New Worlds, New Geographies

Book excerpt: John Rennie Short maintains that the "new world order" is neither new nor orderly. His book, New Worlds, New Geographies, connects global change, urban transformation, and scholarly integrity. The disintegration of the comforting illusion that the present is just a continuation of the past demands a closer evaluation of how to live one's life in the fragmented, chaotic world of postmodemity and the current distrust of rationality and progress. In a personal yet analytical style, Short elucidates the struggles of governments and individuals to situate themselves within changing nation states and the restructurings of urban spaces into a kind of global village. Short insists that it is the responsibility of academics to help make order out of the chaos of postmodemity and make sense of the relationships between people and the environment, the social and the spatial, the structural and the personal. From the restructuring of a "new world order" to the reappraisal of the role of academics, this accessible collection of essays calls for a "progressive human geography" to help cope with the political changes of a postmodern age. New Worlds, New Geographies represents a reluctant postmodernist and resident alien's attempt to make sense of a changing world.