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Decades of decline, disinvestment, and racism have left Detroit with an abundance of abandoned buildings, ruins, vacant lots, and illicit trash dumps. Though these structures and materials might have forfeited their previous purposes, they can act as catalysts, substances, and co-creators of artworks. The paper is thus interested in examining the intricate interplay between art, space, and materiality in Detroit further. Drawing from the practices of local artists Olayami Dabls and Scott Hocking, the paper adopts a new materialist framework to investigate the dynamic agency of matter in the artistic process. By considering materials as active participants in the production of art and space, the paper seeks to add to the emerging interest in the emancipation and meaning making of material in art as well as cultural geography's engagements with new materialism.

Renewable energy infrastructures, such as wind and solar farms, require land on which they can be deployed. While politics and conflicts over accessing land for renewables are well documented, the role, conditions and potential agency of landownership have been often overlooked or oversimplified as a powerful terrain in the field of renewables development. In this paper, we explore the relationship between landed property and community renewable energy projects. In particular, we focus on how landed property variously influences the development modes of renewables by acting as a mediator, barrier and enabler for different types of wind energy projects. We show how this takes place through appropriation of rents in processes of assetisation and value grabbing by landowners. In this way, value grabbing acts as a vital intermediary process to understand green grabbing and wider processes of capital accumulation through renewables. We draw on insights from the Netherlands and Scotland to illuminate different mechanisms, social and historical conditions, and policies through which landed property constrains or enables community wind energy projects. The paper finishes by sketching out some alternative ways of allocating land for the deployment of renewable energy projects, which could help shift the balance of power in favour of community energy developments.

„German Theory“ is a theory that has not yet been written, but could have been. „Theory“ is here understood as a “territory of thought” that transcends the boundaries of its origins, and travels to other sites. „French Theory“, for example, is the label for the travel of French poststructuralism to Anglophone humanities. In this sense, „German Theory“ does not exist (yet), but as this paper will argue, it exists as a potentiality that has not (yet) actualized. To show this potential, this paper turns to the work of Friedrich A. Kittler. To illustrate why Kittler did not become a cornerstone of „German Theory“, and to discuss how it could have been, this paper proceeds in two steps: first, it traces the recent history of the reception of Foucault in German language geography and the humanities. This analysis shows that Kittler and German language geography morphed Foucault's discourse theory into two distinct thought styles – the „discourse school“ in German language geography into a „textual“ one; Kittler into a „materialist“ one. This incompatibility of thought styles, this paper asserts, obstructed the travel of Kittler to Anglophone geography, although Kittler's notion of „materiality of communication“ resonates with the „material turn“ in Anglophone geography. Nor did the Foucault of the „discourse school“ travel to Anglophone geography. Kittler's „German Foucault“ travelled to Anglophone media studies as „German School“, though. In the last part of the paper, I ask the question how Kittler's „German Foucault“ could have travelled to (anglophone) geography and what could have been gained theoretically through this travel.

Urban political ecology (UPE) has recently turned its attention to the embodied dimension of human–nature relations. In particular, within urban hydrological systems across the globe, the need to consider the emotional and bodily ways in which we connect to the ecologies of the city has been acknowledged. This paper joins such efforts and explores the flood experiences of a diverse group of Bangkokians during the 2011 inundation by drawing on three interconnected concepts: materiality, affect and emotion. Together they help us explore the intense experiences of Bangkokians during the flood and serve as theoretical tools to unpack the uncanny encounters between Bangkokians and the materiality of the flood. Thus, the paper attends to the socio-material forces that shaped the flooding event and contributes nuanced insights about the embodied experiences of floods within the delta city.

This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of integrating science and technology studies (STS), especially the variant based on actor–network theory (ANT), into fields of human geography with a critical research tradition. Drawing on the experiences of political ecology and empirical research on carbon markets, it uses the example of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) to show how the turn towards such STS impacts has changed the “framing” of REDD+: from analysing REDD+ as an example of the “neoliberalization of nature” and a focus on the impacts on human forest users to detailed accounts of infrastructures and practices of making markets. Discussing the consequences of these observations and different proposals brought forward to combine ANT with political ecology, the paper argues for a conscious and reflective use of ANT-inspired STS approaches to benefit from the additional insights this approach allows while keeping the critical potential of geography alive.

The governing of urban drug use and its economies represents a central aspect of urban governmentality and has played an important role in the production and control of public space in numerous cities of the Global North since the 1970s. Urban drug cultures are often the subject of moral panics and urban policing. At the same time, geographical engagement with the spatial dimensions and effects of governing urban drug cultures is surprisingly rare. Using the example of Görlitzer Park in Berlin's Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district, this paper examines the spatializing discourses and practices of urban drug policies and shows how looking at the governing of illicit drugs provides a productive lens for analysing forms of urban exclusion, marginalization, and normalization. From a geographical perspective, it is particularly interesting to examine how this form of urban governance mobilizes spatial approaches and representations of space, i.e., how urban drug cultures are spatialized in multiple ways.

Ever since the operation of the first civilian Earth observation (EO) satellites gained momentum in the 1970s, potential benefits and disadvantages of transferring space science and technologies, such as remote sensing techniques, have also been discussed in relation to developing countries. However, this debate has so far largely taken place at a macro-comparative level. This paper presents results from moving to the ethnographic micro level in southwest Nigeria. It sets the experiences of researchers from the Global South, who use remote sensing data, in relation to a critical review of (post-)development theory perspectives and corresponding discourses in postcolonial science and technology studies (STS). The paper discusses how researchers construct collective agency towards capacity building as a shared liberatory language in relation to an amalgam of experienced and contested places in the EO community. At the intersection of STS, geography and the arena of development policies, these experiences create their own spatial references to a developing niche that invites scholars and development practitioners to rethink and reorganise knowledge production and technologies in a postcolonial world.

The debate on the political role of Ratzel's thinking during the first half of the 20th century usually focuses on Nazi Germany and the concept of Lebensraum, but provides little information about its reception in other linguistic contexts. In order to fill this gap, the paper explores the re-elaboration of Ratzel's political geography in Italy from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the fascist period, when the term of “spazio vitale” (living space) became a key element of the Italian projects for the postwar “new order”. The paper argues that the Italian understanding of Ratzel oscillated between irredentist and imperialist interpretations, deeply influenced by the domestic and international situation. Moreover, it traces how the second interpretation emerged at the very beginning of the century – long before Rudolf Kjellén and Karl Haushofer – and gained momentum in the 1930s, as Italian intellectuals used the concept of living space to promote expansionism and the trilateral rapprochement with Germany and Japan.

While a broad debate on carceral geographies has been part of human geography and related disciplines in English-speaking academia, there are only scarce publications among German-speaking geographers. This special issue aims at bringing different researchers (Tobias Breuckmann, Julia Emprechtinger, Sarah Klosterkamp, Nadine Marquardt, Marco Nocente, Marina Richter and Anna Schliehe) and their rich and diverse research insights in the carceral field into a dialogue. What started with a session at the 2019 conference of German-speaking geography (Deutscher Kongress für Geographie), developed into a special issue that encompasses papers based on the contributions to the session as well as additional papers that round up the insights into current research in carceral geographies in German-speaking countries. The papers show the importance of applying a carceral geography perspective to research in German-speaking geography to focus on different institutions, places and spaces that share common carceral characteristics. In addition, the focus on German-speaking researchers also adds to the international debate on carceral geographies with specific insights from the national contexts.

In the form of an explorative empirical study, this paper deals with the reasons for the survival and demise of isolated Swiss ski lifts. For the first time, all isolated lifts documented in Switzerland have been recorded and coded according to a total of six conditions. Using a set-theoretical research method in the form of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), the study aims to identify the necessary conditions and configurations of sufficient conditions explaining (non-)survival. It transpires that closed isolated lifts tend to be outdated and have no technical snowmaking facilities. Moreover, it has become evident that the simultaneous occurrence of the lack of lift facility replacement, lack of technical snowmaking and high ski area competition has caused the closure of most isolated lifts. Low natural snow depth and low elevation difference, conversely, have not had a measurable impact. The causes for the survival of isolated lifts, by contrast, are extremely heterogeneous.

Sustainable development is of equal concern to Geography as an academic discipline and Geography Education. Given Geography's explicit conceptual and thematic affinity to sustainable development, various professional organizations developed normative documents proclaiming Geography to the main carrier subject of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The aim of this paper is to explore what effects the special proximity of school Geography to the promotion of ESD has on the design of geographical specialist knowledge. Lower secondary Geography curricula (1992–2022) of the federal state of Berlin served as sample for content analysis. Viewed in light of work from the History of Education, Sociology of Education, and Subject Education, the results show a progressive loss of disciplinary identity accompanied by a concurrent shift in focus from factual judgments to value judgments.

Based on a review of existing research on adaptive capacity, we identify a research gap in theorizing institutions, power structures, and agency in municipal climate change adaptation processes. Drawing on sociological institutionalism, governmentality, and communicative planning theory, we use post-structuralist concepts of power to to elucidate the collective (de-)mobilization of existing stocks of capacities within municipal institutions of adaptation with a focus on structural power and agency in participation processes. The concept of reflexive capacity is introduced as the ability of organizations such as municipal administrations to incorporate diverse stakeholders and knowledge into decision-making processes in a local context, which is derived from the relationship of power with with power over. The emergence and transformation of reflexive capacity are illustrated and discussed with one case study municipality in Germany, revealing the potential of this concept for the analysis of participation in adaptation processes and the power structures that are inherent to them. In the paper, we incorporate the concept of reflexive capacity with established concepts of adaptive capacity, creating an integrated framework termed institutional adaptive capacity. The analysis concludes that examining power structures and agency in the context of climate change adaptation explains how capacity stocks and individual psychosocial capacity mobilization are institutionally embedded and influenced by reflexive capacity. We argue that the consideration of power structures and agency can provide a complementary approach to explaining adaptive capacity and call for further transdisciplinary empirical research on this topic in different settings of state-initiated adaptation processes.

Around the world, smart grids are emerging as a universal tool to address a wide range of social and technical problems facing energy systems. Despite considerable research on these systems, the ways they differ in the local (re)production of power relations have so far been little discussed. This paper fills this gap by developing a “situated governmentality approach” in conversation with the critique of Foucauldian governmentality studies. By applying this approach to smart grid strategies in Germany (Smart Energy Showcases – Digital Agenda for the Energiewende, SINTEG) and India (National Smart Grid Mission, NSGM), we identify different ways in which power is mediated through situated governmentalities. While SINTEG employs technologies of power that promote a disciplinary regime, the exercise of power in the case of the NSGM displays many elements of a digitally enhanced sovereign approach. The findings reveal the range of governmental programmes that can be realized through smart grids and open up a perspective on the situated functioning of smart grids in energy transitions.

Energy justice is a rapidly developing area of research and policy advocacy. Recently, some critiques have been formulated, particularly from postcolonial, political ecology, and more-than-human perspectives, such as the concept's rootedness in Western thought and its too narrow anthropocentric focus. This paper presents an integrative model of various energy justices including perceptions that allow for a more nuanced and expanded understanding, drawing on recent concepts of environmental and energy justice. This analytic perspective integrates understandings of justice as a subjective belief, including increased consideration of the role of emotion in evaluating justice. According to this understanding, there is no “one” energy justice. Instead, there are multiple, sometimes contradictory, and fluid perceptions of justice.

Against the backdrop of ongoing planetary crises, this paper discusses the ambivalent relationship between large-scale material infrastructure, particularly energy technologies, and environmental justice. Inspired by relational and practice-oriented understandings of infrastructure, it develops a conceptual approach for energy-related environmental justice research, which is exemplarily applied to the emerging issue of green hydrogen, drawing on brief insights from the hydrogen frontrunner countries Colombia and Canada and associated struggles over Indigenous sovereignty. This “infrastructural lens”, based on three epistemological shifts – from infrastructure to “infrastructuring”, from social imaginaries to “sociotechnical imaginaries” and from human infrastructuring to “planetary infrastructuring” – provides deeper insights into how patterns of justice and injustice are practically infrastructured and what kinds of imaginaries they evoke or are entangled with. Moreover, it makes tangible how practices of infrastructuring can themselves become part of a broader political ontology, that is, of struggles over ways of being and ways of relating to planet Earth.

This paper examines whether and to what extent the application of the method of hermeneutic photography can contribute to reducing epistemic relations of violence and thus to decolonizing empirical social research. To this end, an empirical study by the author is subjected to a re-reading and methodological reflection from postcolonial perspectives. On the basis of this, it will then be worked out which potentials and limits the work with the method of hermeneutic photography offers for research projects that are carried out in countries of the so-called Global South.

Deportation is often studied in the context of research into the administration, enforcement, and control of immigration, with researchers highlighting the violent effect on deportees and studying the various actors involved in the deportation process. This contribution adds to the growing literature on deportation infrastructures by emphasizing the inseparability of deportation procedures from the specific sites in which they unfold, as well as highlighting the analytical interest and political agency of such spaces. My socio-material approach applies a rather classical understanding of infrastructure, asking what three specific deportation sites – prisons, hospitals, and airports – can tell us about deportation procedures as a technology of immigration enforcement. Using Switzerland as a case study, this paper analyses deportation procedures, including the role of human and non-human actors, paying particular attention to the situatedness and relationality of deportation infrastructures. The socio-material analysis of the architecture of the three sites under discussion ultimately exposes deportation as violent statecraft.

Research on agricultural development models shows that local applications of global models are adapted both to the globalisation of agricultural markets and to climate change. The circulation of such models is also linked to local political and historical contexts. However, few studies have focused on abrupt changes in economic policies, such as those following the Arab Spring. We propose to study the evolution of olive-growing development policies in post-revolutionary Tunisia. In order to mitigate both market- and climate-induced vulnerabilities and to make the sector more competitive with major olive producers, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) guidelines recommend intensification of Tunisian olive farming through irrigation. Our research makes two main claims: (1) the change in the production model towards irrigation aims to respond to globalisation, climate change and national policies. (2) Some exporters are involved at several levels of the value chain. This research conducted by geographers and economists analyses the mutations of the olive sector towards irrigation, using a double theoretical framework on the circulation of agricultural development models, with a political-ecology approach. This paper contributes to a growing body of research on the relationship between commodity production networks and water studies.

In early summer 1980, radical geography students rallied around the slogan „Geografe nüme schlafe!“ („Geographers, stop sleeping!“) to take part in the radical youth movement that shook the city of Zurich at that time. In turn, these activist students brought these struggles back into the university and the geography department, where they confronted the professorate with their demands for a new curriculum. This paper argues that the antagonistic Stimmung, in which these struggles took place, produced a radical „thought style“ that flourished in a specific constellation of „thought events“: a prominent theory seminar in 1980, the AK WissKri, a network of radical geography students, the „Geoscope“ journal and, finally, a number of diploma theses on feminist, urban and historical geography. In these thought events, a radical geography materialized outside and beyond the mainstream of German language geography. Building on archival material and narrative interviews, this paper documents these student initiatives for a radical geography, and illustrates the precarious conditions of possibility of radical geography, in Zurich, and beyond.

This paper develops three analytical categories – range, supporting capacity, exigency/notability – to capture how supra-individual phenomena affect the people studied by empirical research. Researchers face a tension between constructivist and realist perspectives as the examined phenomena are simultaneously social constructs, in the way people perceive and understand them, and social facts in their consequences. Taking a critical perspective on the notion of large social phenomena – popularized by Theodore Schatzki – the paper develops an explorative terminology that aims to facilitate practice-oriented field research. Examples of empirical research on transition and degrowth initiatives illustrate how research subjects estimate the range of a phenomenon by trying to grasp whether they are in or out of its reach; the supportive capacity of a phenomenon by exploring how far it carries certain processes; and they experience the exigency of a phenomenon and ascribe a certain notability to it. Taken together, this terminology grasps the way phenomena are matters of concern, rather than matters of fact, for the research subjects.

Time shapes every single human–environment relationship and is inherent in 21st-century global challenges such as climate change and the urgent move towards global sustainability. Nonetheless, the concept of time is still insufficiently addressed in climate justice debates. This paper aims to help fill this gap by presenting empirical results about experiences of climate change in farming communities in Tamil Nadu, South India, and fishing communities on the Lofoten Islands, Norway. With the help of the five dimensions of affectedness, rhythms and rituals, slow motion, care, and health and well-being, it exemplifies how time matters to issues of climate injustices faced by the communities. The paper promotes a qualitative understanding of time and climate change. Thereby, it may stimulate greater relatability to climate change, as well as discussion likely to lead to conceptual advances.

Thirty years after the Cold War, many aspects of the West's self-identification are still shaped by othering ‚the East‘. This geographical identity-building in Western media discourses is indicated by terms like geopolitics and the (New/Second) Cold War. The paper scrutinizes ‚grand‘ narratives behind the appearances of such concepts and observes their continuities, dislocations, and disruptions. Taking a critical geopolitical perspective informed by discourse theory and based on Foucault's conceptualization of the archive, the paper introduces aspects of the transformation of geopolitical imaginations of the East and the West: (1) it reconstructs phases of the rebirth of geopolitics after WW2 until today. (2) It focuses on the changes in the East-West relations after 1990 and shows how the imagination of the ‚cold war‘ disappears from media discourse. (3) Finally, it analyses the revival through rising geopolitical risk-narratives since the crises and wars in Georgia and Ukraine.

Research on perceptions of climate change impacts contributes to understanding motivations for adaptation action and increases the legitimacy of climate adaptation research and policy. The body of literature on climate change perception (CCP) is extensive. Given that the perception of climate change is commonly presented as being dependent on an individual's sociocultural and spatial contexts and that climate change is an abstract concept with different dimensions of meaning, this paper systematizes the research in an actor-centered manner. Using a systematic literature review, the abstracts from 821 interdisciplinary studies on CCP were coded and statistically analyzed. The results show that predominantly knowledge about the CCP of vulnerable groups of actors and regions was generated using quantitative methods. Impacts at the collective and institutional levels of CCP were rarely explored. This indicates an individualizing perspective of research on climate adaptation of vulnerable actors. Conclusions for future research are drawn.

Defining experiences of climate change loss and damage (L&D) is the topic of contentious debate across the social sciences and humanities. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by making loss(es) from climate change better legible. After detailing the complexity of the L&D debate from both a political and scientific perspective, we turn to phenomenological theory (Martin Heidegger, Tetsuro Watsuji, Bernhard Waldenfels) in order to make sense of climate's presence and the absences generated from changing climates. The phenomenology of loss we develop promises to help account for experiences of climate change that escape more traditional (social) scientific approaches to both economic and non-economic losses. More broadly, we present an alternative approach to applying phenomenology to research in social science (on climate change).

The article introduces collaborative comic creation (CCC) as a methodological tool. The central question it addresses is how marginalised imaginations of futures can be made visible in the context of the planned Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia-Transport (LAPSSET) in Kenya. The question assumes that infrastructure projects such as the LAPSSET corridor inscribe not only particular ways of moving into a landscape but also one specific temporality that marginalises other future-making practices. The paper participates in the ongoing debate about how imagined futures and future-making practices can be appreciated and analysed methodologically. It thus contributes to the literature on geographies of the future by drawing together conceptual insights from anthropology, infrastructure studies, and critical cartography. Based on these different approaches, the paper proposes to regard future-making practices not only in relation to contentious timelines but also in terms of lines made by moving and drawing on landscapes and surfaces. Using a review of existing social foresight methods as a basis, we describe the practical implementation of CCC. Subsequently, the analysis of one collaboratively produced comic illustrates how the method can help to visualise ambivalent and uncertain imaginations of different futures that oppose the unitary vision of modernity produced by dominant infrastructural visions of a single future. We conclude by reflecting on possible ways of developing the method further.

The measures implemented to adapt to climate change are primarily designed to address the tangible, biophysical impacts of climate change in a given geographic area. They rarely consider the wider social implications of climate change, nor the politics of adaptation planning and its outcomes. Given the necessity of significant investment in adaptation over years to come, adaptation planning and implementation will need to place greater concern on justice-sensitive approaches to avoid exacerbating existing vulnerabilities and creating maladaptive and conflicting outcomes. Building on recent calls for more just and transformative adaptation planning, this paper offers a flexible analytical framework for integrating theories of justice and transformation into research on climate change adaptation. We discuss adaptation planning as an inherently normative and political process linked to issues pertaining to recognition justice as well as distributional and procedural aspects of justice. The paper aims to contribute to the growing discussion on just adaptation by intersecting theoretical justice dimensions with spatial, temporal and socio-political challenges and choices that arise as part of adaptation planning processes. A focus on justice-sensitive adaptation planning not only provides opportunities for examining spatial as well as temporal justice issues in relation to planning and decision-making processes. It also paves the way for a more critical approach to adaptation planning that acknowledges the need for institutional restructuring and offers steps towards alternative futures under climate change conditions.

Equality, a concept so central to democratic societies, is being scrutinized in a critical manner in this paper. It argues that the spatial borders of territorial states are also the limits of the validity of the principle of abstract equality, of its ideological productivity as well as its emancipatory potential. The paper discusses the Marxist critique of the limitations of the merely abstract, formal understanding of equality that is inscribed into the structures of democratic states, and the ways in which both the Marxist tradition and current theories of radical democracy find an emancipatory potential in the demand for abstract equality that makes possible going beyond its very abstractions. The focus of these discussions is on how spatiality is integrated into theories of radical democracy on the level of theory. The paper suggests that combining the insights on the productivity of spatial forms from discussions in human geography with the critique of merely abstract equality is a decidedly geographical contribution to the development of theories of the political.

Agriculture depends in large part on relations with weather phenomena, such as rain and temperature. Anticipatory knowledge about the atmosphere therefore is vital in agricultural livelihoods. Based on an ethnographic case study of weather forecasting for small-scale farming in western Kenya, in this paper I discuss different ways in which knowledge about the future weather is produced. While development organizations promote expert forecasts that draw on meteorological sensing technologies as a solution to dealing with climate change, I show how knowing the weather is an entangled affair in a sensory assemblage that simultaneously draws on scientific instruments and on other entities such as animals, plants, clouds and embodied sensoria associated with experiential knowledge. Building on concepts related to science and technology studies that address the relations between humans and nonhumans, I suggest to treat scientific and experiential devices symmetrically by looking at their more-than-human sensoria, proxies and imaginations to understand how farmers attune to the weather. In practice, then, navigating the uncertainties of the weather is not enabled by scientific meteorology alone, but by combining different sensory devices and practices of interpretation that together mediate the weather as something to be known and acted upon.

This paper examines the contribution of Italian academic geography to the processes of nation-building between ca. 1880–1920. With reference to Friedrich Ratzel's works, it explores the ways in which biological and vitalist theories shaped political processes. In the decades between Italy's national unification until the first post-war period, Italian academic geographers helped to consolidate the nation-state by means of theoretical reflection, applied research, and education. The main focus of geographers was in defining the national space and its boundaries, especially by developing a scientific analysis that could establish the exact position of the terrestrial border along the Alpine chain. The scientific topic was strongly connected with the nationalist question of irredenta, which garnered growing consideration in the last 2 decades of the 19th century. The epistemological turn in Italian geography was particularly influenced by new approaches in German geography introduced by scholars such as Oscar Peschel and Friedrich Ratzel and aimed to formulate a general understanding of biogeography in its relationship with the earth's physical space. The reception of this theoretical model in the political debate and the way it was applied in the following decades proved highly significant.

This article examines the constitution of affective atmospheres that arise through the encounter of scientific and theatre practices. Using an autoethnographic approach, the presented work focuses on a collaborative theatre project on the climate crisis. Here, the author performed in the role of a scientific expert next to colleagues that have a climate change-related research background. Three aspects of affective atmospheres emerging in the rehearsal process are analysed: one's position in the interplay of powerful materialities, the relationality of sensual bodies, and the (in)stability of scientific identities. This paper shows that the artistic collaboration opens up space for reflecting on science that seek to overcome ostensible dualisms of subject/object, mind/body, and reason/emotion. It emphasizes the opportunity of art to bring into account body, more-than-humanity and relationality as part of scientific practices in times of anthropocentric debates facing climate change.

This paper discusses the need for a deeper critical interrogation of participatory mapping (PM) method as a tool for social justice. This stance is informed by the author's involvement in a NGO and community-led PM project in an informal settlement in Khayelitsha (Cape Town, South Africa). The paper argues that academic PM literature is ill-equipped to truly examine its potential for social justice. Firstly, this is due to the PM empowerment framework having shifted from an emancipatory aim to a governing tool. Secondly, this shift does not allow for the consideration of the power relations inherent to PM to be engaged with. This paper concludes by engaging the three epistemological and postcolonial roots of PM in order to provide a starting point for (re)centering PM on social justice.

Automobility still dominates transport and space in most European cities. However, more and more initiatives are being taken to encourage a transition towards low-carbon mobility. One of these is car-free housing, where residents commit to living without a private car. This paper addresses their profiles and motivations based on a questionnaire survey (N=571) and interviews (N=50) in nine housing developments in Germany and Switzerland. Residents are characterised by an overrepresentation of families and people with a high level of education, two population groups that are usually more motorised than average. Their motivations and long-term commitment to living car-free can be explained by not only practical reasons (e.g. availability of alternative modes) but also ecological awareness and social values (as shown by the importance of cooperative housing). This paper sheds light on these urban laboratories where the principles of a post-car system are implemented.

This paper serves as an introduction to the “Contested urban territories: decolonized perspectives” special issue. The idea for this issue emerged during our reflections on a socioterritorial perspective, preeminent in the current Latin American analysis of contemporary urban struggles (Schwarz and Streule, 2016). It aims to contribute to these ongoing debates about a specific understanding of urban territories from a postcolonial and decolonized perspective by combining contributions from two paper sessions we organized at the 2017 meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Boston with additional papers by scholars who could not participate in the conference. All seven contributions tackle the question of what a relational and dynamic conceptualization of territory may contribute to current debates in the urban studies field. Put more precisely, to which extent are socioterritorial approaches of value for a further decentering and pluralizing of urban theory? What is their significance to research on urban social movements? And, finally, how does such a socioterritorial perspective nurture and complement an analysis of the social production of space? The present special issue invites the reader to get familiar with new concepts and engage in a critical reflection on the conditions of knowledge production in urban geography and beyond.

The American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple (1863–1932), famous for her work on environmental influence, is often framed as a mere disciple of the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904). Drawing on a reading of Semple's published and unpublished works as well as correspondence and diaries, this paper sheds new light on the two anthropogeographers' intellectual relationship, which was in fact one with benefits to both sides. Semple found in Ratzel's geography a detached and scientific language with which to reinterpret American history. He drew on her as an informant on issues of racial segregation in the United States. Although Semple remained loyal to his broader intellectual project after his death, she had begun, soon after they met, to develop her own brand of anthropogeography, freed from the ambivalences of his work. Her sharpened reformulation, which he had endorsed, would ultimately make anthropogeography an easier target for its critics.

Emotions affect how humans relate to others and define their place in the world. They thus shape responses to socio-ecological problems like climate change. In spite of the overwhelming knowledge and concern about climate change, a lack of appropriate moral and political consequences prevails in most contemporary societies. Instead of trying to explain climate inaction as a result of (un)awareness, this paper introduces a new perspective by conceptualising climate inaction as an active social process animated by emotions. Drawing on an interdisciplinary and radically relational perspective, I grasp climate inaction as a product of more-than-human intra-action and explore the affective role of emotions within this production. To illustrate how emotions energise climate inaction, I sketch how fear, grief, and hope animate current climate responses.

With their donation appeals aid organisations procure a polarised worldview of the self and other into our everyday lives and feed on discourses of “development” and “neediness”. This study investigates how the discourse of “development” is embedded in the subjectivities of “development” professionals. By approaching the topic from a governmentality perspective, the paper illustrates how “development” is (re-)produced through internalised Western values and powerful mechanisms of self-conduct. Meanwhile, this form of self-conduct, which is related to a “good cause”, also gives rise to doubts regarding the work, as well as fragmentations and shifts of identity. On the one hand, the paper outlines various coping strategies used by development professionals to maintain a coherent narrative about the self. On the other hand, it also shows how doubts and fragmentations of identity can generate a critical distance to “development” practice, providing a space for resistant and transformative practice in the sense of Foucauldian counter-conduct.

In this paper we analyze the territorial organizing of two dissimilar social movements across Greater Buenos Aires, showing how urban struggles produce territory as a key element of their political practice. Through their relational, contested character, these Latin American territories foreground an alternative to state-centric, Anglo-American models of territorial politics. First, the unemployed workers' movements in the urban periphery show how the territorial organization of production and reproduction creates new social relations, and second, an assembly-organized market emphasizes the relationality of territory in constructing solidarity economies. This paper contributes to debates on urban social movements by showing that these movements use practices of territorial organizing to produce urban territory in distinct ways, and that territorial organizing is relational, contested, and central to movements' praxis.

In this article, I will utilize the elusive and fluid identity and texture of water to complicate an essentialist view of modern water that finds new relevance in claims to close the financing gap to provide safely managed water for all by the year 2030. To close this gap, models of blended finance are pursued that rely on transparent and auditable performance data of digital systems. Tracing the implementation of pay-as-you-go (PAYGo) water dispensers in off-grid areas in the Global South, I will demonstrate that the supposedly transparent and objective data generated from remote monitoring systems form part of the enactment of only one water reality amidst the multiple enactments of waters in relation to their sociotechnical environments, non-human encounters, and human bodies. Drawing on ethnographic material from two different settings in Kenya – the so-called informal Nairobi settlement of Mathare and a village called Kondo – I will show that, on the one hand, waters' multiplicity proliferates and, on the other hand, multiple waters and alternative water realities are deliberately undone. The paper closes with a call for the attentiveness to multiple waters.

A central diagnosis driving research around social relations of nature is the thesis of the “end of nature”. In an era marked by climate change and global warming, the image of nature as a pristine and stable foundation of human existence seems outdated. In light of this, recent scholarship demonstrates how environmental changes and conflicts increasingly affect people's daily lives and present significant threats to psychic well-being. In contrast, in this paper we investigate the conditions under which nature continues to function as an effective source of `ontological security'. As part of an international comparative research project that engages geographical imaginaries of security and insecurity in Berlin, Vancouver, and Singapore, we analyze how nature is imagined by city dwellers as an object of desire that offers a place of refuge to escape the burdens from urban everyday life. Against this background, we emphasize imaginary nature as a powerful everyday source for the ontological security of subjects even under today's postnatural conditions.

The relationship between “national” geographical schools and an increasingly globalized geographical theory-building under the logics of Anglophone hegemony has generated critical debate within geography. This paper aims to contribute to current discussions on the development of differential, language-based “schools of thought” in geography and how these are mobilized and de- and recontextualized when they travel beyond their origins. However, it does not focus on the period of Anglophone hegemony but intends to shed a new, historically informed light on the politics of geographical knowledge production. Against this backdrop, we study why, how and with what consequences German geographical knowledge traveled to Argentina in the 1940s – the end of the “German hegemony” – following the employment by the National University of Tucumán (UNT) of the four German geography professors Wilhelm Rohmeder, Gustav Fochler-Hauke, Fritz Machatschek and Willi Czajka, all of whom had been institutionally and ideologically entwined with National Socialism. Firstly, we show that the epistemic differences between “national” schools of geographical thought – skillfully juggled by the geographers we analyze here – can provide an opportunity for the successful de- and recontextualization of theory. Secondly, we argue that boundary spanning and the traveling of theory beyond their geographical origins – largely (implicitly) viewed as progressive – should always be put in context(s) and assessed more cautiously from a normative point of view.

Human-animal relations are often experienced viscerally. These corporeal, affective, sensual and emotional realities cannot easily be put into words and adequately expressed through linear and textual forms. For this reason, this paper investigates the potential of comics in more-than-human geographies. It identifies three different ways of how geographers approach this field of research and communication: (1) comic analysis, (2) comic semiotics and (3) comic practice. In their comic drawings geographers try to make specific viewpoints, moments, emotions and relations visible that have been underexposed either socio-politically or in terms of scientific practice. The article then discusses more-than-human qualities of comics, arguing that graphic narratives emerge as productive tools to reveal „the in_between“ of humans and nonhumans. It further describes an exemplary approach to a collaborative comic and how visceral or nonverbal aspects in human-animal relations can be expressed and experienced, using the empirical study of returning wolves to Switzerland.

This paper explores the use of fuzzy difference methods in order to understand the differences between forest classes. The context for this work is provided by REDD+, which seeks to reduce the net emissions of greenhouse gases by rewarding the conservation of forests in developing countries. REDD+ requires that local inventories of forest are undertaken and payments are made on the basis of the amount of forest (and associated carbon storage). At the most basic level this involves classifying land into forest and non-forest. However, the critical issues affecting the uptake, buy-in and ultimately the success of REDD+ are the lack of universally agreed definition of forest to support REDD+ mapping activities, and where such a definition is imposed, the marginalization of local community voices and local landscape conceptualizations. This tension is at the heart of REDD+. This paper addresses these issues by linking methods to quantify changes in fuzzy land cover to the concept of data primitives, which have been previously proposed as a suitable approach to move between land cover classes with different semantics. These are applied to case study that quantifies the difference in areas for two definitions of forest derived from the GLC and FAO definitions of forest. The results show how data primitives allow divergent concepts of forest to be represented and mapped from the same data and how the fuzzy sets approach can be used to quantify the differences and non-intersections of different concepts of forest. Together these methods provide for transparent translations between alternative conceptualizations of forest, allowing for plural notions of forest to be mapped and quantified. In particular, they allow for moving from an object-based notion of forest (and land cover in general) to a field-based one, entirely avoiding the need for forest boundaries.

This paper characterizes different types of policy narratives that influence the trans-local motion of urban policies and elaborates on their relations. The paper first introduces conceptual and methodological recommendations from policy narrative literature to debates on policy mobility. In an empirical section, it then analyzes narratives that support policies on temporary use of vacant lands and buildings in the German cities of Berlin and Stuttgart. Based on semi-structured interviews with experts and document reviews, the paper finds different, partly competing narratives on temporary use in both case study cities. It identifies their typical elements, categorising them by form and content. Referential narratives are understood as connecters between different cities and influencers of policy mobility. Finally, the paper shows how narratives work with association as well as imagination and thus emphasize the non-factual, yet inherent aspects of relational policy making.

The quantitative revolution in the field of geography is commonly recalled as a story of scientific success, overcoming parochial, regionalist and ideographic modes of geography. This paper, however, suggests a different, yet parallel narrative. It reveals that the methodological reorientation towards statistical geography was a coping strategy, adopted by researchers from within and outside the discipline of geography in order to defend the analysis of ecological (i. e., spatially aggregated) data against the powerful critique of producing “ecological fallacies”. Through emphasizing how the quantitative revolution was an expression of both modernizing and protective tendencies within the field of geography, the paper contributes to a more concrete understanding of what motivates methodological change in geography.

This paper links two strands of Peter Sloterdijk's sphere project – his theory of the environment and his theory of dwelling – and mobilizes them for an analysis of entanglements between spaces of the environment and the space of the home in contemporary sustainability policies and smart home experiments. First, we retrace how Sloterdijk's topology of the environment combines a historical phenomenological methodology with ecological thinking. In the next step, we discuss Sloterdijk's theory of dwelling, which is closely linked to his thinking of the environment and is central to his conception of a plural spherology, yet has so far largely been overlooked in the reception. Sloterdijk's emphasis on the importance of dwelling in the world's inner space (Weltinnenraum) under conditions of a no longer externalizable environment helps to theorize how humans dwell on this earth in the 21st century. In the third part of the paper, we bring together both themes – environment and dwelling – to analyze contemporary ecological and digital home experiments from the perspective of a plural spherology. By showing how recent digital experiments in smart homes entangle spaces of dwelling with environmental concerns we build on Sloterdijk's analysis but also extend it with insights from STS and governmentality studies to better capture the power effects inherent to digitalized dwelling.

The potentiality of crowds, in terms of possibilities for achieving a livelihood in the big and dense cities, gains centre stage in contemporary urban studies dealing with the global South. These emergent effects of crowds act as dissociation of further work in urban theory from the global North that often displays a universalistic claim. However, contemporary urban theory both from the global South and North has astonishing less to say about internal processes of crowds that could be interpreted as emerging effects. The paper analyses the work on crowds by Peter Sloterdijk and the performative theory of assembly by Judith Butler in terms of theoretical possibilities to enrich contemporary thinking on urbanity in the South. The paper accentuates two important arguments for urban theory that could be fit into existing work in the field. Sloterdijk emphasises the affective synthesis of crowds and the build environment as an important mechanism of interaction between crowds and urbanity, whereas Butler elaborates the performative effect of crowds to articulate the right of owning attested rights.

This paper addresses family migration amongst highly-skilled professionals. Drawing on the concept of linked lives, it analyses how the linked lives of parents and children affect integration processes after international migration. The article is based on qualitative interviews with highly-skilled migrants and their accompanying partners in Germany and Great Britain. The analysis illustrates how parents try to reestablish stability and security in their children's lives after migration. It reveals common concerns. However, some of the parents' strategies are location-specific. The results indicate that the parents' efforts for their children's integration also have an effect on their own integration. Given the importance of children in the integration process, the paper suggests paying more attention to the children's perspective in future migration research.

This paper analyses from a philosophical and interdisciplinary point of view two master plans of the canton Ticino – the first one from 1990, Keynesian, and the second one from 2009, neoliberal. The differences between the former and the latter are highlighted on a conceptual level. While the former stresses the importance of rebalancing and maintaining internal solidarity between the regions of the canton, the latter aims to make the canton more competitive and specialised. The discussion highlights how this type of analysis, by showing the political and moral concepts and criteria underlying a master plan, favours their political discussion and thus, ultimately, the implementation of a more inclusive planning process.

Geoheritage is a component of geodiversity constituted by all the elements of geodiversity recognized by society for their particular values. The definition of these values, including the importance of geoheritage for biodiversity, plays a key role in the process of heritage recognition and geoconservation policymaking. In mountain environments, dynamic geomorphosites have a strong influence on plant diversity because the active geomorphological processes responsible for their formation act as renovators for habitats of pioneer species. In this paper, we propose criteria to assess the ecological value of dynamic mountain geomorphosites. We show that the interest of plant communities (species richness and presence of rare or protected species) and the influence of geomorphological processes on plant communities (disturbances, surface movement and soil) are fundamental criteria for assessing the ecological value in an exhaustive and objective way and that the question of the scale (local and national scales) is also a crucial parameter. We then illustrate this methodological proposal by evaluating the ecological value of three dynamic geomorphosites and a talus slope in the western Swiss Alps.

This paper examines questions of how issues of visual representation and vision have changed with the the quantitative and theoretical thinking in 1950s and early 1960s Anglophone geography. If the quantitative revolution in geography is understood as a scientific revolution, one should also expect a revolution of the ways in which geography made use of visualizations. At the center of this essay is William Bunge's “Theoretical Geography”, one of the founding text of this new geographical thought. This book forms the starting point for a discussion of the changed roles and changed forms of visualization in the production of geographical knowledge. Following Fred Schaefer's attack on Richard Harthorne, Bunge placed the search for morphological laws at the center of a geography that is strongly oriented towards geometry. In this paper, the text of Bunge serves as a starting point into the field of early analytical cartography and the first consideration of what later, become geographic information systems and their new visual language. In this paper this history of GIS is largely told without a history of technology a well as without its political context of the cold war and the Fordist state.