CLAG Enlaces Award for 2002:
Pedro P. Geiger
Rolf Sternberg
The recognition of achievement and excellence by scholarly associations are crowning moments in an individual's career. The Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers bestows the 2002 Enlaces Award on Pedro P. Geiger for his creative services to geography in Brazil, Latin America, and especially, as the title of the award suggests, for forging close ties with his colleagues throughout the hemisphere and beyond.
Pedro is cosmopolitan in outlook, action and, of course, philosophy. His bachelor's degree served as admission to the IBGE (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística) which provided the base and springboard for his career, as well as a haven to afford him the needed safety for his intellectual explorations.
In a long and distinguished career, Pedro has spent 42 years with the IBGE, serving as well, during that time, as secretary of the Geography Commission of the Pan American Institute of Geography and History (1965-73). He also served as secretary of the IGU Working Group on Large Urban Centers (1980-88), and in 1995 he was appointed to chair the Brazilian National Commission to the IGU through 2001. He has also been a stalwart member with very active service in the Asociação dos Geógrafos Brasileiros. It is rumored that Pedro's prowess at chess allows him to be the ever-urbane, diplomatic and thoughtful but artful delegate in so many national and international contexts.
In 1969 he was invited as a Tinker Professor to Columbia University, New York, and he has been visiting professor at the universities of Toronto, Ottawa, Paris, Texas, and Sao Paulo. Currently he is a researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. One may also note the early recognition of his contribution to the discipline when the Societé de Géographie de Paris made him an honorary member in 1963.
Pedro is a muti-faceted individualist. There is the regional analyst, then data-dependent urbanist, the conceptual geopolitical philosopher, the environmentally-concerned advocate, the development-oriented regionalist, and not least, the commentator on industrial processes. Such a remarkable range of talents inevitably pulled Pedro from the academic world of teaching and research into the orbit of government administration. Pedro has served, at various times, an advisor to the State government of Rio de Janeiro, the Governor of Rio, the State Planning Agency, and the Urban Institute of Rio's municipal Council.
Of his academic publications one needs only to mention, of the many hundreds of articles, chapters and books, his volumes on the critical issues of urban change [End Page 126] (Evolução da rede urbana brasileira), development (The Dimensions ofBrazilian Development), the environment (Geography and the Environment in Brasil), and spatial transformations (AsFormas do Espaço Brasileiro). Pedro has been a leading critical observer of Brazil's path towards modernization with all of its pitfalls, political problems, social injustice, and spatial disparities. Always the one connected to the external world of international geography, Pedro has served his country exceedingly well. For us, he is the gentleman from Brazil who frequents the rooms of the AAG convention sites, asking arrestingly good questions. He is also the most faithful supporter of CLAG from outside the USA. For that we thank and honor Pedro— for his longstanding friendship and his enviable dynamism in keeping us in contact with the wider Latin American world.
