A Country Called Europe?

We often think of European countries as discrete entities—their own languages, cultures, food, and economies squarely contained within their national boundaries. But in fact Europe is at once a unified place and a sophisticatedly fragmented one, and national boundaries rarely reflect its social and economic realities. Dimitris Ballas, together with his fellow European geographers Danny Dorling (University of Oxford) and Benjamin Hennig (University of Iceland) created The Human Atlas of Europe, the first atlas to map Europe according to these realities, from the perspective of human geography rather than simply a political one. 

It reconsiders European identity through its many different facets: economy, culture, history, and human and physical geography, visualizing Europe and its people in a more fluid way. With his research Dimitris offers fresh perspectives on a range of topics, including social values, culture, education, employment, environmental footprints, health and well-being, and social inequalities and cohesion, as well as current issues such as Brexit. What does Brexit actually mean for the UK and what are the wider implications for Europe? Was the UK ‘leave’ vote actually symptomatic of broader issues within Europe such as population mobility and the rise of non-traditional parties?

Dimitris Ballas holds a Chair in Economic Geography at the University of Groningen. He has also previously worked as Associate Professor at the University of the Aegean, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield and has also held Visiting Research Scholar positions at the University of Cambridge, Harvard University, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Austria) and a Visiting Professor position at Ritsumeikan University (Japan). Prof. Ballas has published widely in the fields of social and economic geography, social and spatial inequalities, regional science and Geoinformatics in the Social Sciences. His most recent work includes the books The Social Atlas of Europe and The Human Atlas of Europe: A Continent United in Diversity, co-authored with Danny Dorling and Benjamin Hennig (Policy Press, 2017) and GIS and the Social Sciences: Theory and Applications (Routledge, 2017) co-authored with Graham Clarke, Rachel S. Franklin and Andy Newing.