More From Our Geographers

An area of concentration within the field of geography is urban geography, the study of cities and their genesis, location, form, and evolution over time. Peter Lloyd, a professor of geography at the University of Liverpool, is an urban geographer interested in the cycle of change affecting Liverpool. Some of the forces that led to Liverpool's current circumstances are global: its rise and decline as a major world port parallels that of the British Empire. Another factor is technology: Lloyd's research assesses the capacity of city leaders and dock workers to adapt to change as the containerization of cargo reduces the demand for labor that services maritime trade companies. The consequences of global and local change affect the physical and functional structure of Liverpool as a city and as a port.

Read more of our interview with Dr. Peter Lloyd on the Liverpool economy.

The globalization thing, in terms of the connection to the global economy, some of the things Liverpool does have just become usable. Liverpool now is one of the most important centers in the UK for the video games business. A lot of smart kids here who have nothing much else to do but spend their time sitting in front of computers got clever in video games. People come here to get software for video games. We've got quite a number of small, developing businesses in this area of Merseyside for video games. That's a piece of product that people globally want to buy.

People globally still want to buy the…music scene, people globally are buying Jaguars, they maybe not have been so keen to buy Escorts, but buying baby Jaguars, yes, it's a big market. They're buying Easyjet, they're buying budget airlines. They're not buying the big airlines anymore, they're buying Easyjet, they're buying in large numbers. So a lot of the things that are on offer here, through the things that no one could have predicted at the time, are actually being much more taken up in terms of the global marketplace.

Of course, it may mean across the next year that they're buying something else or they're buying from somewhere else and this is where you've really got to be careful with painting rosy pictures. It may be that if the recession comes, the robustness is not there. And it may be that in five years time, Easyjet will up and move off to somewhere else. The baby Jaguar has been shoved off into Poland, for example. The European fund stock, because Europe's beginning to get the Eastern European states, it's got a real problem with structural funds.

But the main thing is to have built a platform, to have built a root to change people's attitudes, to change the governance system which has become much more positive here than when you were last here. Those root things will see you through the recession and give you a platform to the future. So the context is really important. The scale of things has changed but if you take the money out, if you take the fact that in the United Kingdom of the moment, profits are relatively low because it's now a highly conducted marketplace, wages are relatively higher than profits of the moment. Consumer disposable income is relatively high, everybody's out spending. If you remove that context, and that may be the thing that gets removed globally in the next five years what's left?

At the moment, for the consumer driven local economy and for the consumer driven national economy, things are not too bad in context terms, regardless of the structures that we've now put in. But the structures are much better, the place looks better, it feels better, it smells better, but I have to do you a "but" at the end because I've been doing an upbeat story here -- but, I can take you to places in the city where there are people who are still disconnected, who are still cut off, who are still living on benefit, who are still finding it difficult to get to a doctor's surgery because they do not have a car, or they do have to take two buses, if they have to pay for a taxi, it takes a large amount of their total income, people who are disconnected and cut off, and whole neighborhoods who are disconnected and cut off. Those things are still going on, so let's not get too rosy-hued about this place. It's still gritty; it's a gritty town.