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Energy transitions cannot be fully grasped without appreciating their spatial implications. This paper takes up the idea of conceptualizing the socio-spatial dimensions of energy transitions and examines the respective value of the Territory, Place, Scale, and Network (TPSN) framework. The fundamental contribution of this framework is to move the focus of the debate away from whether one ontology of the socio-spatial is 'better' than another. By applying the TPSN framework to emblematic cases of regional energy spaces in Germany, we realized that the dynamics of different fields of action within an energy transition are characterized in each case by a specific pattern of the four socio-spatial dimensions and related strategies. The paper concludes with a discussion of the benefits and the shortcomings of the framework as it relates to understanding energy transitions. The fundamental role of place-making at a nexus with territorializations, as well as the additional importance of networking and rescaling strategies, are to be understood with the additional factors of the role of governance spaces, the upscaling of local experiments, powerful space-related discourses, and the socio-materiality of spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, financialization has reworked the ownership, organization and geographies of global brewing. However, the institutional constellations of national, regional and local markets continue to shape and mediate its processes in variegated ways. Presenting a more granular and spatially sensitive conceptualization of financialization, this article adopts a cultural political economy (CPE) framework to analyse its relationships with the German brewing industry. First, the article distils the key elements of firm-level financialization and identifies a range of core constituents which provide the foundations for observing how financialization is enacted as part of wider institutional and political economic contexts. Second, the paper explains how these core constituents unfold as part of the global brewing industry, where the growing importance of mergers and acquisitions (M&As), the cultivation of global brands and the strategic prioritization of value over volume have reconstituted mature beer markets. Analysis then turns to the brewing industry and market in Germany, where regional patterns of production, a localized culture of consumption and various forms of state intervention are shown to constrain the enactment of financialization. Building on this empirical evidence, it is argued that geographically particular social relations, cultural conditions and political economic structures intertwine to shape and mediate processes of financialization, in different ways, with geography both causal and constitutive in its uneven expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Half the population of Europe's largest economy by population and economic output lives in 30 main urban agglomerations. This paper presents a series of cartogram visualisations of population changes in Germany for these areas that happened in the period 2008–2013. Most of the areas have seen an urban renaissance by regaining growth. After a long period of suburbanisation, growth started returning to city centres. Among the few declining major urban agglomerations, the old industrial Ruhr area stands out, with an overall decline that is larger than any decline in all other major urban agglomerations put together. Population decline in the analysed period almost exclusively took place in suburban areas. Both trends mark an important change in the population dynamics of these major urban regions in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Going beyond the territorial/relational divide in regional studies requires researchers to do more than examine the extent to which territoriality and relationality are complementary alternatives. The variety of networked regional spaces means it is intellectually unsustainable to simply relate a single networked regional space to territory-scale without first considering how networked regional spaces interact. Illustrated through the experience of Germany, our paper demonstrates that interaction between different networked regional spaces (eg, city-regions and cross-border regions) is resulting in new networked regional imaginaries (eg, cross-border metropolitan regions). Its overall aim is to show that the production of entirely new networked spaces can assist in overcoming the contradictions present in one configuration of regions, but this only serves to create a new 'regional problem' requiring ever more complex configurations of regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The withdrawal of the welfare states from pensions underscores the need for a better understanding of the spatial characteristics of adoption processes in the case of financial innovations. In 2001 the German pension reform reduced publicly provided pensions, and introduced subsidised, voluntary occupational plans to replace the loss in retirement income. This paper looks at the spatial and temporal adoptions of the newly created occupational pensions by analysing a unique, proprietary database, containing data on 12000 employers and 286 000 employees working in the German metal and electric industry. The study identifies metropolitan/nonmetropolitan, East — West, and further geographical differences in the employers' timing to adopt, which in turn influences employees' decisions to enrol. Differences are identified among employee-level adoptions depending on the employers' timing and further, individual-level factors. The results emphasise the importance of geography in the transformation of old-age finances in the German welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polycentric urban regions have been advocated for, and justified as enhancing both economic growth and overall competitiveness while also creating more equitable and balanced metropolitan regions. We examine the role of regional polycentricity in effectuating certain desirable outcomes, specifically enhancing economic productivity and minimizing spatial disparities simultaneously in German urban regions (Großstadtregionen) as a case study. Using econometric analysis of both functional and morphological polycentricity measures, our results indicate that polycentric development can effectively reduce regional disparities in urban regions, but not simultaneously promote economic productivity. These findings confirm previous studies that progress toward one goal hampers progress toward another. Further investigation at a finer scale suggests that the borrowed size effect is essentially a "win-loss" game between peripheries and urban core(s) within the same urban region. Peripheries benefit from the spillovers generated by nearby urban core(s), thereby narrowing regional economic gaps and leading to more equitable regions. However, the gains of the peripheries are canceled out by the losses of the urban cores, and polycentric development has an insignificant overall effect on regional economic productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monitoring and tracing product and process qualities along global supply chains have become increasingly challenging tasks for companies at the downstream end of the chain. High levels of uncertainty in trade coordination arise among importing companies in the face of these developments. The conceptual aim of this paper is to show, by the example of organic food imports to Germany and Australia, how convention theory can contribute to the analysis of trade coordination in global value chains. Our empirical results affirm that industrial conventions such as standards and third-party certification have gained increasing significance over the past two decades. Simultaneously, however, we argue that industrial conventions are not enough to overcome uncertainties in trade. They do not necessarily lead to reduced differences in perceptions of product quality between suppliers and importers. Less tangible factors such as trust established through relationship management and reputation are likewise significant. Furthermore, not only companies with a certain ideological tradition, but also individual people with altruistic motives within other types of firms, can determine how 'dedicated' a firm is in pushing trade coordination according to civic and domestic conventions. Market conventions (ie, the importance of price and competitiveness) are stressed more by Australian firms reflecting the country's liberal market economy and low state subsidies especially in the area of agriculture. Finally, compromises between conventions are sometimes necessary to end a situation of conflict between buyer and supplier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the notion that entrepreneurship is a 'local event', the literature argues that entrepreneurs are 'rooted' in place. This paper tests the 'residential rootedness' hypothesis of self-employment by examining for Germany and the UK whether the selfemployed are less likely to move over long distances (internal migration) than workers in paid employment. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) and the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), and accounting for transitions in employment status we found little evidence that the self-employed in Germany and the UK are more rooted in place than workers in paid employment. Generally speaking, the selfemployed were no less likely than workers in paid employment to migrate over longer distance. In contrast to the residential rootedness hypothesis we found that entry into selfemployment and female self-employment are associated with internal migration, and that the self-employed who work from home (home-based businesses) are fairly geographically mobile. The gendered results suggest that women might use self-employment as a strategy to be spatially mobile with their household, or as a strategy to stay in the workforce after having moved residence until they find a job in the more secure wage and salary sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to explore the role of regional innovation systems and clusters in the economic recovery of old industrial regions. We draw a distinction between three types of cluster-based renewal: an innovation-oriented adjustment of mature clusters (incremental change); the emergence of new agglomerations in established industries (diversification); and the rise of knowledge-intensive and high-technology activities (radical change). In the empirical part of the paper we compare cluster-based recovery processes in the regions of Styria and the Saarland. It is shown that Styria rebuilt its regional innovation system more successfully, enabling the innovation-oriented adjustment of a mature cluster, the rise of a new cluster in an established industry, and the emergence of knowledge-intensive activities. In the Saarland, in contrast, the regional innovation system has been more specialised, which has resulted in weak performance with respect to incremental change and diversification and high performance regarding radical change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author builds on recent geographical approaches to the investigation of scientific experimentation. While a number of studies have explored the various sites of scientific practice and the role of space in the constitution of experimental matters of fact, far less attention has been directed toward the cultural geographies of experimental science and the extra scientific zones in which modes of experimental practice were themselves developed and contested. Drawing on the reception of professional psychiatry in interwar Berlin (1919–1933), the author traces an alternative set of ‘experimental systems’ which seized on and countered the credibility of psychiatric expertise. The focus is on a series of modernist experiments in interwar Germany which actively reconfigured psychiatric science as a series of critical aesthetic interventions themselves tasked with performing ‘scientific experiments’. The paper is triangulated around three case studies, which chart the multiple traffickings between psychiatric experimentation and modernist art. The first revisits the traumatic reenactments of Berlin Dada in the broader context of mechanized war, rationalized work, and metropolitan life. The second explores the psychotechnical techniques that were crucial to the operations of Brechtian epic theatre, and the third case study explores the relationship between clinical therapy and modernist fiction as it came to characterize the work of Alfred Döblin during the 1920s. The paper concludes with further reflections on the significance of the ‘modern experimental turn’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of this paper is a new approach to multiperiod school location planning in urban areas. Most of the existing approaches in the field do not consider free school choice nor are they able to consider substitution effects between school locations. We minimize the location and transport costs with respect to students choosing the school with the highest utility. Since these school choice probabilities (determined by a mixed multinominal logit model) depend on the available schools, we have to consider two steps. First, we generate for each period a set of scenarios indicating which school is open and which is not. For each scenario we allocate the students to available schools according to capacity and utility. Second, we select for each period one scenario in order to minimize total costs. Problems with a long planning horizon and a large number of demand points are solvable. We apply this approach to schools of the City of Dresden, Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the recent worldwide trend towards devolution has been driven by the belief that fiscal decentralisation is likely to have a positive effect on government efficiency and economic growth. It is generally assumed that the transfer of powers and resources to lower tiers of government allows for a better matching of public policies to local needs and thus for a better allocation of resources. These factors, in turn, are expected to lead to an improvement in regional economic performance, if subnational authorities shift resources from current to capital expenditures in search of a better response to local needs. In this paper we test these assumptions empirically by analysing the evolution of subnational expenditure categories and regional growth in Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, and the USA. We find that, contrary to expectations, decentralisation has coincided in the sample countries with a relative increase in current expenditures at the expense of capital expenditures, which has been associated with lower levels of economic growth in countries where devolution has been driven from above (India and Mexico), but not in Spain, where it has been driven from below. We hypothesise that the differences in legitimacy between the central or federal government and subnational governments in top-down and bottom-up processes of devolution may be at the origin of the diverse capacity to deliver greater allocative and productive efficiency and, eventually, greater economic growth by devolved governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we test the importance of the regional restructuring hypothesis by investigating whether the internal migration flows in western Germany can be explained by employment changes, on the basis of data of out-migration of employed workers and employment in seventy-five regions over the period 1982-97 for each year separately. Starting from a conditional probability model for the unobserved individual migration decisions, we derive mathematically a dynamic version of the Poisson gravity model for the total out-migration per region per year. Estimating this model for each year separately, we find partial confirmation of the regional restructuring hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern theoretical concepts in economic geography are used to try to explain the positive sides of geographical clustering of industries. Of the few theoretical concepts which are used to try to explain the negative sides of clustering, that is, the decline of old industrial areas, evolutionary regional economics, in general, and the lock-in concept, in particular, are promising ones. Lock-ins have been furthest developed by Grabher in his study on the steel and coal-mining complex in the Ruhr Area, Germany. They can be considered as thick interfirm, institutional, and cognitive tissues aimed at preserving existing industrial structures and therefore unnecessarily slowing down industrial renewal. It is particularly in regions with political lock-ins in which the legacy of manufacturing endures. On the basis of a study on the restructuring of the textile industry in Westmünsterland in Germany, in this paper I analyse whether these kinds of lock-ins can also be observed in regions with strong concentrations of the textile industry, an industry that strongly differs from the above-mentioned steel and coal-mining complex. I show that the impact of lock-ins can be regarded as relatively weak in the textile region of Westmünsterland. Partly because of that, industrial renewal has been relatively successful, which in turn has kept lock-ins weak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine the ways in which politicians, media, and native residents formulate assimilation discourses—that is, expectations for immigrants to adapt to prevailing norms and cultures—and the effects that such discourses have on social relations in immigrant-receiving societies. Archival and ethnographic research in Germany illustrates that assimilation discourses are central in the dialectical process of identity construction in which native-born Germans and immigrants from Turkey construct their respective 'other', and thereby themselves. I pay particular attention to the effects of assimilation discourses in negotiations over belonging and culture at multiple scales in Germany—from the national to the neighborhood level. Space figures prominently in these negotiations, as the spaces that immigrants occupy and create often become the focus of debates about difference, otherness, and the unassimilability of migrants in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of 'equity gaps' has loomed large in recent discussions of enterprise formation and development, both in the United Kingdom and in Germany. One particularly intriguing, but highly elusive, aspect of this issue is the question of whether equity gaps have a regional dimension: are certain regions at a systematic disadvantage with respect to the provision of equity capital? In this paper, we explore this question in the context of the UK and German venture capital industries, drawing both on unpublished industry data and on information obtained from original surveys of venture capital firms in the two countries. We report clear evidence that the venture industries in both countries are spatially constituted. Despite important national differences, venture capital firms tend to be concentrated in identifiable clusters and their investment outcomes show clear evidence of spatial proximity effects; investment is disproportionately concentrated in those regions that also contain the major clusters of venture capital firms. However, how far this spatial form produces regional equity gaps is hard to determine. Venture capitalists themselves argue that they do not intentionally discriminate between regions in their decisionmaking, and many acknowledge the existence of funding and deal-size gaps but not regional gaps per se. But their perception of project risk is, nevertheless, regionally sensitive. We argue that the notion of a simple supply gap overlooks the way in which the localised form of the industry is based on a dynamic learning process in which demand and supply processes combine with their embeddedness in social networks and individual perceptions in a mutually reinforcing way. Less-favoured regions, with low investment rates, few local venture capital firms, and a dearth of experienced specialist intermediaries, may thus be trapped in a situation of both depressed demand for and supply of venture capital investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the interrelationships between urban land use, resource consumption, and utility service provision with a study of brownfield regeneration—from an infrastructure perspective. Drawing on recent research into the spatial strategies of utility companies, after liberalisation and privatisation, I identify disused industrial sites as 'cold-spots' of infrastructure systems where energy and water consumption has recently collapsed. Using a case study of Berlin I analyse first the challenges facing the city's three major utilities as a result of shifting patterns of resource consumption and overcapacity in parts of their networks. In the second part I examine the responses of the three utilities to these challenges in the context of recent institutional changes to infrastructure provision; exploring how the utilities are moving towards greater spatial differentiation in their network management and what interest they have in brownfield regeneration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional actors at the regional or local level increasingly see the development of the creative industry sector as a means of improving local competitiveness. However, research on relations between institutions and local development barely considers the interaction between policies and a sectoral logic of work organization and labor-market functioning. On the basis of qualitative research on the locally clustered media sector in Cologne, Germany, we argue that a sectoral logic which relies strongly on the use of networks can hinder or 'convert', the course of policies aimed at improving the skill supply, and thereby produce unintended effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the impact of cell phone base stations on prices of condominiums in Hamburg, Germany. This is the first hedonic study on this subject for housing prices in Europe and the first ever to examine the price impact of base stations within a whole metropolis. We distinguish between individual masts and groups of masts. On the basis of a dataset of over 1000 base stations set up in Hamburg, we find that only immediate proximity to groups of antenna masts is perceived as harmful by residents of nearby condominiums. For individual masts no effect on residential property prices in the surrounding areas was observed, indicating that cell phone service providers should prevent installation of groups of masts in a single location. We control for spatial dependence and show that the influence of cell phone base stations on adjacent residential property prices can be overestimated, if other negative externalities that are typically correlated with the proximity to base stations are neglected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]