Conclusions

In this final chapter, we return to our three key themes of the social, inequality and social justice which framed the book, and from there outline a series of future considerations for social geography within our current world (as of 2025). The theme of the social was explored through a relational lens, where our lives are shaped by the spaces of encounter that we occupy, move through, and shape through our embodied and intersectional presence. One takeaway is understanding that the social is framed by at least geographic scales – macro, meso and micro – which are neither neat nor separate categories but porous and simultaneously intertwined in everyday life, sometimes symbiotically linked. This means that wider macro-scale processes, including the geographies of production and welfare, can have meso-scale effects in the way urban issues are understood and dealt with within cities. At the same time, these can have immediate lived and felt realities at the micro-scale for people on the ground, the so-called spaces of encounter. Over the course of the book, we have been attuned to how spaces of encounter are often inexplicably linked, where we must remain conscious of how each side of the perceived line affects the other. Here, relations are manifest, ‘made’ and come into being through the shifting places that people (may be forced to) use, occupy, abandon and shape, for example via social, affective and material relations at home, in the community and at a cultural/political level. Such emplaced and embodied experiences are encountered through both individual embodied changes/difference and through multi-scalar relations with others. This understanding of the experience of the social allows us to better appreciate how we are socio-economically situated or perhaps marginalised through those relations in ways that shape or constrain experiences of hope.