and climatic uncertainty.
This article reframes the contemporary "crisis" of the nation-state not as a simple erosion of sovereignty but as a problem of spatial misalignment: adaptive states remain strategically embedded in dense transnational regimes, yet domestic legitimacy falters when unitary national imaginaries confront heterogeneous, multi-sited social realities. Synthesizing globalization studies, identity transformation literature, and spatial theory, we conceptualize layered citizenship as a regime of constitutional equality coupled with differentiated access to political voice, cultural expression, and mobility, sustained by hierarchies of cultural legibility and securitized forms of visibility. We develop this argument through T & uuml;rkiye's trajectory from late Ottoman plural imaginaries and Republican homogenization to contemporary geopolitical upscaling, showing how shifting spatial projects have configured unity and disunity across time. While external organizations recalibrate state functions without abolishing capacity, internal cohesion increasingly depends on integrating plural identities into the language and infrastructures of public space. As a constructive response, we reconstruct Blue Anatolianism not as historical romanticism but as a methodology of spatial commoning that relocates identity from blood to place and from essence to shared use. Through route pedagogy, in situ learning, multilingual signage, and conservation-use balances, we outline scalable commons-oriented policies that render difference co-present and publicly legible without undermining territorial integrity. The framework explains why conventional appeals to unity reproduce fragmentation and offers an implementable program to reconcile adaptive statehood with plural belongings. Though grounded in T & uuml;rkiye, the argument travels to post-imperial and metropolitan contexts, where spatial commons can realign sovereignty, territory, and identity by thickening shared infrastructures of narrative, route, use, and care.
This review article brings together recent work on climate distress and reparative framings of care, drawing in particular on Carr's (2022) recent call to turn to “tangible work of climate crisis” to explore the potential posed by climate distress to become and world otherwise . First, I reflect on existential perspectives on climate distress, looking to theories of anxiety, horror, grief, and trauma to understand it as a form of “unworlding” (Halberstam, 2024), that is, as a disrupter to business-as-usual lifeworlds and an indicator of the need for both personal and political change. I then move to explore reparative geographies, which emphasise the critical work of care, repair, and maintenance. What potential lies in rethinking climate distress as a matter of work? What possibilities might there be for research if we think through climate distress through a modality of repair? Recent work suggests that the goal of engaging with climate distress is “affective transformation” (Verlie 2022), that is, to work through ‘negative’ feelings in order to become capable of not only bearing the weight of climate crisis, but of generating more livable worlds as well. Scholarship on care, which has long held the radical potential for surviving precarious worlds and for bringing other worlds into being, can serve here as a useful guiding framework. In bringing together these two bodies of work, I hope to elucidate how thinking through climate distress as a matter of reparative work could be generative for future directions of geographic research on the everyday work of climate distress.
This article explores the development of Italian popular and educational cartography following the national unification of 1861. While Italy had a long-standing cartographic tradition dating back to the Renaissance, this tradition had rapidly declined in the late modern age due to political fragmentation. The late 19th century saw a revival of map production, particularly through figures like Guido Cora and Giovanni De Agostini, who aimed to establish a national cartographic industry and make Italy's map production independent from foreign, especially German, publishing houses. Beyond the dissemination of geographical knowledge for scientific and educational purposes, the revival of cartography proved crucial in fostering the consolidation of the nation-state and constructing an imperial imagination that supported the establishment of a colonial domain.
