The future as an emergent problematic in geographical scholarship

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that what makes geography stand out among other academic disciplines is not its collection of methods, but instead the collection of key geographical concepts that are encountered with high frequency in its corpus of published scholarship. I illustrate how this way of thinking works in practice by taking as a case study the emergent field of the geographies of the future and suggesting that it is the very same set of key geographical concepts that makes this field stand out from the more amorphous realm of “futures studies.” I begin my analysis by providing a brief literature review of the seven main research clusters within the field of the geographies of the future: (1) risk, uncertainty, contingency, and surprise; (2) neoliberal governmentality and its management of the future; (3) prefigurative politics and visions of a postcapitalist future; (4) technological progress as a key dimension to foreseeing the future; (5) the future in light of social difference; (6) culture and the historicizing of the future; and (7) economic geographies of the future. Then, in the final part of the paper, I offer some suggestions on how the careful and creative deployment of these key geographical concepts can deepen and enrich the way we think about the future and its geographies. Specifically, I organize these suggestions into three analytical clusters, focusing on (1) distance and proximity; (2) scale; and (3) borders and territory. I then provide some final thoughts about the key concepts versus key methods controversy, arguing in favor of the former.

Introduction and overview

In this paper, I aim to make a modest contribution to the rapidly evolving research on the geographies of the future. I begin by noticing that a significant part of the geography papers dedicated to the problematics of the future is rather weak in describing and conceptualizing in precise terms how the discipline of geography can make a distinct contribution to the transdisciplinary field of enquiry known as “futures studies” (for overviews, see Bergman et al., 2010; Sardar, 2010; Son, 2015). To illustrate this point, many human geographers today identify themselves as critical geographers to signal their commitment to social justice and its multiple ramifications (anticolonialism; antiracism; gender pluralism and gender equality; anticapitalism, etc.). However, this identification does not single out anything unique about geography. In Anglo-American academia, many scholars who work in the humanities, social sciences, and the field of education also label themselves critical or progressive and pursue in their own lives and research programs the ideals of social justice and the attendant commitment to make the world a better place. To provide another illustration, some geographers believe that there is a unique set of geographical methods and that, therefore, it is methodology that makes geography unique. I explain my reservations with this view in the second half of the discussion section, noticing that a simple enumeration of methods in geography and cognate disciplines reveals an overwhelming degree of overlap. Therefore, in this paper, I want to propose a different take on what makes geography unique and then develop the argument that the field of the geographies of the future could benefit from taking it into consideration. In a nutshell, this different take is simply that the discipline of geography approaches the world through the lens of a limited collection of key geographical concepts (for prior work in this vein, see, among many others, Barnes, 2003; Bunge, 1962; Entrikin, 1991; Gould, 1991; Gregory, 1994; Hägerstrand, 1968; Haggett, 1990; Hartshorne, 1939; Massey, 2005; May and Thrift, 2003; Nystuen, 1963; Rose, 1993; Sauer, 1925; Tuan, 1977). These include, but are not limited to, areal differentiation, region, space and spatial diffusion, place and sense of place, distance and proximity, territoriality, territory and borders, landscape, scale, site, locale, location, and locational analysis, time-geography, timespace (also spelled time-space), socio-spatial positionality, nature-society relations, and so on. The frequency of use of these concepts has varied over time, often reflecting the rise and fall in popularity of different schools of geographical thought (Johnston and Sidaway, 2015). To illustrate, distance and proximity were frequently encountered in the publications of scholars associated with the theoretical and quantitative revolution (or the spatial analysis tradition; see Bunge, 1962; Gould, 1991; Hägerstrand, 1968; Haggett, 1990; Nystuen, 1963). For another illustration, the concept of geographical scale and related phrases (such as jumping scale and bending scale) were often deployed by scholars identifying themselves as Marxist or post-Marxist geographers (Herod, 2010; Smith, 1992). The popularity of the idea of scale has suffered significantly in the last two decades, because of the sustained criticisms raised against it by proponents of anarchism, poststructuralist geographies, actor-network theory, assemblage theory, and non-representational theory. Some of the aforementioned key geographical concepts have withstood the rise and fall of different schools of geographical thought, as they have been redefined, reframed, and reinterpreted to account for the new theoretical and political sensibilities of more recent paradigms. A good example is the concept of place (Tuan, 1977). Although it was a key trope of the humanistic geographies of the 1970s and early 1980s, it has been reworked alongside more sophisticated theoretical axes by feminists, poststructuralists, and non-representational theorists. The early naïveté and romanticism associated with ideas of place have been replaced with understandings of place as a site of political struggle, of uneven power relations, of social exclusions, and of the reproduction of dominant worldviews and hierarchies.

The remainder of this paper is organized into two sections. The first one briefly and selectively discusses some of the recent literature on the geographies of the future. The aim of this section is not to provide a comprehensive literature review or to go in-depth with the analysis of particularly influential papers. Instead, the discussion is organized by grouping the relevant papers into a handful of themes or clusters, which together help provide a bird’s eye view of this emergent research area. This grouping is strictly conceptual or theoretical, and not social. That is, papers included in each theme should not be read to mean that their authors work together in a communal or shared research program around that theme. The second section returns to my idea that the uniqueness of geography is best understood by analyzing the discipline’s key concepts and develops a number of preliminary connections between these concepts and how using them can shed light on previously underappreciated dimensions of the future.

Emerging themes in the geographies of the future

To the best of my knowledge, there is no comprehensive literature review summarizing how the problematic of the future is addressed across geographic subdisciplines. The closest attempts to such a synthesis are a somewhat dated introductory editorial by Anderson and Adey (2012) and a more recent annotated bibliography by Simandan (2023). For the remainder of this section, I build on the latter’s thematic organization, while enriching it with an emergent new theme, namely the economic geographies of the future. This new theme coalesced especially in the wake of Gong’s (2024) and Crawford et al.’s (2026) programmatic contributions.

Risk, uncertainty, contingency, and surprise

This theme groups together four concepts that are part of the semantic network of the idea of the future. Each one of them illuminates our understanding of the future from a different angle. Derbyshire (2020) makes a strong case for distinguishing between epistemic uncertainty and ontological uncertainty. He then identifies ontological uncertainty as central to comprehending the inherent limitations of quantitative analysis, including their application in the sphere of policy (see also, Fusco et al., 2017; Kwan and Schwanen, 2018). Simandan (2020) develops a geographical theory of surprise that can be applied to both individuals and groups. Since surprises are violated expectations, they connect the present with the future, and they can prompt the updating of one’s operating model of how the world works. Scholarship on the idea of contingency (vs necessity) includes several important papers, but unfortunately, they did not generate a dialogue among them. Such isolated contributions go back to Jones and Hanham (1995), continue with Simandan (2010; 2011; 2018a), and end most recently with Landau-Donnelly and Pohl (2023), who approach contingency in relation to negativity and spaces of antagonism. Finally, the concept of risk (and riskscapes) was treated from a geographical perspective in the edited collection by Müller-Mahn (2012) and subsequently developed by Neisser and Runkel (2017) in the context of forecasting potential emergencies.

Neoliberal governmentality and its management of the future

Critical geographers with a research interest in neoliberalism and the specific forms of governmentality it takes have noted that finding ways to reproduce the status quo or to “hold the future together” (Brown et al., 2012: 1607) is one of its central concerns. The future is often assumed to be a threat to the existing political-economic order, and this threat needs to be anticipated and prepared for (Amin, 2013). Anderson (2010) has identified three major neoliberal strategies for the management of the future: preemption, precaution, and preparedness. Preemption is the most effective one because it stops a dangerous development in its very early stages, before it gathers momentum. Preparedness is the least effective, because it applies to those situations where the threat or danger has already occurred, and the management of human affairs must adapt to the new circumstances. Some of these ideas have been researched especially in the context of the city as a site of neoliberal calculus (Leszcynski, 2016; McCann, 2017). Whereas most geographical scholarship on neoliberalism implicitly frames the various emergencies it must handle as quick developments, Anderson et al. (2020) have proposed the concept of “slow emergencies,” defined as “situations marked by a) attritional lethality; b) imperceptibility; c) the foreclosure of the capacity to become otherwise; [and] d) emergency claims” (Anderson et al., 2020: 621). Subsequently, the idea of slow emergencies has been deployed by Grove et al. (2022), to assess the differential future impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic (cf. Simandan et al., 2024).

Prefigurative politics and visions of a post-capitalist future

Geographers preoccupied with this theme emphasize the key point that researching and revealing the evils of capitalism is not enough for making the world a better place. What is also needed is a sustained effort to envisage alternative future societies and economies that avoid capitalism’s major moral and political failings and build instead “abundant futures” (Collard et al., 2015: 322) or “liberatory futures” (Narayanan, 2023: 179). Ideally, this effort shouldn’t be reduced to theorizing. Instead, it should be tested experimentally by creating “islands of freedom” within capitalism, where non-capitalist practices are cultivated (e.g. not using money). This dual focus on theory and practice calls for geographers who are also activists, working on the ground with various communities to implement these alternative futures (Chatterton and Pickerill, 2010). One important emotional and motivational aspect of this forward-looking and constructive research is that it keeps hope alive for all those people bearing the brunt of capitalist exploitation (Harvey, 2000). This rich vein of research on prefigurative politics (Craig and Dyson, 2021) has brought together geographers of very different theoretical inclinations, ranging from Marxism and anarchism (Gerhardt, 2020), to decolonialism, and ecological philosophies of degrowth (Savini, 2021).

Technological progress as a key dimension to foreseeing the future

The very idea of “technological progress” has become controversial, opposing on one side the lovers and promoters of technology as the main driver of global improvements in standards of living, and on the other side technology skeptics, who worry about the emergence of a new technocentric political-economic order where a handful of billionaires (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.) manipulate conventional democratic practices to promote their interests and entrench their grip on power. More recently, a new wave of diffidence toward technology has emerged around fears of what will be left of humanity if we were to reach general artificial intelligence in the next few decades. This problematic raises many difficult moral conundrums and is likely to reset current understandings of normativity in moral philosophy and moral geography (Amoore, 2020). Under this umbrella term of “technological progress,” many geographers have chosen to narrow their focus to a particular class of technology and to a particular geographical scale. To illustrate, Dallyn and Frenzel (2021) critically interrogate the association of cryptocurrencies with progressive politics, Henderson (2020) researches the future of electric vehicles, Sumartojo et al. (2021) speculate about how the near-future of public space might be redefined by robots, Reid (2022) studies how technology might reshape caring practices at the level of the home (or family unit), whereas Cugurullo et al. (2021) researches the topic of self-driving cars and their impact on the redesign of the infrastructure of future cities. From a geographical political economy standpoint, technological “progress” is seen as a capitalist strategy to lower costs of production by replacing human labor with robots (Bissell and Del Casino, 2017; Samers, 2021). Since working at a given job is not only a source of revenue but also a provider of meaning to people’s lives, the limitations of proposals such as universal basic income become readily apparent.

The future and social difference

One of the most important developments in the human geography of the last three decades is the shift in researchers’ attention toward the complex problematic of social difference and of what “desirable futures” look like from the standpoint of someone committed to the ideals of equity, diversity, and social justice (for recent reviews, see Gergan et al., 2024a, 2024b). The future will unfold differently for different individuals and social groups, since their current location along various axes of social difference (race, gender, class, etc.) will cast a long shadow on their prospects for a better life. In other words, the future is never an unqualified term; instead, we must consider how it is always gendered and raced. MacLeavy et al. (2021) argue that futurity needs to become a key preoccupation of contemporary feminism, whereas Simandan (2019a, 2019b) reworked older feminist ideas of positionality and situated knowledge to highlight how the future inhabits the epistemic gap between the actual, realized world and the unrealized, possible worlds. In a recent feminist critique of the geography of regional development, Ormerod (2023) has argued that this field is still “man shaped” and sorely needs a feminist revamping. Baldwin (2012) is a programmatic paper for the field of race and futurity, as it offers a research agenda for this topic. Ideas of inevitability regarding the future are critically deconstructed by Mitchell (2010) to show how they reinforce racial exclusion. A Foucauldian perspective on the future through the lens of racial biopolitics is developed in Smith and Vasudevan (2017), whereas Gergan et al. (2020) look at apocalyptic portrayals of the future, allegedly arising from the conjunction of two types of decline: racial and environmental.

Culture and the historizing of the future

Differences among cultures take many forms, but one relatively neglected area is the way in which they think about the future. Geographers have begun to explore this issue, as seen in papers by Bunnell et al. (2018), which discusses aspirations in Asia, and Simandan (2018b), which suggests that the distinction between the distant future and the imminent future recurs in multiple areas of traditional Chinese thought. The accompanying implication is that the distant future is fundamentally unpredictable, whereas the imminent future has some degree of predictability, which varies with the wisdom and alertness of the person making that prediction. At the intersection of cultural and political geography, Joronen et al. (2021) address the divisive topic of Palestinian futures in the historical context of a regionally specific type of colonialism. Cultural and historical geographers have discussed the subjectivity involved in processes of sensemaking about the future (Mahony, 2019; Shaw and Sharp, 2013). This analytical dimension is central to DeSilvey (2012), as she proposes the term “anticipatory history,” and to Fincher et al. (2014), as they argue that people routinely use time stories to help make sense of a nebulous future. Organized religions have their own unique ways to think about the future, as illustrated in the discussion of religious prophecy by Holloway (2015) and in the analysis of apocalyptic visions proffered by American Evangelism (Dittmer and Sturm, 2016). One challenge for researchers in this area is how exactly to go about historicizing the future. It seems to me that it is not enough to select a moment in the past (e.g. year 1800) and investigate how people in that moment envisioned the future (e.g. year 1825). The deeper issue is that how we approach the past affects how we conceive the future (I thank an anonymous reviewer for making this point). In turn, this implies that how geographers approach bygone eras would dramatically impact how they think about the future.

Economic geographies of the future

This research theme is still inchoate, but likely to flourish in the coming years. It includes the study of delays and their role in understanding and predicting market dynamics (Simandan, 2019c), the study of economic agency in relation to expectations and uncertainty (Fuller, 2023), and the application of a critical realist framework to theorize regional economic futures as a “boundary object” (Gong, 2024). Gong’s paper is ambitious in its aim to reset the research agenda for economic geography as a whole, by making the subdiscipline “forward-looking.” She suggests that “economic geographers’ ability to engage with the future in meaningful ways is as important as their ability to engage with the past and present if the discipline is to retain its relevance in the future” (p. 292). The choice of critical realism as the theoretical framework for her proposal might, however, limit its appeal, since many economic geographers have moved to other theoretical approaches at odds with the tenets of critical realism (e.g. Neo-Marxism, feminism, evolutionary economic geography, actor-network theory, etc.). Most recently, Crawford et al. (2026) have made a substantial contribution to developing this research theme by addressing the methodological aspects of economic geographies of the future. This is a clear indicator that the field is well on its way to acquire distinctiveness within economic geography. While topically their paper focuses on markets and marketization, their methodological points have much wider generalizability. Even though the study of imaginaries is most associated with the cultural geographies of the future, the authors argue that it is equally important to “future-gazing” economic geography. Whereas the paper does not develop new methods per se, it makes a convincing case for an experimental attitude that creatively recombines existing methods into novel configurations better able to capture economic geographies “in-the-making,” within the larger context of a “world-in-flux” (Crawford et al., 2026: 1).

I would like to conclude this section of the paper by making two points. On the positive side, the review of the multiple topics and themes underpinning the general problematic of the geographies of the future makes obvious just how rich and complex and fertile this area of scholarship has become (see also Anderson and Adey, 2012, for an earlier overview). This strength still has a lot of untapped potential residing in the prospect of exploring connections between the various themes, as opposed to working within self-imposed “silos.” On the negative side, it strikes me as problematic that much of this research treats the future as a “primitive,” that is, as a sufficiently intuitive and easy-to-grasp concept, that is in no need of definition and clarification. This issue is only one of several epistemological problems that need to be addressed more explicitly in future scholarship. For example, is the future something out there and our task is one of predicting or forecasting it, or is the future something of our own making, such that our task is one of building it as we go? This epistemological problem brings with it issues of ontology. What is the ontological status of the future? To what extent can we claim that it is something “real”? And if it is not real, what is it? Some of these questions have been tentatively answered from a geographical standpoint in two unjustly neglected papers by Haggett (1994) and Batty and Cole (1997), but much more work along these lines is needed.

An opening of the geographies of the future toward philosophical work on these abstract, but foundational, issues (e.g. Rescher, 1998) is, in my opinion, necessary.

Discussion

The future through the lens of key geographical concepts

In the introduction to this paper, I made the case that the most distinctive aspect of the discipline of geography is the set of quintessentially geographical or spatial concepts it routinely deploys.

These include, among others, space, distance, proximity, place, landscape, territory, borders, site, scale, and so on. In the remainder of the paper, I pause to reflect on some of these concepts and how they might articulate with the study of the future, while remaining attuned to the importance of difference, and to that of site/context. These reflections are tentative and should be taken as an invitation to other geographers to get involved in this problematic.

Distance and proximity

In public discourse and everyday discussions of the future, a quite frequent distinction is that between the near future and the distant future. This dichotomy is underpinned by the idea of distance as an organizing principle for how we are making sense of the world (Eldridge and Jones, 1991; Watson, 1955). In the academic realm, most scholars of the future subscribe to the intuitive belief that the distant future is more difficult to predict, as more and more variables intervene, and as processes of branching render long-term prediction intractable. This intuition has been analytically reconstructed in the interdisciplinary field of complexity science, where the near future’s predictability is seen as a direct consequence of processes of path dependence, whereas the distant future’s unpredictability is seen as a direct consequence of phase transitions that punctuate the preexisting equilibria or paths (Byrne and Callaghan, 2022). In statistical parlance, complexity theorists would say that over the long term, the properties of nonergodicity and nonstationarity prevail and subtend the nonpredictability of the distant future (Arthur, 2021).

However, a minority of scholars (who ironically, constitute the majority in econometric forecasting; see Allen and Fildes, 2001; Hendry and Clements, 2003) have observed that we can deploy statistical theory to turn this intuition on its head. In the immediate future, the turbulent and unsettled environment means that the noise to signal ratio is very high, which undermines pattern extraction and leaves us mostly with “chasing noise.” In contradistinction, the distant future is mathematically equivalent to a long time-series, which enables the gradual removal of noise, and the concomitant increase in the signal. In other words, as the noise to signal ratio becomes lower, patterns become apparent, and more reliable predictions can be built on them. This reversed way of thinking dominates the field of econometric forecasting, which believes that world dynamics are dominated by stationarity and ergodicity and routinely uses the methodology of cointegration on the linchpin assumption that in the long-term everything is pulled back to trend (Allen and Fildes, 2001; Hendry and Clements, 2003). This statistical argument can be translated into common sense, by noting that it is more difficult to predict if a middle-aged person will die in the next 12 months (the immediate future) than it is to predict that they will die in the next 150 years (the distant future).

In the last decade, human geographers have proposed a radical rethinking of the notion of distance, aimed to emphasize its subjective aspect and its conceptual multidimensionality (Simandan, 2016). This interdisciplinary intellectual move has been developed in connection with (a) earlier attempts by geographers to bring together time and space (e.g. Hägerstrand’s 1982 time-geography; May and Thrift, 2003, on “timespace” as a fused concept), and (b) work on construal-level theory in the field of experimental social psychology (Trope and Liberman, 2010). The conceptual multidimensionality of the idea of distance has been revealed empirically in this latter field and consists in the coexistence and mutual influence of four types of distance: spatial distance, temporal distance, hypothetical distance, and social distance. Whereas spatial distance is the most familiar to geographers, it is temporal distance and hypothetical distance that are the most useful for thinking about the future geographically. Construal-level theorists such as Nira Lieberman and Yaacov Trope (Liberman and Trope, 2014; Trope and Lieberman, 2010) have noted that our mental models of the future vary in their level of abstraction in direct proportion with how far an imagined future is. Imminent developments are associated with mental models (or representations) that are more concrete and richer in specific detail, whereas far-away, distant developments are depicted very abstractly and are devoid of detail. The same logic applies to hypotheticality or hypothetical distance, which depicts highly probable or almost certain scenarios as “near” and as rich in detail and concreteness, while highly unlikely scenarios are framed mentally as “distant” and “abstract.”

Geographical scale

In the last 30 years, the concept of scale, one of the preferred tropes of Marxist geographies, has come under attack from newer paradigms such as anarchism, poststructuralism, feminism, actor-network theory, nonrepresentational theory, and assemblage theory. Nigel Thrift was an early critic of scale, famously saying that “there is no such thing as scale” (Thrift, 1995: 33). Interestingly, this trenchant statement came before the years when he developed and published his non-representational theory. One decade later, a highly cited paper by Marston et al. (2005) also made the case for a human geography without scale. Their criticism of the concept was two-pronged. Firstly, they noted the theoretical inconsistency or conceptual incompatibility between understandings of scale and novel spatial ontologies proposed in actor-network theory and assemblage theory (see Müller and Schurr, 2016). These spatial ontologies view global scale as a mere illusion that simply refers to the capacity of an actor-network to grow and thereby encompass the whole world. Secondly, they also criticized scale as a reactionary concept because of its presumption of a hierarchical or stratified spatial ontology, with superordinate scales and subordinate scales. This ontology was at odds with progressive geographers’ vision of a flat ontology, where various entities from rocks, to plants, to animals, and humans coexist as equals in a shared space (for a paradigmatic illustration of this approach, see Country et al., 2016; for an anarchist take on flat ontology, see Springer, 2014). These powerful criticisms notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is that geographers often end up thinking in terms of scale and inter-scalar relationships. The idea of scale and the trio global-regional-local seem fundamental to geographical thinking and capable to adapt to the challenge of sophisticated theoretical deconstructions. One of these challenges is the perceived need to move away from the rigid separation of spatial scale from temporal scale and choose instead a more sophisticated understanding of scale as relational space-time (e.g. Herod, 2010; Howitt, 2002). Indeed, there remain many geographers, including some who do not self-identify as Marxist (Delaney and Leitner, 1997; Sheppard and McMaster, 2004), who continue to believe that geography requires some notion of scale, reworked to address the concerns of its critics (e.g. Marston et al., 2005). The study of the future reflects this stance, since the variables that must be considered when predicting the future are a function of the scale of a given prediction. Thus, wide scope geopolitical and geoeconomic transformations are especially relevant to understanding global futures, whereas changes in regulation regimes and legal frameworks are highly useful to comprehend regional futures. Finally, the study of the future can be articulated with ideas of scale, by remembering that temporal scales (the day, the month, the year, the decade, the century, etc.) are just as analytically useful as spatial scales. People are generally better at noticing change at lower temporal scales, whereas transformations at the scale of the decade or century are often escaping us. This insensitivity and inattention to long-term change, aptly summarized by Magnuson with the term “the invisible present” (Magnuson, 1990), might help explain why it took us so long to take seriously the challenge of global environmental change.

Borders and territory

On 9th of November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. For those who lived at the time and watched the news, it was a historical moment, full of hope and even optimism for a better future, a future without borders, where people can circulate freely and transcend their parochial nationalistic baggage. The euphoria of the moment eventually waned, with the ultimate blow coming from the events of 9/11 in the USA. Nonetheless, the prefigurative politics of an open future, without territorial controls and without borders, remained alive among progressive scholars, including geographers. As we move to the present day, it is hard not to notice the massive resurrection of territorialism and of border policing, entrapping us back into the “striated space” of national territories and away from the “smooth space” of a borderless world. More worrying, this resurrection goes beyond patrolling and controlling existing national territories. Instead, there is often an explicit agenda to grab territory from others (on human territoriality as an ingrained instinct; see Raffestin, 1984; Sack, 1983). We can notice this in China’s plans to take back Taiwan, in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and in Trump’s promise to literally “make America great again” by taking over Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal. These are dangerous developments that may escalate into wider global conflicts. Predictions of the global future in the next few years tend to be pessimistic and consider the threat of the use of nuclear weapons more likely than ever before.

The parceling of the world into distinct territories for different sovereign nations emerged from the Peace of Westphalia (1648). Unfortunately, this Westphalian order is still with us centuries later, with few prospects of having it replaced with something more progressive and more humane (Murphy, 1996). Meanwhile, geographers have reinvented their understanding of territory and borders in the context of the future, so as to create a conceptual alignment with wider theoretical shifts in the discipline, such as the emergence of Black geographies, critical geographies of embodiment, neo materialism, and posthumanism. Thus, Danielle Purifoy builds the case that Black people have been left out of discourses of the future and shows how Afrofuturism and Black spatial practices of interdependence, solidarity, and relationship-building can be drawn upon to rectify this unacceptable omission (Purifoy, 2021). Furthering earlier geographical research on embodiment, Sara Smith makes the provocative claim that “bodies not only are territory but also make territory” (Smith, 2012: 1511, emphasis in original; see also, Smith, 2020) and substantiates it empirically by tying together geographies of religion and geopolitics to investigate how bodies are caught up in the territorial politics of the Leh district, in India’s Jammu and Kashmir State. To provide yet another illustration, Banu Gökarıksel, Christopher Neubert, and Sara Smith dissect the relationship between the future and territory by illustrating how the discursive construction of the future as a threat can be used to manipulate the masses into endorsing a vision of immigrants as inducers of nefarious demographic shifts, and, therefore, into supporting authoritarian right-wing policies explicitly framed in terms of promoting ethnic homogeneity and defending the national territory (Gökarıksel et al., 2019). As true geographers would do, they illustrate these “demographic fever dreams” (Gökarıksel et al., 2023: 1) with an analysis of a variety of national territories, ranging from Turkey, to India, and the United States. Usher (2020) traces the history of interpretations of territory from the Westphalian one (territory as legal container), through dialectical, strategic, and rhizomatic approaches, and settles on a post-humanist and neo materialist vision of territory as more-than-human, which promises a better, more equal future for all living entities.

A focus on methods versus a focus on concepts

This second part of the discussion section is about a potential point of controversy suggested by my work, namely whether it is methodology rather than key concepts that makes geography unique. There are different valid ways to approach this issue but when I look at the specific choice of methods geographers make, it does not seem to me that these methods are unique to geography. Human geographers who rely on qualitative methodologies use the same methods – in-depth interviews, focus groups, ethnography, discourse analysis – as other social scientists, be they cultural anthropologists, sociologists, or political scientists. Likewise, geographers who work with quantitative-spatial methodologies – statistical analysis, mathematical modeling, GIS, remote sensing – do not have any monopoly on these methodologies. Fields such as epidemiology, spatial econometrics, new economic “geography” (Krugman, 1992), quantitative political science, and quantitative sociology increasingly incorporate a spatial dimension to their quantitative modeling. Techniques of remote sensing and GIS are widely used outside geography, in interdisciplinary research fields such as sustainability science or global climate change. In some instances, the current practice to incorporate space into quantitative analysis can be traced back to geographers as their originators (e.g. Walter Christaller, Torsten Hägerstrand, Peter Haggett, etc.), but making this important point is not the same with claiming that geography has a unique set of methods: the former is a matter of genealogy, the latter a matter of enumerating contemporary methods in each broadly related discipline and evaluating the degree of overlap with geography. It is this distinction that underpins differences of opinion on this matter: those who believe in geography’s methodological uniqueness implicitly rely on a genealogical/vertical perspective, whereas those who believe that geography’s uniqueness stems from its collection of key spatial concepts reject the idea of methodological uniqueness by means of an enumerative/horizontal perspective that shows a high degree of methodological overlap with cognate disciplines. To summarize, I argue that a focus on geography’s key concepts is a more effective and persuasive way to demonstrate geography’s unique contribution to science and the social sciences.

But there is more subtlety to my contention than meets the eye, simply because we are talking about different levels of abstraction and different levels of analysis. The realm of concepts is on a higher plane of abstraction than the realm of methodology (Rescher, 2001). We first have a concept or an idea of what is worth researching, and only then we go down the hierarchy of abstraction to determine the specific research design and collection of methods that can best operationalize that initial concept or idea (Bunge, 1996). The very formulation “concept or idea” is problematic because I define concepts as encapsulations of one or several ideas. It is this that makes concepts pregnant with meaning, and it is this condensation or encapsulation process that necessitates the careful work of unpacking a given concept, of spelling out the ideas it brings together and of showing how they can potentially relate to one another. Because the realm of geographical concepts is one of higher-order abstractions, one can say that engaging with them is tantamount to engaging with different ways of seeing. As such, I argue that concepts are semantically closer to metaphors than they are to methods, even though concepts tend to be more explicit and analytical, whereas metaphors tend to be more implicit and “impressionistic.” Indeed, in his work on metaphors in economic geography and the history of geographical thought, Barnes (1996; see also Barnes and Duncan, 2013) highlighted this proximity and demonstrated how it can be deployed to look with fresh eyes at geography’s apparent messiness to unearth deeper continuities subtending superficial discontinuities (e.g. Barnes, 2006, on David Harvey).

A further layer of subtlety comes from the attitude geographers from different eras and schools of thought bring to conceptual analysis. At one extreme, we have foundationalists determined to impose a particular definition of a concept as the “correct” one, and to dismiss everything else as “incorrect.” At the other extreme, we have the anarchist epistemologies (Feyerabend, 1975) of “anything goes,” rejecting any anchoring in any kind of foundations, be they historical (cf. Livingstone’s “geographical tradition,” 1992) or analytical (e.g. reasoning from first principles, with a heavy reliance on deductive logic, as in the Anglo-American analytical philosophy approach). In-between these extremes there are approaches that strike me as more reasonable, as exemplified by Rortyan neo-pragmatism and its geographical offsprings (Barnes, 1996; Barnes and Sheppard, 2010). Rorty (1989) viewed science as an ongoing, never-ending conversation, whereby truths are socially constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed as a consequence of genuine engagement with, and openness to, alternative ways of looking at a given issue. This fascinating enterprise is rife with irony and with historical and geographical contingency. As an antidote to the nastiness, hostility, and harshness into which scientific dialogue occasionally devolves, Rorty proposed that we cultivate an attitude of solidarity among scholars, which includes being willing to offer charitable or benevolent interpretations of points of view with which we disagree. Of course, it is for the readers to judge to what extent this paper lives up to this ideal.

Conclusion

Perhaps controversially, in this paper I argued that what makes geography stand out among other academic disciplines is not its collection of methods, but instead the collection of key geographical concepts that are encountered with high frequency in its corpus of published scholarship. These concepts include, among others, region, areal differentiation, space and spatial diffusion, place and sense of place, distance and proximity, territoriality, territory and borders, landscape, scale, site, locale, location, and locational analysis, time-geography, and timespace. What is peculiar about this set of key concepts is that they are at the same time full of historical baggage (i.e. each concept has a long history of prior theorizations) and radically open to reinvention (i.e. each new generation of scholars is free to propose a radical rethinking of one or several of these concepts). This dual character gives a certain resilience to this collection of concepts, as they are at once open to the past (taking advantage of geography’s legacy of theorizing) and to the future (welcoming the vibrancy and rejuvenation brought about by younger generations of geographers keen to leave their mark on the discipline). In the remainder of the paper, I illustrated how this way of thinking works in practice, by taking as a case study the emergent field of the geographies of the future and suggesting that it is the very same set of key geographical concepts that makes this field stand out from the more amorphous realm of “futures studies.” I began my analysis by providing a brief literature review of the seven main research clusters within the field of the geographies of the future: (1) risk, uncertainty, contingency, and surprise; (2) neoliberal governmentality and its management of the future; (3) prefigurative politics and visions of a postcapitalist future; (4) technological progress as a key dimension to foreseeing the future; (5) the future in light of social difference; (6) culture and the historicizing of the future; and (7) economic geographies of the future. Then, in the final part of the paper, I offered some suggestions on how the attentive application of these key geographical concepts can deepen and enrich the way we think about the future and its geographies. Due to space limitations, the discussion was necessarily selective, focusing on (1) distance and proximity; (2) scale; and (3) borders and territory. In future work, I hope to apply the same analytical frame to reflect on other key geographical concepts not included in the present paper (e.g. space, place, region, location, and landscape). Whereas I am the first to acknowledge that this paper is a modest contribution, I believe it may help the field of the geographies of the future become more self-conscious of itself as a relatively distinct field of enquiry within geography and the transdisciplinary area of futures studies. At a higher level of generality, the proposition that geography’s conceptual uniqueness resides in its distinct spatial lexicon may be of interest not only to geographers studying the future, but also to scholars preoccupied with the history and philosophy of geographical thought. Indeed, this proposition is certainly not mine alone but builds on a long tradition of geographical scholarship delineating the myriad parameters of this problematic.