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In this article, I expound upon the recent claim that Geography is well placed to contribute to the global ‘green recovery’ by suggesting that landscape architects have the potential to be highly effective collaborators in this endeavour. Contemporary Geography represents a diverse array of sub-fields coalescing around scale, space and place. Altogether, Geography provides a disciplinary lens that is multi-scalar and can focus on any number of critical environmental and cultural concerns that resonate with green recovery discourse. At various times, landscape architecture has shared Geography's multi-scalar and multifaceted lens, and through this complementary outlook, the disciplines have collaborated within mutual spaces such as ‘geodesign’, and through a to-and-fro of methods of practice and disciplinary reflection. However, ongoing discourse within landscape architecture describes self-doubt around the consistency of its agency and capacity to engage with the critical challenges of the climate crisis and social inequity. Elsewhere, this has been attributed to landscape architecture's loss of professional territory to other practices of spatial design, and a reverse into scenography. Here I articulate the concern that much landscape architectural practice appears to intermittently misplace the scale and scope that is akin to Geography's lens and that, although this has stymied the discipline, there are recent indications that landscape architecture is hungry for relevance and ready to re-engage with the necessary space, place, and scale. This article, then, looks to provide are a reminder of the potential to be found in landscape architecture and whet the appetite for green recovery collaboration.

This paper showcases Oral Histories and Futures interviews as an approach and series of innovations for researching crises with qualitative methods. It presents new possibilities for methodological innovations to embrace the multi-directional and longitudinal temporalities of crises across the life-course and the life-course of crises. As an exciting avenue for methodological enhancement, I build on and bring together techniques across Oral Histories and creative biographical interviewing. Developed as part of a recent study exploring reproduction, economic crisis and the life-course, with this approach I aimed to elicit people's experiences and opinions about their pasts, present and futures by innovating with traditional qualitative methodologies. I outline five areas of innovation—and associated observations, opportunities and obstacles—including a focus on younger generations, on the future, the inclusion of reflexive activities, interviewing in the midst of crises, and remote interviewing. Conclusions highlight what can be learned from an Oral Histories and Futures approach for thinking about socio-temporal horizons.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has brought profound change to many areas of our lives, and perhaps most of all in terms of how we communicate. A testament to our vital need for social connection, millions of people have sought to shed the physical constraints of isolation and restricted mobility by using online video calling to reaffirm relations with friends, colleagues and wider communities. Drawing on qualitative in-depth interviews with users of online video call platforms, this paper explores the social and subjective impacts of video calling, and how they are transforming habitual modes of relating to ourselves and others. The paper argues that grasping the impact of such technological encounters requires new modes of thinking attuned to the less conscious and more material processes though which technologies come to shape how we think and behave. In theorising these unconscious and non-representational potentials, the paper engages with Félix Ravaisson's innovative theorisation of habit. In contrast to those thinkers who would reduce habit to the unthinking and automatic repetition of the same, we explore how Ravaisson's theorisation of habit offers a dynamic ontology for understanding how bodies change and how change comes to be registered in bodies through encounters with technology. We argue that this conceptualisation of habit opens a powerful way of thinking about how the repeated use of online video calls has become bound with the production of new habits of attention, transforming the embodied ways in which we perceive and relate to our own subjectivities, other people, and the spaces in which we live and work.

Universities and policymakers increasingly use ‘research culture’ and ‘research environment’ to govern as well as describe research. Both terms help frame who is considered a research actor; how researchers interact with the contexts in which they make knowledge; and what is considered malleable when attempting to improve how research is done. There are very few conceptual-critical analyses of either term, even as each is a complex abstraction with rich and contested histories and usage. I explore both, largely using the example of the United Kingdom (where improving ‘research culture’ is currently prioritised by many funders, and will be assessed by the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2028). Research culture has a close relationship with the concept organisational culture, which emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s and prioritised particular – frequently psychological – constructs that focused on the norms, values, and attitudes of an organisation. ‘Research labour’ – the labour relations that underpin how people work together and shape organisational norms, values, and relational dependencies – tends to drop from view. Geographers have much to offer these debates, given how extensively the discipline has contributed to what culture and environment might mean. Institutional, national, and sectoral policies concerning research culture and environment significantly shape how knowledge-making is understood and intervened on. The processes that ‘research culture’ and ‘research environment’ authorise and foreclose require greater examination.

This article addresses the uneven territorial growth of the smart city phenomenon and how the national and local spatial politics of urban smart projects work out in practice. While in previous decades the concept of smart city referred mainly to the digital and technological realm as an indicator of the performance of cities, today it is taking on a broader range of meanings, so as to also cover such areas as governance, environment, housing and people. However, the critical literature on smart cities highlights two potential disadvantages: firstly, that urban planners who decide to pursue a smart city vision run the risk of creating a kind of power and control over residents; and secondly that there appears to be an incompatibility between smart cities and the informal. Moreover, the spatial and the critical dimensions of the governance of urban smart projects are still insufficiently researched. By using a comparative and developmental quantitative methodology for the urban smart projects of Romania and taking the city of Timisoara as a case study, this study highlights the fact that large cities are not always the best represented; our findings show that peripheral small cities and towns may enjoy a more balanced distribution of smart projects. Furthermore, our evaluation of the spatial distribution (centre–periphery) of smart city projects in Timişoara—a European Capital of Culture in 2023—reveals a higher level of investment in smart projects in its urban periphery. By presenting new critical understandings of the spatial interrelationships of smart city development, the study contributes to the geography of smart cities.

In 2016 and 2017, local environmentalists in downtown Indianapolis organised for the conservation of an urban greenspace known as Crown Hill Woods. The woods was sold by Crown Hill Cemetery and its planned removal set off a struggle over the meaning of the woods that revealed elements of placemaking and place attachments. This article uses a case study of a conservation conflict to analyse the language used by conservation activists attempting to prevent the development of Crown Hill Woods. Drawing from public interviews, social media posts, blog posts, letters and essays, this study identifies several themes of placemaking present in the discourse around Crown Hill Woods, including materiality, non-human agency, ethical considerations, and interactional past/potential. These themes suggest that placemaking, and place attachments, can offer an alternative to ecosystem services as a motivator for conservation.

In this article we draw on recent debates in ecology and human geography on the project of decolonising academic practice. Our objective is to address two key questions via a generative discussion across disciplines: what can ecologists learn from ongoing debates in human geography? And how might those learnings translate back into geographical praxis? We make the central argument that vibrant debates in human geography can push ecologists to take more radical steps towards a decolonial vision that, in turn, can guide geographers to a more material decolonising praxis. We build this argument by working through various dis/connections—between ecology/human geography, theory/praxis, South/North—in the wider project of decolonising academia to provoke critical reflection around the themes of (i) language and publishing; (ii) collaboration and ‘inclusion’; and (iii) the geographies of ecological research.

Court ethnographies have commonly relied on the physical presence of the ethnographers. This paper explores the opportunities and the challenges of conducting court ethnographies without this physical presence. Specifically, it examines what it means to conduct remote ethnographies of legal processes where neither the ethnographer nor the other hearing participants are physically co-present. The sudden shift towards remote hearings in fieldwork conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic presented an opportunity to compare in-person and remote ethnographic methods. Through a case study of bail hearings in the immigration tribunal in the UK, this paper explores the value and challenges associated with conducting remote ethnographies and asks how they can help to shed light on the impact of absences in legal events.

Despite considerable research into special economic zones (SEZs) and Island Studies, islands and SEZs are rarely considered together. Islands and SEZs are, however, closely associated, in part due to the attractiveness of island characteristics (remoteness, boundedness, isolation) for exclusive economic processes. Many prominent SEZs are located on small islands, and many island economies function similarly to SEZs. Defining SEZs as ‘bounded spaces of economic and regulatory exception’, this paper considers deregulated industrial zones and exclusively branded smart cities and eco-cities, as well as island SEZs designed for external benefit and for local benefit. The study shows that spatial processes of containment and exclusion are supported by islands and are especially useful for crafting SEZs, which may specialise in industries such as financial services, manufacturing, gaming, port services and high-end tourism. Nevertheless, SEZ processes often create negative social, economic and environmental impacts. Island SEZs developed for external interest often seek to contain harm within islands or to exclude unfavourable factors, resulting in a spatial mismatch of harms and benefits. Island SEZs developed for local interest struggle to externalise harms, creating problems for island populations. The paper argues for the value of understanding islands and SEZs together, without exceptionalising them.

Over the past two decades, advancements have been made towards de-medicalising the term ‘dementia’, attending to in-the-moment lived experiences of people with the condition, and exploring the connections between dementia and place, relations, activities, and well-being. In the same timeframe, a range of prominent researchers within health geography have proposed new renegotiations of well-being that consider it as something relational, process-oriented, and emergent. Although these progressions in both dementia studies and health geography are ontologically aligned, the two lines of enquiry have only recently started to see crossover, pioneered by geographers seeking to better understand what it means to ‘live well with dementia in the moment’. In this theoretically driven paper, I celebrate these contributions to dementia and well-being studies through a timely review of the literature that informed the theoretical underpinnings of my own doctoral studies. Through the literature, I consider how a relational well-being lens can make supportive and empowering in-the-moment contributions to people living with dementia, who seek ways of ‘being well’ and ‘doing well’. As part of a special edition of Area, this paper takes us from the early inputs of health geographers to dementia and relational well-being knowledge, through to present-day literature and the future of dementia research framed around the in-the-moment movement. The contents of this paper ultimately support the importance of pushing the theoretical and conceptual boundaries of dementia research and well-being studies, to subsequently broaden our understandings of dementia and provide a new well-being lens that better captures the perspectives of those living with it.