The performing arts of dance, theatre, music and live art have become established means through which cultural geographers can examine how people experience and make sense of their everyday worlds. Simultaneously, performance theorists and practitioners increasingly seek geographical tools that help elucidate the broader processes or politics that underpin artistic genres of performance. This review article works at this interdisciplinary nexus, exploring the diverse areas of engagement between geography and the performing arts. It provides an overview of three spatialities around which interdisciplinary exchanges take place, and where there are interesting synergies in the conceptual approach to studying geographies of performance, namely: landscapes, places and cities. In so doing, the article outlines some avenues where geography and performance studies academics might further their mutual interests, and argues that geography is central to the constitution, meaning and form that performance works take.

As human activities increasingly threaten the ecosystems on which they depend, one of the main questions our societies are facing is related to the resilience – seen as a necessary element of sustainability – of social–ecological systems (SESs). SESs are composed of many heterogeneous elements including human actors such as institutions and resource users, and natural components such as land patches, animal species, etc. The numerous relationships between these different entities shape complex, dynamic networks of social–ecological interdependencies. Once described as networks, SESs can be analysed using a variety of network metrics, which may potentially help to better quantify and evaluate the resilience of SESs to external or internal perturbations. In this paper, we provide a broad overview of the latest progress in network theory as applied to SESs and discuss how network metrics may be used to assess the sustainability of an SES.

This paper examines the use of ‘community’ rhetoric in the Transition Town Network (TTN). This is seen in both its external and internal context. Externally, TTN has emerged against the backdrop of an increasing use of ‘community’ rhetoric in environmental governance, for example, in renewable energy projects. Internally, the use of ‘community’ language and ‘community’ ways of operating are crucial for understanding this movement, in how it sees itself and the lineage it builds upon. Particularly, TTN builds upon the polysemic, subjective nature of the word, fused with their unique permaculture inspired meaning. TTN have emerged as an important response to climate change and peak oil (Bailey et al. 2010; Mason and Whitehead 2011). This paper attempts to address their crucial, if neglected, focus on ‘community’. In the wide sweep of writing on ‘community’, what distinctive, if anything, can TTN add to current understandings and practices of ‘community’?

There has been increasing emphasis on the built urban environment within anti-obesity policy in the UK and elsewhere in the global north as part of a shift away from a model of individual responsibility to focus on so-called ‘obesogenic environments’. While recent policy has called for urban design and planning professionals to eradicate obesity there is, however, significant uncertainty in the science surrounding the relationship between body size, urban design and health and little definitive evidence about what works. In this paper, we therefore outline connections between critical geographies of obesity and urban geographies in order to question the ways in which obesity is framed and politicised in relation to the urban built environment.