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Geography

A subject guide for the UCL Department of Geography

Print books

The principal book collection for Geography is located on the first floor of the Science Library

Explore is UCL's library catalogue. This is the principal tool to find books, journals and other materials (either in print or in electronic format) held in UCL libraries. On the catalogue, you will find details such as: library site, collection and shelfmark, when you are looking for print resources. In order to access e-books via Explore, you will always need your UCL user ID and password.

 

Print books are arranged on the shelves according to their shelfmark. For example:

GEOGRAPHY H 72 MOR for a book on the human impact on the environment

GEOGRAPHY E 45 CAM for a book on wetlands

Other print collections useful for Geography related topics

  • The Bartlett Library holds material on planning and urban development, architecture, and energy and sustainable environment.
  • The Institute of Education (IOE) Library holds material on sociology, social policy, gender and sexuality, race, media studies, and religion as well as education and curriculum resources.

New books in geography

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Managing Protected Areas: People and Places

 

Managing Protected Areas focuses on issues surrounding the importance of natural environments on public health and wellbeing, and the environmental, cultural, and social importance of green and blue spaces that can result through responsible and sustainable adaptive management processes. It explores how the Covid-19 pandemic forced reconsiderations of our relationship with these natural spaces and highlights the important impact of the pace of climate change. While not pretending to have the answers, the stimulating and imaginative contributions embrace rich perspectives drawn from backgrounds as diverse as heritage studies, tourism, conservation, geography, policy formulation, public health, environmental health, research methods, history, literature, art, and theology.

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Fundamentals of Air Pollution

 

Fundamentals of Air Pollution, Sixth Edition offers an extensive study of the science of air pollution. With a highly interdisciplinary approach, the book's author examines air pollution through the lenses of chemistry, physics, meteorology, engineering, toxicology, regulation, and more. Students, faculty, and researchers alike will find a world of information in this comprehensive text that is strategically organized into six parts: Foundations of Air Pollution, The Risks of Air Pollution, Tropospheric Pollution, Biogeochemistry of Air Pollutants, Addressing Air Pollution, and The Future for Air Pollution Science and Engineering.

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Future-ready geography : goals, problems and challenges

 

Growing global issues related to climate change, food security, depletion of conventional energy sources, conflicts and wars, refugee crisis and pandemic open up new issues for geographic investigations as well as reinforce the need to examine old research topics covering a variety of subdisciplines. That is why the term “future-ready” is being more frequently used in discourses on geographic research. 

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The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography

 

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography offers a wide-ranging overview of the dynamic field, providing critical insights into the ways political geographers investigate and interpret the rapidly changing world. Reflecting the dramatic shifts in global events and politics over the past decade, this thoroughly updated volume bridges theoretical debates and empirical research to provide a clear and comprehensive understanding of foundational themes and critical contemporary issues. With contributions by an interdisciplinary team of leading experts, the second edition of the Companion incorporates fresh perspectives on topics including climate change, terrorism, the intersection of materiality and politics, geopolitical ecologies, natural resources, and identity politics.

Remote Sensing - Theory and Applications

 

This book explores the world of remote sensing technology, offering comprehensive insights into its principles, data acquisition methods, advanced processing techniques, and diverse applications. It covers the basics of remote sensing such as the foundational principles and data acquisition techniques, image pre-processing, such as noise removal, radiometric corrections, and image fusion, and advanced classification techniques like machine learning algorithms including neural networks and support vector machines. Finally, it discusses disaster management and agriculture, demonstrating how remote sensing methods are revolutionizing fields such as disaster response and agricultural monitoring. Professionals, researchers, and students involved in environmental sciences, geography, urban planning, and disaster management will benefit from these topics.

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Sustainable Regional Restructuring: Insights from Economic Geography and Regional Innovation Studies

 

This incisive book presents conceptual and empirical insights to illustrate how regions can adopt sustainable industry practices in response to climate change. Contributing authors assess regional restructuring from multiple angles, examining case studies and empirical evidence. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book features contributions from economic geography and regional innovation studies that provide an approachable overview of the subject, and proposes fresh development strategies and policies to support sustainable transformations.

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The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Cultural and Social Geography

 

The Companion to Social and Cultural Geography provides reliable and up-to-date coverage of both foundational topics and emerging themes within two vibrant and increasingly interconnected subdisciplines of geography. It offers an expertly curated collection of original essays with special emphasis on early-career scholars, geographers of colour, and geographers from the Global South. Organized thematically, the Companion opens with a series of "Global Dispatches" from cultural and social geographers working in different disciplines and locations, followed by explorations of key concepts in social and cultural geography such as identity, belonging, solidarity, inequalities, and intersectional geographies.  

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Climate change and public health

 

This second edition of Climate Change and Public Health comprehensively covers the health impacts of climate change, including heat-related and respiratory disorders, vectorborne and waterborne diseases, malnutrition, mental disorders, and violence. It provides a thorough understanding of the policymaking process and energy, transportation, and agriculture policies for mitigation. It covers health adaptation, sustainable built environments, and nature-based solutions to address climate change. Finally, it describes ways of strengthening public and political support, including communicating the health relevance of climate change, building movements, and promoting climate justice.

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The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Justice and Sustainable Development

 

Despite the global endorsement of the Sustainable Development Goals, environmental justice struggles are growing all over the world. These struggles are not isolated injustices, but symptoms of interlocking forms of oppression that privilege the few while inflicting misery on the many and threatening ecological collapse. This handbook offers critical perspectives on the multi-dimensional, intersectional nature of environmental injustice and the cross-cutting forms of oppression that unite and divide these struggles, including gender, race, poverty, and indigeneity.

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Weather in the city : how design shapes the urban climate

 

Prolonged heat waves are a source of many stress-related problems, especially in densely populated areas. Certain wind phenomena in cities have also caused issues in the atmosphere. Based on these factors, Sanda Lenzholzer shows how basic climatic processes work in an urban environment, and how they can be influenced by spatial planning and urban design. 

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Water and society : changing perceptions of societal and historical development

 

Despite the central importance that water has held for civilizations both ancient and modern, its social significance has made surprisingly little impact on our contemporary understanding of human history and development. Dominant interpretations of the relationship between society and nature have remained water blind. In Water and Society historian and leading water expert Terje Tvedt argues for a change that acknowledges the significant role played by water in societal development.

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Oceanography and Marine Biology: An Annual Review, Volume 60

 

Oceanography and Marine Biology: An Annual Review remains one of the most cited sources in marine science and oceanography. The ever-increasing interest in work in oceanography and marine biology and its relevance to global environmental issues, especially global climate change and its impacts, creates a demand for authoritative refereed reviews summarizing and synthesizing the results of both historical and recent research. This Volume celebrates 60 years of OMBAR, over which time it has been an essential reference for research workers and students in all fields of marine science.

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Urban Planning for Climate Change

 

This book tackles the future challenges and opportunities for planning our cities and towns in a changing climate and recommends key actions for more resilient urban futures.

Urban Planning for Climate Change focusses on how urban planning is fundamental to action on climate change. In doing so it particularly looks at current practice and opportunities for innovation and capacity building in the future - carbon neutral development, building back better and creating more resilient urban settlements around the world.

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Climate change 2021 : the physical science basis : Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

 

The Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a comprehensive assessment of the physical science basis of climate change. The report serves policymakers, decision makers, stakeholders, and all interested parties with the latest policy-relevant information.

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Rethinking Urbanism: Lessons from Postcolonialism and the Global South

 

This book provides new insights into popular understandings of urbanism by using a wide range of case studies from lesser studied cities across the Global South and Global North to present evidence for the need to reconstruct our understanding of who and what makes urban environments. Myers explores the global hierarchy of cities, the criteria for positioning within these hierarchies and the successes of various policymaking approaches designed specifically to boost a city's ranking. Engaging heavily with postcolonial studies and Global South thinking, he shows how cities construct one another's spaces and calls for a new understanding of planetary urbanism that moves beyond Western-centric perspectives.

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Education for Sustainable Development in an Unequal World: Biopolitics, Differentiation and Affirmative Alternatives

 

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is recurrently depicted as an enterprise that unites humanity in a common pursuit of a more just and sustainable world. But how is this enterprise pursued on a planet that is enormously unequal? Drawing on biopolitical theory and rich empirical data from different contexts around the world, this book explores how ESD is unpacked depending on whether people are rich or poor.

Elgar Encyclopedia of Global Migration: New Mobilities and Artivism

 

In recent decades, emerging challenges such as increased digitalization of social lives and the ongoing processes of border externalization and internalization, have prompted scholars and civil societies to question the ways in which people view, frame and experience migration and draw attention to emerging forms of resistance and mobility justice. This timely Encyclopedia engages with critical epistemologies and practices to provide a comprehensive examination of the field of global migration, activism and cultural production.

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Remapping the World in East Asia: Toward a Global History of the “Ricci Maps"

 

When European missionaries arrived in East Asia in the sixteenth century, they entered ongoing conversations about cosmology and world geography. Soon after, intellectuals in Ming China, Edo Japan, and Joseon Korea selectively encompassed elements of the late Renaissance worldview, leading to the creation of new artifacts that mitigated old and new knowledge in creative ways. Simultaneously, missionaries and their collaborators transcribed, replicated, and recombined from East Asian artifacts and informed European audiences about the newly discovered lands known as the "Far East." All these new artifacts enjoyed long afterlives that ensured the continuous remapping of the world in the following decades and centuries. Focusing on artifacts, this expansively illustrated volume tells the story of a meeting of worldviews.

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Handbook of Anti-Environmentalism

 

This thought-provoking Handbook provides a theoretical overview of the wide variety of anti-environmentalisms and offers an integrative research agenda for future research on the topic. Probing the ways in which groups have organized to oppose environmental movements and pro-environmental policies in recent decades, it examines those involved in these counter movements and studies their motivations and support systems.

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Africa’s Urbanisation Dynamics 2022: The Economic Power of Africa’s Cities

 

This report provides a new perspective on Africa’s urban economies that is unique in its breadth and level of detail. Based on data from more than 4 million individuals and firms in 2 600 cities across 34 countries, it presents compelling evidence that urbanisation contributes to better economic outcomes and higher living standards. It shows that across most socio-economic dimensions, cities significantly outperform the countries in which they are located.

E-books

Use Explore to find individual e-books. Additionally, you can browse for e-books in the following databases:

How can you tell if a book is available online?

On UCL Explore, you can look at the results of your search to quickly discover if a book is available in print or/and online: View Online means that the book is available electronically, while Available means that the book is available in print. In some cases a book is available both in print and online.

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General reference works and encyclopedias

Consult introductory material or general reference works for a broad overview of your issue or topic, and to identify key concepts, theories and researchers in the field. Introductory material may include:

  • subject or discipline specific dictionaries and encyclopaedias.
  • handbooks.
  • companions.
  • introductions.
  • guides.
  • biographies.
  • histories.

Find introductory material in Explore by combining a topic keyword with one of the material type descriptors above, e.g. Handbook AND Geography.

These are some examples of introductory material available electronically for Geography. The list is not extensive, and you should perform your own searches on Explore to see what else is available in print in UCL Libraries.