GeoAI’s rapid expansion makes renewed attention to slowness in GIScience necessary. Situating GeoAI within GIScience’s longer history of automation, this progress report revisits fast and slow geographic knowledge production and develops slow GIS as a critical orientation to intelligent automation. Drawing on critical, feminist, Indigenous, participatory, disability, and minor GISciences, I propose four commitments—relevance, reflexivity, relationality, and responsibility—that guide attention to moments that should not be automated too quickly, from framing problems and assembling data to interpreting results, mobilizing knowledge, and tracing consequences. I conclude by considering systemic changes needed to sustain slow GIS within contemporary research systems.
This article theorises bulldozer violence as a distinctive modality of planetary urbanisation through which contemporary urban development increasingly proceeds via mechanised displacement, territorial erasure, and political spectacle. We develop a fourfold theoretical framework that defines bulldozer violence as a political technology of spatial governance, reconceptualises planetary urbanisation as a dialectic of development through erasure, and explains its operation through violent agencement and spectacle. Bulldozer violence simultaneously disassembles existing socio-material worlds while assembling new territorial, legal, and affective orders, offering a conceptual vocabulary for understanding contemporary authoritarian urbanism across diverse geopolitical contexts.
This report reviews recently published work on political ecologies of war to argue that war is a terraforming project. Terraformations of war require thinking through the ways in which ecologies are shaped by and in turn shape violent conflict. The concept of terraformations is introduced before outlining the many destructive, toxifying, and degrading effects that war has on socio-ecological relations. The article then shows how ecology functions as a medium of war, after which it articulates forms of ecological endurance. It concludes by reflecting on ecocide and calls for more scholarship on life-giving terraformations amidst militarised ecologies.
Human geographers are constantly endeavoring to deepen our understanding of patterns and processes. As a result, we have no shortage of models to simplify, visualize, explain, and predict human activity on Earth. However, recent advances in geographic modeling approaches are rapidly changing how we address contemporary geographic problems. In this first progress report, I provide an overview and typology of uncertainty in human geography models, enabling researchers to make more informed decisions about their data pipelines and modeling choices. In particular, this work explores uncertainty in classic, deductive models, inductive models, agent-based models, and spatial digital twins.
This article explores research on digital geographies of childhood and youth , critically considering (potential) contributions to wider scholarship in geography and interdisciplinary childhood studies. Although geographers’ engagement with this emerging field is developing productively, extant scholarship remains relatively diffuse and research methods-focused; more sustained interrogation of digital processes and experiences with/in young people’s lives, has only recently emerged. This article traces key geographic contributions, identifies potential absences in the field, and outlines an ambitious, interlinked agenda for future work on: (i) agency, materiality, and the more-than-human; (ii) marginalisation and intersectionalities; (iii) spatial politics and activism; (iv) popular culture and everyday economic geographies.
This report undertakes to bridge the notions of rural housing provision and homemaking, highlighting how structural conditions and lived experiences are mutually constitutive. Drawing on rural geography research, it explores how social relations, everyday practices, and engagements with material and non-human environments shape processes of belonging and dwelling. The analysis identifies key conditions that enable homemaking, including social networks, routines, and locally embedded skills, while also addressing processes of home unmaking linked to exclusion, policy frameworks, and labour market dynamics. The report argues for further critical interrogation of rural housing provision and homemaking, bridging structural and experiential dimensions.
This paper develops a feminist reorientation of post-foundational urban geography by shifting attention from rupture to reproduction, and from the spectacular event to the everyday labour that sustains collective life. Rather than rejecting post-foundational political theory, it reconstructs its core concepts of contingency, dissensus, and political subjectification through feminist geographies of care, embodiment, and interdependence. By foregrounding the embodied, affective, and material dimensions of social reproduction through which political life is constituted, it argues that feminist geography expands rather than abandons the post-foundational project, offering a more comprehensive account of how urban political life is constituted, sustained, and transformed.
This paper develops a topological analysis of digitalising territories which examines the dynamic relationship between territory, land, and the digital technologies of measurement and control. We propose a conceptualisation of digitalising territories through a topological lens and across three key pathways: boundaries, relational presence, and invariants. Where boundaries and presence conceptualise territories not as bounded entities, but as dynamic, relational geography continually reshaped by digital technologies, topological invariants point us to the material anchors within transformation. As a result, this framework considers both the adaptability of the digital world and the grounded realities they encompass.
Predicting urban futures has long been central to urban science. This article traces the evolution of urban prediction from structural-equilibrium and process-based models to today’s emerging algorithmic regime. We argue that this shift marks a fundamental epistemic transition from deductive explanation to inductive inference. Examining tensions between explanation, prediction, and policy control, we show that gains in predictive accuracy often come at the cost of causal intelligibility and democratic accountability. The article critiques the governance implications of algorithmic foresight and proposes a framework for democratic urban foresight that reconnects modelling with epistemic democracy, spatial justice, and plural urban futures.
This paper examines the interdisciplinary relationship between geography and ‘the classics’. It attends to the relative paucity of (re)engagements with antiquity from geographers, even as ‘geography’ continues to be an active arena of investigation for classicists and ancient historians. It explores how certain disciplinary features of modern geography reinforce epistemological breaks between ancient and modern geographical thought. Drawing upon debates around canons and canonicity in geography, and decolonial approaches to the history and philosophy of geographical thought, the paper argues for the ongoing significance of ancient geographical thought and for a keener sense of cross-disciplinary dialogue between geography and classical studies.
This article identifies a persistent analytical asymmetry in geographical scholarship on state violence. While existing research has richly examined the structural and spatial effects of state harm, less attention has been paid to the institutional processes through which violence is enacted, justified, and normalized. In response, the article proposes an embodied perspective that redirects attention to the everyday institutional conditions through which violence becomes thinkable and legitimate. Arguing that violent space is not given but produced through organizational routines, spatial imaginaries, and justificatory practices, the article advances a theoretical reorientation for studying state violence as an embodied institutional process.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in environments through which bodies are trained, monitored, evaluated and cared for. This article argues that AI-mediated embodiment should be understood not as intelligent systems applied to pre-existing settings, but as part of the spatial production of embodied life. It develops the concept of algorithmically produced embodied space to describe environments organized through extraction, classification, anticipation and intervention. Bringing sport, fitness and health into dialogue with human geography, the article shows how predictive systems redistribute bodily authority and produce uneven legibility, value and governability. It concludes that bodily futures are spatially produced, not technically predicted.
This paper analyzes contemporary scholarship on repair and the reparative in Geography and allied disciplines. We understand the term repair to refer to incremental and everyday forms through which cities, objects, and landscapes are held together through processes of fixing, mending, and maintaining. The related concept of the reparative, with links to the project of reparations, is more expansive, opening up possibilities for action that respond to wider conversations about historical violence and historical debts linked to colonialism and racial capitalism. Exploring contemporary geographical engagements with repair in both the Global North and South, we argue for a closer connection between ideas of repair and the reparative. We understand this as advancing a reparative orientation in scholarship and action that labors both against infrastructural disrepair and the ongoing disposability of racialized lives.
