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In disaster science, policy and practice, the transition of resilience from a descriptive concept to a normative agenda provides challenges and opportunities. This paper argues that both are needed to increase resilience. We briefly outline the concept and several recent international resilience-building efforts to elucidate critical questions and less-discussed issues. We highlight the need to move resilience thinking forward by emphasizing structural social-political processes, acknowledging and acting on differences between ecosystems and societies, and looking beyond the quantitative streamlining of resilience into one index. Instead of imposing a technical-reductionist framework, we suggest a starting basis of integrating different knowledge types and experiences to generate scientifically reliable, context-appropriate and socially robust resilience-building activities.

Human mobility impacts many aspects of a city, from its spatial structure 1 – 3 to its response to an epidemic 4 – 7 . It is also ultimately key to social interactions 8 , innovation 9 , 10 and productivity 11 . However, our quantitative understanding of the aggregate movements of individuals remains incomplete. Existing models—such as the gravity law 12 , 13 or the radiation model 14 —concentrate on the purely spatial dependence of mobility flows and do not capture the varying frequencies of recurrent visits to the same locations. Here we reveal a simple and robust scaling law that captures the temporal and spatial spectrum of population movement on the basis of large-scale mobility data from diverse cities around the globe. According to this law, the number of visitors to any location decreases as the inverse square of the product of their visiting frequency and travel distance. We further show that the spatio-temporal flows to different locations give rise to prominent spatial clusters with an area distribution that follows Zipf’s law 15 . Finally, we build an individual mobility model based on exploration and preferential return to provide a mechanistic explanation for the discovered scaling law and the emerging spatial structure. Our findings corroborate long-standing conjectures in human geography (such as central place theory 16 and Weber’s theory of emergent optimality 10 ) and allow for predictions of recurrent flows, providing a basis for applications in urban planning, traffic engineering and the mitigation of epidemic diseases. Using large-scale mobility data from diverse cities around the globe, a simple and robust scaling law that captures the temporal and spatial range of population movement is revealed.

This paper introduces a set of analytical frames that explore the possibilities of conceiving, researching and writing a global geography of squatting. The paper argues that it is possible to detect, in the most tenuous of urban settings, ways of thinking about and living urban life that have the potential to reanimate the city as a key site of geographical inquiry. The paper develops a modest theory of ‘urban combats’ to account for the complexity and provisionality of squatting as an informal set of practices, as a makeshift approach to housing and as a precarious form of inhabiting the city.

This paper provides a theoretical and political critique of how the concept of resilience has been applied to places. It is based upon three main points. First, the ecological concept of resilience is conservative when applied to social relations. Second, resilience is externally defined by state agencies and expert knowledge. Third, a concern with the resilience of places is misplaced in terms of spatial scale, since the processes which shape resilience operate primary at the scale of capitalist social relations. In place of resilience, we offer the concept of resourcefulness as an alternative approach for community groups to foster.

During the past few decades, technologies such as remote sensing, geographical information systems, and global positioning systems have transformed the way the distribution of human population is studied and modeled in space and time. However, the mapping of populations remains constrained by the logistics of censuses and surveys. Consequently, spatially detailed changes across scales of days, weeks, or months, or even year to year, are difficult to assess and limit the application of human population maps in situations in which timely information is required, such as disasters, conflicts, or epidemics. Mobile phones (MPs) now have an extremely high penetration rate across the globe, and analyzing the spatiotemporal distribution of MP calls geolocated to the tower level may overcome many limitations of census-based approaches, provided that the use of MP data is properly assessed and calibrated. Using datasets of more than 1 billion MP call records from Portugal and France, we show how spatially and temporarily explicit estimations of population densities can be produced at national scales, and how these estimates compare with outputs produced using alternative human population mapping methods. We also demonstrate how maps of human population changes can be produced over multiple timescales while preserving the anonymity of MP users. With similar data being collected every day by MP network providers across the world, the prospect of being able to map contemporary and changing human population distributions over relatively short intervals exists, paving the way for new applications and a near real-time understanding of patterns and processes in human geography.

This first report on mobilities outlines some aspects of research on mobilities that differentiates it from and connects it to earlier, ongoing geographies of movement such as transport geography. In the context of a world on the move it seeks to bring us up to date with the mobilities turn and make a case for mobility research as a project which focuses on the universal but always particularly constructed fact of moving. Mobilities research is compared to and differentiated from work in transport geography, arguing that mobilities research takes a more holistic view that allows it to make some previously unlikely connections.

This paper reviews the diverse literatures on negative experiences of home at the domestic scale and sets out an agenda to further ‘critical geographies of home’. Tying into broader debates in critical geography on the delineations between the ‘mapping’ of exclusionary landscapes versus the ‘doing’ of something to transform them, the paper finds that the line between these two modes should not always be dichotomously drawn. Now is the time that the burgeoning interest in, and catalogue of research on, home is capitalized upon by pushing towards a critical geography that simultaneously illuminates and catalyses the addressing of domestic injustice.

This paper remaps the geographies of terrorism. Everyday terrorism (domestic violence) and global terrorism are related attempts to exert political control through fear. Geographical research on violence neatly reflects the disproportionate recognition and resourcing that global terrorism receives from the state. The paper explores the parallels, shared foundations and direct points of connection between everyday and global terrorisms. It does so across four interrelated themes: multiscalar politics and securities, fear and trauma, public recognition and recovery, and the inequitable nature of counter-terrorisms. It concludes with implications for addressing terrorisms and for future research.

The paper focuses on how futures are anticipated and acted on in relation to a set of events that are taken to threaten liberal democracies. Across different domains of life the future is now problematized as a disruption, a surprise. This problematization of the future as indeterminate or uncertain has been met with an extraordinary proliferation of anticipatory action. The paper argues that anticipatory action works through the assembling of: styles through which the form of the future is disclosed and related to; practices that render specific futures present; and logics through which anticipatory action is legitimized, guided and enacted.

This paper builds on the designation of networked spatial information technologies (both hardware/software objects and information artifacts) as ‘spatial media’ to advance media as an epistemology for engaging these presences as both channels for content and as cultural apparatuses. Doing so directly asserts their materiality as coincident with (new) media techno-cultural productions. This allows for a theory of mediation that belies narratives of ‘virtual’–‘real’ spatial hybrids by instead understanding spatiality (as the nexus of material socio-spatio-technical relations) as always-already mediated – i.e. as the ontogenetic effects of the contingent, necessarily incomplete comings-together of technical presences, persons, and space/place.