The map is a central element of our visual culture. It has also been a vital representation technology in many scholarly disciplines for hundreds of years, as well as a practical tool for navigation and a means for the government of territory. But, as the editor of this new four-volume collection from Routledge explains, the rhetorical power and technical complexity of how maps work are relatively underappreciated and not well analysed across the social sciences and beyond. Now, to enable researchers and advanced students to make better sense of a vast corpus of scholarship, "Mapping"...

Urban Ecology is a rapidly developing area of research and study. Drawing on the work of many disciplines including geography, planning, landscape architecture, sociology, economics, anthropology, engineering, and climatology urban ecologists argue that an understanding of the relationships between living organisms and their urban environment as an integrated social-ecological system is an essential component of the decision-making and planning needed to create viable and sustainable cities around the world.

Now, Ian Douglas, one of Urban Ecology s founding fathers (and editor of...

Big or small, islands and their inhabitant communities have long been the focus of intellectual enquiry, but in recent years a whole host of new academic institutes, journals, and conferences have devoted themselves to their study and research. And while early scholarly work mostly originated from those working in the natural sciences, and in Physical and Human Geography, Anthropology, and Archaeology, in the last twenty years or so serious research has also burgeoned under the rubric of, for example, Cultural Geography, Regional Development, Environmental Studies, Tourism, and Identity...