The importance of geography for understanding the Contemporary World

This issue of Geousp comes to light amid a series of environmental disasters occurring around the world (such as a severe drought in South America, storms in Greece and Libya, extensive and deadly fires in Greece, Canada and Hawaii, United States, among other notable episodes) (Yeung, 2023) as well as in Brazil, such as the landslides in the municipality of São Sebastião (SP) (Costa, 2023) and the floods that shook states in the South Region, taking lives and severely impacting local economies. Furthermore, at this moment, another war has just broken out, this time involving Israel, the terrorist group Hamas and, consequently, the Israeli and Palestinian people.

This set of socio-environmental, political, geopolitical and geoeconomic events challenges us, always, in the search for understanding their causes, their dynamics and their consequences, located on different levels and inserted in the historical, social and contradictory process of production of space.

All this also highlights the importance of Geography (Carlos; Cruz, 2019) as a disciplinary field devoted to understanding the complex society-nature relationship, in a globalized world, tormented by evidence of global warming, governed by the capitalist mode of production and marked by struggles for power on different scales.

With this brief preamble, we aim to highlight the importance of each article that makes up this issue of Geousp Journal, which, from different theoretical, methodological and conceptual perspectives, and dealing with different themes and case studies, bring a contribution to a better understanding of ongoing processes.

In “The Insertion of Milton Santos’ Geographic Space in the Althusserian Interpretation of

the Social Whole: A Structure Like the Others?”, Bruno Moreira Riani Costa investigates theoretical approximations between Milton Santos' and Althusser's propositions, tensioning the possibilities of using “the lenses of structural Marxism” to understand the work of this Brazilian author.

The following article, entitled “CO₂flux index to assess losses of ecosystem services in mangroves impacted by hailstorms in Southeast Brazil”, by Marco Antonio Saraiva da Silva and André Luiz Lopes de Faria, has the general objective of evaluating changes in photosynthetic activities of mangroves, using the CO₂ flux index from a case study in the Municipality of Aracruz (ES).

Talita Gantus-Oliveira, author of the article “Resilient cities and the dispute over the discourse of the risk and disaster reduction agenda”, problematizes the concept of “resilient cities” and proposes thinking about resilience and disasters “not as a neoliberal category, but as a social, political and collective practice of adaptation and mitigation to global climate change”.

In the article “Modernization and society-nature relationship in capitalism at the turn of the 21st century”, Anselmo Alfredo analyzes the transition from productive capital to fictitious capital, from the 1970s onwards, considering the construction of a discourse about nature that is “expressed in environmentalism as generic consciousness”.

Roberto Marques Neto, in turn, defined the objective of his text “Terraces and river incision in great escarpments passive margin: genetic and geochronological aspects”, to discuss causes that generate aggradational geoforms, based on the assumption that “river terraces and their depositional tracts are important geoindicators of past environmental conditions and the Neoquaternary evolution of the relief”.

Eberval Marchioro and Alfredo Ollero, in the article “Hydrogeomorphological assessment: an historical approach in the 20th and 21st centuries”, analyze the hydrogeomorphological quality of the Duas Bocas River basin through the changes that occurred in its landscape between the 20th and 21st centuries.

In “Collaborative mapping and the mobilization of powerful geographic knowledge at school”, Taylane Marcene Ganz and Daniel Luiz Stefenon present results from a case study carried out with high school students in a public school in the state of Paraná, based on the development of “didactic sequences with the Google My Maps platform”.

In the article “Neoliberal restructuring in central areas of Latin American port cities: the case of Valparaíso (Chile)”, Paula Neumann Novack analyzes the process of transformation of the central region of this Chilean city, making important use of empirical research and of interviews. Among the results achieved, the author highlights the important role of the tertiary sector, policies for the recovery of public spaces and the promotion of tourism as expressions, in Valparaíso, of the reproduction of neoliberal policies underway in the cities.

Finally, in the article “Between the permanence and transfer of CEAGESP: critical notes from the production of the São Paulo space”, Fernando Firmino Messias proposes “a reflection on starting from elements underlying the opportunity for transferring the warehouse”, indicating the need and an analytical perspective based on the notion of (re)production of the space of São Paulo.

Have a good read everyone!

References

• CARLOS, Ana Fani A.; CRUZ, Rita de Cássia A. A necessidade da Geografia. São Paulo: Contexto, 2019.
• COSTA, Wanderley Messias da. Os temporais e a catástrofe em São Sebastião - SP no Carnaval de 2023. Confins, n. 58, 50176, 2023. https://doi.org/10.4000/confins.50176
  » https://doi.org/10.4000/confins.50176
• YEUNG, Jessie. Ten countries and territories saw severe flooding in just 12 days. Is this the future of climate change? CNN, 17 setembro 2023. Disponível em: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/16/world/global-rain-flooding-climate-crisis-intl-hnk/index.html Acesso em 18 de outubro de 2023.
  » https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/16/world/global-rain-flooding-climate-crisis-intl-hnk/index.html

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  08 Dec 2023
• Date of issue
  2023