The European Geonight: how to reconcile academic and popular geography

Abstract

In 2017, the French National Geographical Committee initiated the first “Night of Geography”, also called “Geonight”, in Paris and a dozen other French cities. The overall event was a success, with a great diversity of the public and organizers, with hundreds of people attending local events. The second edition of Geonight took place on Friday, April the 6th, 2018, and was expanded on the European scale. Around 80 events took place. In France, 25 events were spread throughout the country; there were 37 in more than 20 Italian cities, 14 in Hungary, and further events in other countries such as Portugal, Spain, Greece, and others. The general goals of the project are to put forward geography and geographers, to give the greater public a chance to better grasp the various facets of geography, and to make geographical research more accessible. The baseline is that the proposed events should, whenever possible, be free of charge and open to the public. These events and their success derive from a specific diagnosis and raise some questions. Why is geography so little known and under-appreciated? Why is it that geographical studies do not receive more attention, even if a variety of extremely well publicized topics belong to these geographical studies, such as climate change, natural hazards, geopolitics, as well as cartography and geolocalization? Finally, how can geographers overcome these obstacles?