Department of Geography University of Canterbury

is located on the University of Canterbury campus in Christchurch, New Zealand. Geography encourages students to take a holistic view of the world and their place in it: it's about putting knowledge together, rather than taking it apart. It focuses on the relationships between people, their places and their environments, and the ways in which these can be made more sustainable for the future.

About the Department of Geography - University of Canterbury

The Department of Geography at the University of Canterbury is the oldest Geography department in , founded in 1937. It was set up by , who was responsible for attracting a young Kenneth Coumberland to NZ in 1938. This is described in the extract from Cumberland's memoir published in the NZ Geographer in April 2007. It was while at Canterbury that Cumberland wrote his famous book drawing attention to New Zealand's soil erosion problem, published in 1944. Cumberland went on to found the Auckland Geography department in 1946. Other notable geographers at Canterbury include RJ Johnston (1967-74), Jane Soons (1961-1993 first women geomorphologist of note in Australiasia and a mentor to women still in the ANZGG) and PJ Perry (1966-91).

The Department of Geography is housed in extensive purpose-built accommodation, dating from the mid 1970s. The main, 6 level, block houses graduate students, a full time academic staff of fourteen, short and long term visitors, as well as GIS and computing labs on the top floor. An allied university research and teaching centre, , occupies the ground floor.

There is also an adjacent three level lab block, which has teaching rooms, physical laboratories, a well equipped departmental Geography Library, and other services such as cartography, graphics and workshops. Another two allied university facilities, the National Centre for Research on Europe, and the , are also located in this block.

The undergraduate curriculum is structured around four 'pathways', after introductory integrated courses at 100 level each taught by teams of physical and human geographers.The pathways are: physical geography; human geography; Geographic Information Systems and Environmental Remote Sensing, and Resource and Environmental Management.

Graduate coursework students are spread across a range of courses in physical and human geography, GIS, remote sensing, and in resource assessment and management. Usually there are between 25 and 30 coursework students in Geography, with half as many again coming in to take particular papers from other departments.

Thesis students are either engaged in Masters degrees or PhDs. Currently there are between 30 and 40 thesis students working in the department. The South Island is an ideal laboratory for many fields of physical geography, such as climate, coastal and alpine studies. New Zealand, with its history of experimentation in economic and environmental management, social relations and land rights, also has some specific human geographies that repay close research.

Geography has a number of adjunct fellows, postdoctoral fellows, and a steady stream of visitors, all of whom add to the intellectual life of the department and work closely with graduates. The university’s Erskine Fund pays for three prestige visitors to spend periods of up to a semester with us each year, and the department also pays for its own visiting lecturer from overseas for each academic year. In the past several years such eminent academics as Professor's Peter Haggett, Richard Peet, Audrey Kobayashi, Tim O'Riordan, Jan Monk, Colin Ballantyne, and Robin Flowerdew have all spent time teaching and researching in the department over the past years.

The Department of Geography at the University of Canterbury is one of the only true Geography Departments left in the world - it is the only Department of Geography in Australasia. Most others have been split (with physical geographers going into Geosciences or Earth Science, and human geographers going into planning or sociology type schools) or the geographers have been merged into bigger schools (with planning, architecture, geology, environmental science etc)

The Department of Geography has the only significant programme in health geographies in NZ, with a that focuses on a range of GIS-supported research areas, in partnership with the Public Health Intelligence Unit of the Ministry of Health.

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