Complexity and emergence (another conversation)

At the Annual Conference of the RGS-IBG in 2005, on 31 August, another session was held in the series that began at the Annual Conference in 2003 under the generic title "Conversations across the divide". These meetings have evolved with the aim of encouraging human and physical geographers to communicate with one another about their concepts, methods, languages and research agendas (Harrison et al. 2004). In 2005, a conceptual theme was chosen: "Complexity and emergence". The papers presented at the conference are listed in Table 1. This Commentary is itself a continuation of a kind of conversation, rather than a conventional report of the session. Instead of simply writing a summary, we drafted Part I as an introduction, and sent this and the questions listed in Table 2 to all of the participants. Part II then presents a kind of conversational review of their responses.