ABSTRACT
One part of mankind appears to have become captive of its own achievements in technology, economic growth, and the creation of an affluent materialistic society in which interpersonal relationships and some of the more simple intangible pleasures of life are becoming increasingly lost. Another part is still captive of the ills of an earlier age – poverty, ignorance, disease, economic exploitation, racial discrimination, and so on. We all have a personal interest in the process of liberation, for we are ourselves among the captives. As geographers we have a special role – a truly creative and revolutionary one – that of helping to reveal the spatial malfunctionings and injustices, and contributing to the design of a spatial order of society in which people can be really free to fulfil themselves in a secure social setting where the rights of all are respected. This, surely, would be ‘progress in geography’.
