The umbrella term for a group of geographical concepts and procedures that are centred on opposition to repressive and inequitable power relations in: capitalism, class, colonialism, disability, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexuality. The keystone to all of these is the contention that ‘knowledge can never come in an unpoliticized form’ (J. W. Crampton 2007). Critical geographers stress the role of dominance and confrontation in the production and reproduction of landscape, place, and space: see, for example, Thompson-Fawcett and Bond (2003) Prog. Plan. 60, 2 on the urbanist discourse. ACME (an online international journal for critical and radical analyses of the social, the spatial and the political) sees critical geographies as ‘part of the praxis of social and political change aimed at challenging, dismantling, and transforming prevalent relations, systems, and structures of capitalist exploitation, oppression, imperialism, neo-liberalism, national aggression, and environmental destruction’.
Although Blomley (2007) PHG 31, 1 judges that critical geography has become deeply entrenched within the academy, many share Cloke’s frustration with ‘our apparent inability to retain a critical political edge in human geography’ (2002, PHG 26). For Baeten (2002, Geografiskal B 3–4), urban geography ‘fails to crystallize in a convincing political project that would provide a credible alternative for the poverty-generating capitalist shaping of today’s city’. However, Peck and Wills (2000) Antipode 32, 1–3 note that being radical in the late 1960s ‘involved a very different cluster of beliefs, ideas and affiliations than might be expected today’. Mitchell (2000) 2nd Int. Crit. Geog. Conf. 2 argues that critical geography should be ‘for people, not just ourselves’. Oberhauser (2007) AAAG 97, 2 judges C. Katz (2004) as ‘a model for research in critical geography’. See Simonsen (2004) Geoforum 35, 5 and Blomley (2008) PHG 32, 2 for reviews of this sub-discipline; see also Oswin (2008) PHG 32, 1. Unwin’s words (2000, TIBG 25, 1) are inspirational: ‘A critical geography needs to engage with the everyday practices of all of us who live in the places that we do; it needs to focus on the needs and interests of the poor and the underprivileged; it remains a very modern enterprise, retaining a belief that it is possible to make the world a “better” place.’ See Glassman (2011) PHG 35, 5, 669 on critical development geography.