ABSTRACT
My initial armchair speculation about what had transpired in urban geography in the 1990s was rudely undermined by a look at the published literature. In the first part of this paper I describe the ways in which the weight of tradition is evident in the urban geography literature of the 1990s; tradition dominates in the topics and themes that are the focus of research, the types of cities studied, the epistemological and 294methodological approaches used, the gaps that are evident, and the disinclination to make clear the links between research and possible action. In the second part of the paper I describe three strands of path divergence that have emerged in the 1990s from these traditions, namely research on globalization, research on gender, and a greater diversity of methodological approaches and data sources used. In the final section I suggest how we might use tradition as a springboard to move urban geography beyond the 1990s. The topics that demand a larger share of our attention include those focused on the urban environment, sustainability, identity, and megacities in non-OECD countries. I propose that we work to ensure that our research on these and other topics is useful to certain audiences and constituencies by highlighting geographic scale and cross-scale processes and by crossing the permeable boundary that delineates academe.
