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Royal Geographical Society (With IBG) Medals and Awards Ceremony 2015 bs_bs_banner The Geographical Journal, Vol. 181, No. 3, September 2015, pp. 311–318, doi: 10.1111/geoj.12148 The relevance of geographical knowledge for the challenges facing society: Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Medals and Awards ceremony 2015 JUDITH REES, MICHAEL BATTY, PAUL THEROUX, STEPHEN DANIELS, JAY MISTRY AND GILL VALENTINE Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7 2AR, UK E-mail: [email protected] The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)’s annual Medals and Awards recognise achievements in researching, communicating and teaching a wide range of geographical knowledge. The speeches and citations are a record of the 2015 ceremony, with contributions from Paul Theroux, Professors Michael Batty, Stephen Daniels, Gill Valentine and Dr Jay Mistry. The speeches include comments on the importance of geography for understanding and tackling challenges facing society, urban modelling, travel, landscapes, and community led research. KEY WORDS: geography, geographical knowledge, teaching and learning, fieldwork, disseminating research people who give their time to the Society as Council President’s introduction and committee members, ambassadors, mentors, rofessor Dame Judith Rees: Good evening and a reviewers, assessors and sponsors – thanks to you all. It very warm welcome to one of the most is appropriate that I am sharing the platform this P important events in the Society’s calendar, the evening with two of theVice Presidents; I owe a special presentation of the Medals and Awards for 2015 and a thank you to all theVice Presidents and Treasurers who celebration of the diverse contributions made by the have served with me over the years – their support and recipients to geographical knowledge and a better wise advice has been greatly appreciated. understanding of the world around us. As most of you First will be the Medals, which I will present. will be aware, this is the last year that I will have the Second will be the Scholarly Awards of the Society. honour and pleasure of presenting these awards. My These will be presented by Professor David Thomas, period as President seems to have flown by and not just the Vice President for Research and Higher Education. for me judging by an encounter I had with a Fellow just The third group will be the awards celebrating two weeks ago at the lecture by Sir Bob Geldof; she education, wider public understanding of geography, came up to congratulate me on taking over from and support for excellence in expeditions and Michael Palin and was somewhat taken aback to learn fieldwork. These will be presented by Dr John Shears, that three years had passed since then. This encounter the Vice President for Expeditions and Fieldwork. served to remind me of Michael’s words in his last These awards will be interspersed with short videos Presidential address, ‘Presidents come and go, but the highlighting the photography of our Cherry Kearton continuity of the RGS-IBG is in the hands of everyone Medal and Award recipient, the Society’s grants, who works here’. I want to sincerely thank them all for specifically the Land Rover Bursary, and the making my Presidency a relatively stress-free and Ambassador programme. enjoyable experience. We have a great Society, one of At the end, the recipient of the Murchison Award, the most vibrant geographical societies in the world. Its Professor Gill Valentine, will give a speech on behalf success owes much to the Director and her staff who of all the Award recipients. have done an enormous amount to promote our Before we begin, I would just like to thank the many subject and share geographical knowledge with new staff who have helped to organise this event, and in audiences. However, their achievements are only particular Emma Neave and Alex Bishop in the made possible by the support of literally hundreds of Director’s Office. I would also like to thank all those The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). © 2015 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). 312 RGS-IBG Medals and Awards ceremony 2015 who submitted nominations for the Medals and intellectual and professional confusion had by then Awards. accelerated, I sought refuge in what I thought was a Her Majesty the Queen has approved the awards of more certain future: in thinking about planning and our two highest honours – the two Gold Medals of cities as science. equal standing. This year the Founder’s Medal is One great revelation to me was that you could think awarded to Professor Michael Batty and the Patron’s of cities as systems, as machines – and this systems Medal to Paul Theroux. approach suggested that if you could think this way, you could build formal models – mathematical Founder’s Medal models – which could be used to make predictions of what a future would be like. The other great revelation First the Founder’s Medal awarded to Professor was that we could use computers to do this. Naïve Michael Batty. perhaps to think we could invent the future this way Professor Michael Batty is one of the most but optimistic too. influential geographers of his generation. Working at We are all prisoners of the time when we are trained the interface of geography and planning, he has and in my own case I have continued this last 40 years made enormous contributions to advancing human or more to pursue these early aims. In the late 1960s geography, developing methods and concepts for and then at geography in University of Reading in the understanding cities. 1970s, I built various urban models that we still call Professor Batty has written hundreds of land use transport models – large-scale, static, publications. His academic papers and books have set aggregative beasts tied together with wire and string – intellectual agendas for the discipline. His equally hardly science but a ‘kind of science’ nonetheless, prolific, more general contributions have stimulated drawing on bits and pieces from physics to sociology. discussion, debate and awareness among wider My time at Reading under my mentor, the sadly audiences of how cities function. His latest book, The departed Peter Hall – who also received this medal in new science of cities, draws together much of this 1988 – equipped me to move on to Cardiff where I research. It is an intellectual tour de force; ‘locational was a Professor in the Planning School. analysis’ in a digital age. There in the 1980s, I was much influenced by Professor Batty’s influence has also been felt strongly computer graphics – and the beginning of GIS – through institutes, which he has chaired and initiated, geographical information systems which now most notably the Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis constitute the basic elements of the way we represent (CASA) at UCL, where he has been based for the last 20 the geographical world in our models. Tonight years. CASA’s work is at the cutting edge of innovations receiving an Award is David Martin who was a PhD in information science and its application to the world student there developing this world of GIS and data, of big data and smart cities. and he is still doing that. There I met Paul Longley, Mike is a Fellow of both the British Academy and again a recipient here two years ago of the Victoria Royal Society, which places him in elite company; he Medal, and we worked on new approaches to has been awarded a CBE; and is recipient of the simulating cities from the bottom up. The great insight Vautrin Lud Prize, a leading international award for that has happened in science and social science this geographers. last 30 years is that things like cities and societies need It is most fitting that today Professor Michael Batty to be thought about as systems which grow and evolve be awarded the Founder’s Medal for the development from the bottom up – more like organisms than and promotion of the geographical science of cities. machines – and our models are now much more infused with this than they once were – they draw Professor Michael Batty’s acceptance speech extensively on complexity theory, on ideas such as As a schoolboy in the 1950s in a northern grammar emergence and evolution and in this quest Paul school, I did not know what to do at university. In fact Longley and myself developed many ideas of I thought about architecture and geography, representing the form and function of cities as fractals economics and maths but it was really the headmaster and similar emergent systems thinking. and my father who decided I should go to Manchester I left Cardiff for the State University of New York at and do Town and Country Planning, sufficiently like Buffalo in 1990 where I ran the National Center for Architecture but with a little more intellectual clout Geographic Information and Analysis for 5 years and they said, and as I was good at drawing . where I cut new teeth on GIS and spatial analysis, and So that is what happened and when I got there in on trying to run a Centre, and then in 1995, it was 1962, I found the place in turmoil – half the staff said Peter Hall as much as anyone but also Richard planning was architecture, the other half said it was Munton, Peter Wood (who is receiving the Honorary geography, and geography was beginning to win out. Fellowship here tonight), Bill Hillier and Paul By the time I finished my degree, there were lots of Densham who set up and have long supported the people who were pushing the idea that planning Centre I am now associated with at UCL – CASA.
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