Job title: Professor
Phone: 64 9 373 7599 ext 85183
Office: Rm 691, Human Sciences Building,10 Symonds Street, Auckland
Postal: School of Environment, The University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland
Email: p.forer@auckland.ac.nz

MA (Oxf.), PhD (Bris.)

Basically Pip Forer is an academic with a sometimes excessive enthusiasm for digital technology who has a few endearing traits and many internal contradictions. You will find him researching and teaching largely in a range of areas where Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) react in some way with human spatial processes. If you want four phrases to summarise this, try Dynamic Geographies, Impacts of Spatial Technologies, E-Learning and Lifestyles, and Geo-Graphics. All of these tend to get wound up with using new technologies such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Web-based delivery of course materials and maps. Geographic Information Studies is his specialist area, particularly as applied to human/environment interactions.

Dynamic Geographies concerns people’s movement patterns and activities over time, following the ideas of Torsten Hagerstrand. Such a view works from individual lives in their space and time settings, to form more general ideas on movement, exposure to disease, tourist experiences and city structure. Ongoing research has been funded in all of these areas The modelling techniques used are timely, but potentially invasive of privacy. Odd thing to work on for a researcher who has a deep suspicion of the power of tracking people and the potential for misuse of such data.

Impacts of Spatial Technologies addresses how transport and communication technologies change our lives, communities and geographies. Pip’s early work was in how airlines in New Zealand re-wrote the map of urban location, but more recently he has looked at aspects of the Internet and the geographic impact of the substitution of virtual for real activities. He is also interested in the way that Geographic Information Technologies create new industries and new expressions of human spatiality.

E-Learning and Lifestyles is a title blatantly trying to be trendy, and hide the fact that Pip has worked for 25 years in the educational application of ICT and learnt much about what does not work (apart from valves). Along the way, however, he has also developed some idea of what does, added to which he is researching with Otto Huisman how E-Learning and Flexible Learning might alter the lifestyle options of students by making their schedules more flexible and travel less necessary.

Geo-Graphics covers any form of environmental visualisation, cartographic or otherwise, and is probably an expression of misbalanced brain hemispheres. A Web address with some example maps from the Department is given below.

He also has interests in a range of related topics including Maori Land and Development Issues, Spatial Social Disparities and even some landscape-related issues. Most of these things he gets to teach something about, but especially GIS and dynamic geographies.

To add some gravitas, Pip Forer has edited or served on the editorial board of a number of international journals in GIS and educational technology, contributed to some twenty books, including the leading GIS reference book, written or edited a number of books and paper collections, and has authored almost 100 refereed papers in journals and conference proceedings. He was programme chair at the 9th Spatial Data Handling Symposium in Beijing in August 2000.

At a personal level he acknowledges an Anglo-Swiss genetic heritage, past links with Oxford, Bristol, Edinburgh and Canterbury Universities, the supremacy of Canterbury rugby and Arsenal Football Club, the pleasures of wine, latte and cheesecake (but not necessarily simultaneously), the glories of the opera, Kate Bush, early Jethro Tull and Patti Smith, the sublime nature of snow, bush and mountains, the style of Auckland as a place to live, the humour of sheep and the fact that Tom Robbins’ latest book is a bit of a disappointment.

‘ Advances in GIS Research’ Proceedings of the Spatial Data Handling Conference, Beijing, August 2000. Geographic Information Science Study Group of the IGU, 827, 2000 (with Anthony G.O.Yeh and Jianbang He).

‘ Fabricating Spaces’ Explorations in Human Geography: Encountering Place. Oxford University Press, Auckland, 85-115, 1999 (with Le Heron R, Murphy L, Forer P.C. and Goldstone M.).

GIS for Emergency Preparedness and Health Risk Reduction. Kluwer, Dordrecht, 318, 2002 (with Briggs D., Jarup L. and Stern R.).

TBA