The relentless march of Adelaide's urban sprawl

Following the RGSSA's successful recent symposium on 'Urbanization of the Mount Lofty Ranges - The Adelaide Hills under pressure,' this talk will look at some of the broader issues regarding the ongoing growth of Adelaide.

It will consider the loss of prime agricultural land and the various impacts of the expanding city upon its rural-urban fringe. This will embrace topics such as green belts, reconnecting the rural to the urban, alternative food networks, slow food, the multifunctional countryside, and alternatives to urban sprawl.

This lecture will be preceded by a short presentation from Dr Carmel Chui Sutcliffe, one of the Society's recent recipients of the John Lewis Prize for Excellence in Doctoral Research in Geography, on Embracing lived experience for understanding the wholeness of place.

Although a marginal philosophical research tradition, geographical phenomenology has continued to provide compelling insights into the significances of places for people and communities throughout the world since its development in the 1970s by humanistic geographers. Geographical phenomenology sets out to explore and describe the immediate consciousness of environmental experience with the aim of developing a sensitive awareness and contemplation of the underlying existential structures of places as they are actually lived, rather than theorised. In this talk, I will present a brief overview of the phenomenology of place that was developed in my doctoral thesis for Fakulteta, one of Bulgaria’s largest and most stigmatised Roma neighbourhoods, and will emphasise the value of approaching place through respecting the unique reality and wholeness of people’s lifeworlds, learning to dwell in them and unconcealing and clarifying their humanised meanings.