In his article in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Peter Hopkins explains the theme of September’s annual Royal Geographical Society Conference in London, ‘Toward Just Places’. As this year’s conference chair, Hopkins chose this theme in recognition of the urgent need for academic research to contribute to the fight against multiple, intersecting inequalities and injustices that are intensifying in the UK and across the planet. Among other motivating questions, he asks ‘what are the ways forward for developing place-based sustainability transformations (Keddie et al. 2025) to ensure access to nature, transitions to low-carbon economies and to secure environmental justice?’
The ‘Toward Just Places’ theme and this question could not be more relevant to the research we are conducting in the JUST Centre. They are why many of us submitted proposals to share our work with the wider scholarly and activist community at the conference. Thirteen members of the JUST Centre participated by chairing organised panels, serving as discussants and presenting papers, with many contributions representinginterdisciplinary collaborations between JUST Centre researchers, and with colleagues in other institutions and organisations.
Our conference contributions
Peter North’s presentation, ‘Transformation Without Catastrophe?’ explored an emerging typology of the North of England’s social and solidarity economy and how these alternative models can pave the way for a more just climate future. It was based on his longstanding expertise in this field as well as new work being developed with JUST Centre Social and Solidarity Economy working group theme leads Helen Holms and Liz Edwards.
Subina Shrestha’s presentation on ‘Just urban logistics’ discussed the justice dimensions of gig economy work, highlighting that ‘seamless’ services often rely on insecure contracts and weakened labour protections, and how cities can involve workers and communities to design fairer logistics systems.
Alexandra Gormally-Sutton and Ceri Holman presented a paper on ‘Grassroots Narratives of Net Zero: Place-Based Storytelling and Just Transitions in Cumbria’, which argued that grassroots storytelling is an important yet under-represented dimension of net zero transitions. Recognising that mainstream transition discourse prioritises technology and policy, the presentation focused on the lived experience, local meaning-making, and community-generated ‘good news’ stories, as essential components of the transition process.
Brett Cherry’s paper, co-authored with colleagues from Newcastle University, shared findings from an innovative and interdisciplinary research project based in Blyth, a post-industrial coastal community in the North East. Using creative, participatory methods, the project found that net zero frameworks need to engage with specific histories, place attachments, and shared vulnerabilities of post-industrial places in order to avoid reproducing injustices. A key output was a testable model for how net zero organisations and governing bodies might work with post-industrial communities to surface and validate their knowledges, and work co-productively in a ‘whole-of-place,’ transformative way.
Harriet Thew presented ‘Just Joking’, a paper exploring how humour can contribute to justice and solidarity in intergenerational collaborations towards climate resilience. It was based on ‘Playgrounds of Possibility’, an interdisciplinary project in Leeds that involved co-designing climate-resilient playgrounds with the young people who use them.
The co-leads of JUST’s Social and Built Infrastructures working group, Claire Hoolohan and Stefan Bouzarovski, organised a two-part session on social infrastructures for net zero, which focused on how to enable just place-based decarbonisation. As part of the session, JUST Centre PhD researcher Matt Newbold presented a paper titled ‘The Extra-infrastructure – Arguing for Green Infrastructure as Social Infrastructure’ based on his evolving doctoral research project, and Stefan Bouzarovski presented ‘Energy and Retrofit Advice as Moments of Socio- Infrastructural Encounter’ which was co-authored by PPERG co-director Katherine Sugar.
A highlight for me chairing our successful panel that showcased the breadth and depth of the JUST Centre’s research agenda, ‘Putting people, place and power at the centre of just transition debates in the UK’. In the panel, five of our early career researchers – Anna Key (Liverpool), Ceri Holman (Manchester), Harry Barton (Manchester), Mapenzie Tauzie (Leeds) and Brett Cherry (Newcastle) – presented findings from place-sensitive case study research with communities in five areas of North of England, highlighting substantive themes and methodological challenges and creativity that have emerged so far.
The session then opened to a discussion about how research can contribute to the development of hopeful narratives that put people, place and power at the centre of just transition debates. The audience gave us some challenging questions to think about, including how we will ensure we engage with a wide diversity of people while also working co-productively with a small number of organisations, and how we are thinking about fostering a transformative culture of sustainability within the Centre itself.
Why climate action can’t bypass inequality
Besides the JUST Centre’s contributions, a highlight of the conference for me was Oxford professor of human geography Danny Dorling’s keynote lecture, ‘Social geography, economic inequality, and understanding what’s going on’. Dorling provided a litany of evidence of the very bad state of inequality in the UK. We already know it is the most spatially unequal country in the OECD, which is a key reason why we have chosen to do place-based research in the North of England. But I also was reminded that the UK, as he put it, ‘stands out like a sore thumb’ as having the worst record on child poverty, of being the most heavily privatised and having the lowest taxes in Europe. It was somewhat surprising to hear that we have the most economically far-right political party in the world (the Conservative Party) and more far-right think tanks than in the rest of Europe. Dorling warned that the UK could well be the closest of any European country to electing a far-right government at the national level. These worrying claims underscore the importance of our work to understand how – and under what conditions – positive action on climate that is joined up with strategies to tackle social inequalities can counter the anti-net zero backlash, and meaningfully address the rising levels of discontent in communities across the North of England.
Dorling’s lecture was very far from hopeful, but he ended by telling us that the UK is one of the least climate-sceptical countries in the world. This makes us a curious outlier, since the evidence suggests that the more equitable a society is, the more likely it is to have a strong record on climate policy. He then moved to his key take-home message, which was that we should all read Thomas Piketty’s 2024 book Nature, Culture and Inequality . Having now read it, I see clearly the thinking behind his more recent project with the World Inequality Lab, The Global Justice Report , published in the summer.
A better world is possible
One of Piketty’s central arguments is that inequality is a choice rather than an inevitability; it is driven by dominant ideologies and structures not by natural or economic laws. This means that a more equal society can be achieved through collectively choosing a different system that promotes equality, happiness and sustainability. Another key point is that the climate crisis and extreme wealth are two sides of same coin and should be tackled together via progressive taxation, a plan for which Piketty offers up in his 2024 book and in a more detailed way in the 2026 report. It was surprising to hear Danny Dorling endorse Piketty’s argument for what he summed up as ‘democratic eco-socialism’.
For me, that this type of joined-up, transformative vision is reaching the mainstream and being endorsed by some of this generations most respected economists affirms that our JUST Centre research is more important and timely than we could ever have imagined. It is an inspirational thought to energise and motivate us as we start the new academic year.
