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Flinders Institute for Housing, Urban and Regional Research (FIHURR)

Welcome

The School is located within the Faculty of Social Sciences at Flinders University, and has active links with academic areas in each of the University's Faculties.

Our areas of special interest include urban social geography, including housing studies; urban and regional development; population studies and demography; environmental studies and environmental management; geographies of justice, representation and communication; geographical education; and applications of geographical information systems. Regionally we concentrate on Australia, but we also study the Asian-Pacific region (especially Indonesia) and global issues more broadly.

Current activities within the School can be viewed by looking at Happenings and Seminars.

Profession and community

Staff contribute to the Institute of Australian Geographers, including management of the IAG listserve, the Australian and New Zealand Section of the Regional Science Association International, the Australian Population Association, the Australian Institute of Urban Studies, the Environment Institute of Australia, the Royal Geographical Society of SA Inc, and other professional organisations.

Members of the School regularly contribute to the print and electronic media. They also maintain good links with schoolteachers, especially through the Secondary Schools' Assessment Board of SA (SSABSA) and the Geography Teachers' Association of SA.

The School has links with a range of similar departments in Australia and internationally, including the Department of Geography at the University of Indonesia and the Department of Geographical Sciences at Plymouth University.

Staff and senior students also provide consulting services in their areas of special expertise.

Physical resources

The School is located on the top two floors of the Social Sciences North Building. In addition to staff offices and postgraduate rooms the School has an administrative office (Room 318SSN), and two teaching laboratories (Rooms 201SSN and 213SSN).

A Map Library (Room 205SSN) and the McCaskill Resource Centre (204SSN) contain a collection of topographic and thematic maps, aerial photographs, technical pamphlets, statistical reports, census data and reports in various forms, and some atlases. These collections also hold some of the reports and articles required for student reading. Students are encouraged to use the Resources Centre for study and discussion purposes. The physical geography laboratory (205ASSN) is available for research students and staff and includes a herbarium.

The Spatial Information Systems Laboratory is a teaching and research facility which contains Silicon Graphics workstations which run ARCMap, ARC-INFO, ARC-View and ERDAS IMAGINE, the School’s primary GIS and Remote Sensing software packages. There are also a number of workstations which run mapping software packages including Mapinfo which permits access to Australian Bureau of Statistics Census Data. Printing and imaging facilities include an A3 colour scanner together with an A4 laser printer, an A3 colour inkjet printer and an A0 large format colour plotter. Staff and students also have access to the central computing facilities and a number of Faculty PC laboratories for teaching.

History

The Discipline of Geography, as it was then known, was a foundation member in the School of Social Sciences when Flinders University opened in 1966. Since it was founded the School has been led by the following academic staff:

The Graduate Program in Population and Human Resources was established in the School at Flinders in 1987.

In 1997 the department changed its name to the School of Geography, Population and Environmental Management in recognition of the range of teaching and research programs managed by staff in the School.