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Whether new technologies will have a positive impact on how societies experience nature depends on how particular devices and populations come to interact. This paper reviews two bodies of work that have sought to understand and influence these interactions with reference to the smartphone. The first is associated with a group of researchers interested in how smartphone apps might help people to engage with their surroundings in beneficial ways. The second comes from a set of scholars hoping to learn from the analysis of the social media datasets associated with smartphone interactions outdoors. After comparing these how these two bodies commonly see the social world, the paper considers how other approaches might augment these endeavours. We argue for more studies that explore what different social groups have to say about life with the smartphone and how norms of technology use emerge. We also suggest that this area of research might engage more fully with wider academic work on how smartphones are reshaping our societies. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

There is a growing body of research that, under the banner of ‘green exercise’ considers the additional physical and psychological benefits that may be accrued by those who exercise in ‘natural’ environments. This essay considers the implications of how this research has been conducted to date and argues that it may be usefully enriched by a fuller examination of how exercise and environment come together in less controlled conditions. After outlining some ideas and approaches commonly found in this field, we contend that there are two problems here: firstly, the focus on ‘green’ – in so far as this defines the experience in certain visual terms – and, secondly, the focus on ‘exercise’ – in so far as this downplays diversity in physical experiences. In response, we argue that studies centred on how various environments are inhabited by various groups of exerciser could provide fresh ideas about how best to promote the benefits of green exercise. We make this argument because the implied vision of positive landscape design currently associated with this field is typified by flat surfaces that allow exercisers to visually consume vegetation without other stimulation. With reference to qualitative work on recreational running, we contend that this is not always the way to go.

Summer music festivals that involve a few days of camping have often been linked to sustainability agendas. Yet relevant studies have so far overlooked how these events can themselves serve as experiments in less resource consumptive living. Building on a wider interest in the cultural evolution of cleanliness norms, this paper explores how attendees come to use water in personal washing at two UK festivals. Through survey, observation and interview research, it examines how current festival goers respond to the disruption of their usual washing regimes, paying particular attention to how a combination of social and infrastructural cues serves to encourage the emergence of a temporary new cleanliness culture. Doing so highlights the value of seeing human resource consumption as a matter of dynamic collective convention more than fixed personal preference since these respondents were seen to embrace a new relationship with washing that was otherwise deemed unthinkable. This leads to a broader discussion of how visitor needs and the social world are most usefully studied by both future festival organisers and the wider field of sustainable tourism research.

Qualitative research focused on how people experience the social and material environments in which they exercise has the potential to inform public health agendas in all sorts of ways. This commentary takes up the claim made by Stephanie Coen that such research should begin with an ‘equity lens’ and place a greater emphasis on ‘critique’ than we did in the ‘Exercise and Environment’ special issue to which she responds. At its best qualitative research reveals new ways of thinking about the social and material contexts at hand. As such, it has the potential to highlight important dimensions of the lived experience of popular fitness practices that may have hitherto been relatively overlooked. Always starting with the overt aim of applying an ‘equity lens’ truncates the possibility of discovering such dimensions. Furthermore, being too wedded to an overtly critical stance may end up hindering, rather than encouraging, the most positive dialogue between those studying the cotemporary exercise experience and those involved in public health.

Starting with a series of perspectives on why and where humans run, this paper considers how running comes to happen in some environments instead of others and how it is experienced thereafter. More specifically, we are interested in the processes by which contemporary recreational running has come to take place either indoors on treadmills or outside on pavements and paths. Running has been recently positioned as an obvious target for those hoping to encourage public health amongst increasingly time pressured populations and running outdoors can often lead to additional benefits. Yet how it is that runners and environments come to coalesce has yet to be examined in any great detail. This paper responds by drawing on theories of how embodied practices spread through society to further an emergent geographical interest in the speech patterns of everyday life. With reference to a project involving accompanied runs and interviews with groups of both indoor and outdoor recreational runners in London, we ask what the subtleties of their running talk tells us about how exercisers become attached to the environments they currently occupy and how they might feasibly be encouraged elsewhere.

Taking four assumptions in turn, this review article considers some of the lenses through which researchers might look at later-life leisure travel and the implications of adopting each of them. First, we consider the ‘active ageing’ agenda and what this means for how leisure travel may be thought about in academia and beyond. Second, we turn to studies underpinned by worries about the appetite for significant consumption thought to typify the ‘baby-boomer’ generation and question whether these studies could inadvertently be promoting the very future they hope to avoid. Third, we explore how research on the benefits of everyday ‘mobility’ in later life may have morphed into a more general belief about the value of travel in older age. Finally, we reflect on how relevant studies of tourism are often underpinned by an argument about the financial rewards that now await those ready to target the older traveller. Our overall contention is that, though for different reasons, all four could be serving to encourage more later-life travel. Whilst for some this prospect is not at all troubling, the spectre of adverse energy demand consequences leads us to explore a more critical view.

Targets for energy performance in operation have been advocated as a solution to the well-documented mismatch between the expected and actual energy use of buildings. Although construction industry actors will be crucial in realising these targets, their response to them is currently under-explored. Augmenting research on how middle actors shape energy consumption, this paper examines how everyday talk in the construction industry sustains this mismatch, drawing on a study of a hospital construction project with targets for energy in use. It applies Gilbert and Mulkay's approach to discourse analysis, particularly their interest in “accounting for error”, to data drawn from interviews with actors across the construction project, observation of daily life on site, and an examination of written interactions. Findings show how actors make a discursive division between the “theory” and “reality” of energy use. Expressing scepticism about “theory”, in particular, allows them to rationalise problems with future operational energy consumption and thereby mitigate their professional liability. This division therefore perpetuates, rather than overcomes, the separation between energy in design and operation, displacing a more collaborative discussion of performance expectations. This challenges the assumption that targets for energy in use can be effective without accompanying changes in industry incentives and ways of working. This paper argues for more attention to the patterns of talk that are found in the construction industry, in order to uncover how this crucial set of actors will respond to new energy policy incentives.

The health benefits of physical activity are many and well known. Those hoping to promote public health are therefore understandably keen on encouraging physical exercise. This commentary considers the role of qualitative research in this undertaking, given a context in which medical researchers have more commonly taken a quantitative approach to the motivations that are thought to underpin exercise. Our core argument is that studies concerned with how particular environments are inhabited by particular groups of exercisers could play a more central part in public health promotion. In making this case, and by way of an introduction to this Health and Place special issue, we present a series of statements that we think could usefully guide the further development of this work. Specifically, we argue for further attention to: the ways in which different material settings play into the exercise experience; how many of the exercise practices that we may hope to understand sit rather uneasily with the idea of sport; the subtleties of how sociality features in contemporary exercise practices; the physical pleasures that come from exercise; and how exercise practices are both acquired by individuals and evolve as a whole. In so doing, the aim is to encourage relevant researchers to engage more directly in conversation with health promoters instead of either being indifferent to, or critical of, them.

This paper is concerned with ambient climate control as an increasingly common means of managing the degree to which local weather conditions and seasonal temperature changes are allowed to complicate human activities. Our focus is on summertime shopping and sport spectatorship in the UK as activities that, though often still imaginatively associated with the outdoors, may increasingly take place in comparatively controlled indoor environments. We begin by arguing for an examination of these activities according to the many ways in which those involved might relate to climate control when the experience of air-conditioning has often been studied in terms of thermal comfort. Then we present the findings of two interview projects that developed this argument. The first involved shoppers on the Oxford High Street in view of how retail air-conditioning entails a growing amount of energy use in this country. The second focused on spectators at the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament in view of how one court there now boasts a retractable roof that renders match conditions newly controllable. We find that these respondents connect climate control to ideas of societal progress and effective scheduling more readily than to any desires for greater personal comfort. We end with the implications for those hoping to encourage less energy hungry societies and for researchers interested in how best to study the relationship between climate control and everyday life.

That urban green space can provide opportunities for psychological restoration which could prove valuable in promoting public health now seems relatively well established. What is less clear is whether many of us will continue to avail ourselves of these opportunities. Perhaps the question to pose is less one of whether green space experience can be good for people and more one of how best to tempt them there. This essay draws on a serial interview study with a sample of city professionals who ventured relatively infrequently into the various parks and gardens scattered around their offices. The aim is to stage a broader discussion about ways of researching those who seem happy to go without green space experience and the role of qualitative methods in questioning the most effective means of engaging with them.

Recreational running is increasingly widespread and could therefore be seen as the obvious target for those hoping to encourage greater public health through exercise. Existing qualitative research on this topic has, however, tended to focus on groups of highly committed runners. It is accordingly unclear whether their findings can be extrapolated to the much larger population of comparatively casual runners. This existing work has also tended to emphasise the social nature of the activity in particular ways. Whilst much recreational running happens alone, most commonly these studies have centred on the establishment of shared identities and group subcultures. Drawing on a study involving accompanied runs and interviews with recreational runners who do not belong to running clubs in London, this paper presents an alternative account. These respondents were relatively uninterested in the idea of proper running technique, ambivalent about the presence of others when running, and reticent about being pulled into a more committed collective practice. In view of how these more casual runners may be of particular interest to public health promoters, this finding suggests future campaigns might do well not to focus too greatly on the potential enjoyments of running community membership and start instead with a different set of social dynamics.

Our understanding of how and why young people consume, and thus how easy it might be to encourage more sustainable modes of consumption amongst this group, is currently patchy and somewhat hampered by the preoccupations of those who have concerned themselves with this subject so far. This paper substantiates this claim by presenting two caricatures of how youth consumption has previously been framed. We suggest geographical studies are well placed to establish the degree to which each holds true in specific spatial and material contexts and thereby demonstrate how such studies could usefully contribute to wider scholarship on this topic.

This paper considers the value of using interviews to research routine practices. Interviewing could easily be framed as inappropriate for this task, either because such practices are too difficult for respondents to talk about as a result of having sedimented down into unthinking forms of embodied disposition or because this method is out of step with a current enthusiasm for research styles that do not focus unduly on the representational. The discussion starts with how some key proponents of social practice theory have characterised the possibility of talking with people about these matters before turning to my own experience with two interview projects that attempted to do so inside city offices and older person households. I conclude that people can often talk in quite revealing ways about actions they may usually take as a matter of course and offer suggestions about how to encourage them.

Though many people around the world now spend much of their time surrounded by bodies of controlled ambient air indoors, we still know relatively little about the subjectivities involved. Some have deployed the idea of air-conditioning addiction. Others emphasise the enjoyable sensations associated with temporary escape. The research described in this paper sought to add some empirical depth to these discussions by combining theories of social practice with a programme of serial interviews to examine how a sample of city professionals felt about the long periods they spent inside air-conditioned offices. The rationale was that, through these means, it should be possible to identify ways of disrupting otherwise habitual indoor existences and thereby discourage people from becoming increasingly reliant upon ambient conditions that are environmentally costly to supply. Describing their passage through a typical working day, this paper focuses on the moments when it might have occurred to them to spend time outside and how certain mental and material elements combined to impede the arrival of this decision. This exercise is used to draw out suggestions about how a better relationship between professional office workers and the everyday outdoors could be encouraged. The broader conclusion is that contextual studies which examine how places and practices produce decisions, instead of assuming individual people merely make them, have their part to play in fostering positive social futures.

How might the fact that western people now spend so much of their time indoors impact upon techniques for studying urban greenspace experience? This paper takes this question as its starting point before substantiating one possible answer. It does so by using qualitative methods to examine the everyday practices of city professionals in London and what they tell us about the likelihood that this group will ever venture out into the various parks and gardens found around their offices. Many studies have considered which physical arrangements of city greenspace seem to deliver the greatest amounts of human benefit. Yet this kind of endeavour gives us only one part of the puzzle and contextual studies with those now generally found indoors have something important to add. It is with this in mind that the paper discusses how one sample of office workers quite easily forgot about these spaces, how certain social injunctions both pushed them outside and sealed them indoors, and why it sometimes made good sense for them to avoid any areas of local outdoor vegetation during the day. In so doing it highlights contextual dynamics that seem set to make significant impacts on the future of urban environmental experience and offers some novel suggestions about how best to promote positive greenspace relations in cities today.

There are many factors shaping the relationship between human bodies and their immediate environments and the mechanical control of ambient thermal conditions is playing an increasingly important part. It is with this in mind that this article travels to the tropical island of Singapore where the assumption that the air surrounding people should generally be cooled has quietly become entrenched. Specifically we focus on the young people we find in this country and consider how the presence of air conditioning has become implicated in particular combinations of social practice and sensual expectation amongst this group. The conclusion we draw is that it is only by attending to the contextual interplay of bodies, clothing and immediate climate that we gain the fullest sense of the processes underwriting a much wider retreat into indoor social spaces where these elements could be usefully understood as the material culture of routine human encasement.

Machines that provide people with nearby sources of outdoor warmth have become increasingly popular in the UK as a crop of mushroom-shaped technologies has started to spring up outside many public houses and private homes in this country. Yet this development has also received considerable condemnation from advocates of sustainable consumption, who have seemingly been disgusted by the societal self-indulgence that they see in these devices. Moving away from these more immediate forms of outrage, this paper enriches our understanding of their arrival by considering these heaters in terms of cultural conventions of thermal adaptation and the changing geographies that can be attached to them. Through these means, it is argued that a more nuanced understanding of why these technologies have become prevalent is produced and that an existing disciplinary interest in embodied outdoor experience is taken towards some important new spaces for study.