27 September 2012 Professor once, twice, thrice!

Geographer and professor Dr Harvey Perkins has swapped professorial hats and institutions after a 23-year academic career at Lincoln University, and he has also gained an additional hat.

At Lincoln University Dr Perkins has been Professor of Human Geography, but he has now resigned from that position and been appointed Professor of Planning at the University of Auckland within its National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries. At the same time he has been made an Adjunct Professor of Lincoln University, preserving academic connections with his former institution.

Professor Perkins’ post at the national institute is Director of the Thematic Research Initiative Transforming Cities: Innovations for Sustainable Futures, a cross-disciplinary urban studies enterprise focussed on transformative research about cities and the way they function.

In the Faculty of Environment, Society and Design at Lincoln University, Professor Perkins has been a member of a small band of geographers who have made a big contribution from their discipline to the University’s teaching and research in social science. Professor Perkins’ specialist area is human geography, but much of his work has drawn on theory from the borderlands of this field and sociology and he has applied this to socio-spatial phenomena of interest to geographers, sociologists and planners.

A key research theme throughout his career has been urban, peri-urban and rural social, economic and environmental change under neo-liberal and late-modern conditions.

Most recently he has led, or been a member of, research teams that have studied aspects of sustainability and urban change; the meaning and use of house and home; outdoor recreation and tourism; economic restructuring, emerging consumption patterns and rural change.

He was a founding member of the joint Canterbury University/Lincoln University Research Programme on Human Settlement, and is a member of the Steering Committee of the Asia Pacific Network for Housing Research. Until recently he was a board member of the Centre for Housing Research Aotearoa New Zealand.

“One of the aims of social science is to help us understand who we are,” says Professor Perkins, “and the house is a key element in the New Zealand identity. If you want to understand the shifting nature of New Zealand’s cultures, you have to understand New Zealanders’ distinctive relationships with their houses.”

What drives the attachment New Zealanders have to their houses, and what changing attitudes will mean for the future of New Zealand’s houses and communities, have been important questions in Professor Perkins’ research. The significance of his work was acknowledged with a major grant from the Foundation for Research Science and Technology which provided for the first in-depth look at New Zealand attitudes around these issues, a grant he shared with Professor David Thorns of Canterbury University.

The meaning of ‘house’ and ‘home’ in New Zealand was research work that absorbed Professor Perkins and colleagues for the best part of 20 years and it generated numerous publications relating to public policy, the building trade, the real estate industry and the media. It led, this year, to the publication of a jointly authored book with David Thorns entitled Place, Identity and Everyday Life in a Globalizing World.

Over this and other research topics Professor Perkins’ list of publications totals more than 100 and in his campus farewell speech he acknowledged the many co-authors with whom he had worked.

Only a handful of publications were in his name alone, he said. The bulk had been written with other people, and he enjoyed working that way. Lincoln University’s scale encourages a very collegial research environment.

That collegiality is well seen in a number of Professor Perkins’ books. Time Out? Leisure, Recreation and Tourism in New Zealand and Australia”, published in 1998, was co-edited with Professor of Leisure Studies Dr Grant Cushman and it contains contributions from Lincoln University colleagues in the fields of philosophy, psychology, economics, Māori studies, landscape architecture and health promotion.

That book was the second collaboration between Professor Perkins and Professor Cushman. In 1993 they produced Leisure, Recreation and Tourism.

Another notable collaboration was with Lincoln University’s Professor of Environmental Management and Planning, Dr Ali Memon. Together they produced two of the seminal books on urban and regional planning in New Zealand – Environmental Planning in New Zealand (1993) and Environmental Planning and Management in New Zealand (2000).

Dr Perkins began his service at Lincoln University in 1988 as a Lecturer. Earlier in the 1980s he had completed a PhD in Human Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, after which he took up a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Geography, St David’s University College, University of Wales.

Originally from Dunedin, where he completed an MA in Human Geography at Otago University, Professor Perkins started his working life as a high school teacher but says he “very quickly gave that up” and became a member of the Department of Internal Affairs’ community development team in Otago and Southland. From there he proceeded to PhD studies in the USA. On his return to New Zealand and after a brief period as a researcher and then manager in the Head Office of the Department of Internal Affairs he took up employment at Lincoln University.

Alongside his academic duties at Lincoln University, Professor Perkins was active in Tertiary Education Union affairs on campus and served as a branch committee member, a vice-president and acting president.