The article presents conceptual contributions of geography to studies of futures. While the future is conceived as a temporal category, geographical perspectives highlight the role and relevance of space. The spatial dimension becomes evident in future-making practices such as imagination and anticipation, especially in the visualization of desirable futures. Future-making and geography-making are interdependent practices, which are articulated through the projection of imagined futures into space.

The article examines how asylum seekers in the Greek refugee camp Moria were barely kept alive through different technologies and actors taking part in the field. It also examines the political purpose of placing asylum seekers on the brink of death in European refugee camps.

This article systematically reviews how research within the Alpine Arc explores open spaces, their ecosystem services, and their role in spatial planning processes and land-use decision-making processes. Results show a research imbalance and a lack of solution statements for identified problems in Alpine research. Open spaces require safeguarding beyond regional borders and beyond spatial planning documents in a more proactive manner to ensure long-term quality of life within and beyond the Alps.

The paper shows that the fight against COVID-19 has contributed in manifold ways to establishing the air as an object of imagination, concern and practice, generating novel ways of understanding it, of experiencing it and of acting on it. From this, a series of important insights are derived with regard to our understanding of the “air” as a realm of reality that is dramatically underplayed in socio-spatial theory.

In light of recent developments in space exploration, this intervention engages with the relations between the planetary and the extra-planetary. Advocating for the explicit consideration of the latter in critical planetary thinking, the extra-planetary is conceptualised as imagined-and-real counter-space. As such, it is literally not for humans and certainly not for the very frontier expansionist and extractivist practices that have contributed to the socio-ecological crises on planet Earth.

In the paper, we shed light on the extent to which students who moved to a university city perceive their place of study as temporary or permanent. Furthermore, we explore the effects of temporary or permanent living arrangements on place attachments, belonging and feelings of home. The results show that students who moved to the university cities perceive themselves as residents after some years, and quite a few even aim to stay beyond their studies.

Focusing on the aftermath of the murder of 8-year-old Araceli in Vitória in 1973, the paper develops an approach to analysing necropolitical power through obfuscated traces of violence. For this purpose, archival research is combined with an account of recent mobilizations around the toponomy related to the murder. What thus emerges is a nuanced analysis of contested “signatures of power” that are inscribed into urban space.