This scientific-disciplinary group critically analyzes and interprets the world, focusing on the discourses and meanings that human groups have created over time in relation to their environment. Key concepts include space, territory, environment, place, landscape, and region. The discipline studies, also from a didactic-educational perspective, the regional organization of terrestrial spaces through multiscalar, transcalar, and diachronic approaches. It examines the processes of economic, social, political, and cultural territorialization carried out by different human groups in their coexistence with each other and with other living species on the planet.
In addition to territory, its environmental and landscape configurations, and related policies, the discipline also explores narratives and representations of territory, the power relations underlying them, and their theorization over time. Central themes include the transformation, organization, and planning of terrestrial spaces, shaped by cooperation, mediation, or conflict among economic, social, and political actors, as well as unequal access to opportunities and various forms of discrimination—including gender, class, language, religion, and nationality—analyzed in their spatio-temporal dimensions.
Geographical research has both theoretical and applied value within an interdisciplinary framework. It encompasses the study of resources, land use, activity location, human mobility, innovation processes, flows, networks, circulation nodes, ways of life, and practices of territorial promotion and enhancement—including tourism—all from an environmental, economic, and social sustainability perspective. It also involves reflections on urban and regional systems across different scales and within a plurality of political scenarios.
Qualitative and quantitative tools—such as field investigation, use of secondary data, interviews and surveys, archival sources, visual and multimedia research, cartographic representations, geographic information systems (GIS), and remote sensing technologies—are fundamental to supporting geographic analysis

The ongoing or completed research activity of the Geography Area includes the following scientific-disciplinary field (SSD) afferent to GSD 11/GEOG-01:

• Geography (GEOG-01/A)
  ormerly M-GGR/01 Geography
  This field, also addressing didactic-educational objectives, focuses on the relationships between environment, individuals, and society at different scales. It encompasses facts, representations, materiality, and meanings. Using key concepts such as space, territory, environment, place, landscape, and region, it critically analyzes the world and the discourses and constructions of meaning that human groups negotiate over time in relation to their environment.

  Research in this field produces analyses of spatial processes, population evolution and settlement patterns, landscape and territorial heritage, sustainability, and the interactions between humans, non-human agents, and the abiotic environment. It also investigates socio-spatial conflicts, cultural, perceptual, and humanistic understandings of spatiotemporal and territorial dimensions, as well as diachronic analyses of territory, its knowledge, and related narratives and representations.
  The field employs both quantitative and qualitative methods, including field surveys, analysis of secondary data and archival documents, interviews and questionnaires, visual and action research, and cartographic and paracartographic representations, integrated with geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing technologies.

Specifically, the main areas of research include:

• history of geography;
• geography teaching;
• geography of the sea;
• marine environmental education, focusing on ocean literacy and ocean citizenship;
• island geography;
• the responses of local communities to environmental, social, and cultural changes.

MALATESTA STEFANO

SCHMIDT MULLER DI FRIEDBERG MARCELLA

SQUARCINA ENRICO

AGNOLETTO PIETRO

BOCCALETTI SILVY

NERI ERICA

RUGGIERI BEATRICE

SALIMBENI ALICE

Di seguito sono riportati i Centri di Ricerca che vedono la partecipazione di membri afferenti all'area Geografica.