The increased focus, from the 1990s onwards, on culture as a geographical agent and product: ‘a reorientation of human geography’s interdisciplinary concerns toward the wide field of cultural studies’ (Barnett (1998) Antipode 30, 4). ‘It is because all human realities are expressed through cultures that a cultural turn was needed in geography’ (Claval (2007) Tijdschrift 98, 2). ‘With the cultural turn in economic geography, the emphasis on economic necessity…has been contested by an agency-orientated cultural reading’ that views engagement in such spaces as about the search for fun, sociality, distinction, discernment, the spectacular, and so forth, and more recently by a geographically sensitive approach that ascribes agency to affluent populations and economic rationales to deprived populations (Williams and Paddock (2003) Geografiska B 85, 3).

Thornes and McGregor in S. Trudgill and A. Roy (2003) propose a cultural climatology: ‘the study of the processes of, and the interactions and feedbacks between, the physical and human components of the climate system at a variety of temporal and spatial scales’ while Gregory (2006), Geomorph. 79, 172, argues for a cultural geomorphology; for example, ‘with knowledge of processes and changes of river channels it seems expedient to consider cultural reactions and perceptions’.