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Diese Studie untersucht am Beispiel des Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in Israel, wie umweltbasierte Friedensbildungsmaßnahmen die Wahrnehmung eines Konflikts bei Akteuren auf der Graswurzelebene verändern können. Ausgangsüberlegung ist dabei, Umwelt nicht nur als Teil des Konfliktes zu interpretieren, sondern als konfliktneutralen Katalysator einzusetzen. Die auf dieser Basis erreichte Veränderung der Wahrnehmung des Konflikts wird in Form von konstruierten Raumbildern sowie den Bausteinen der Versöhnung nach LEDERACH (1997) konzeptualisiert. Die empirischen Einblicke zeigen zum einen die Bedeutung von physischen wie sozialen Orten und Räumen als Rahmen für die konstruktive Auseinandersetzung. Zum anderen lässt sich in Bezug auf die Konfliktwahrnehmung ein Bruch zwischen einer positiven Veränderung des Bildes der anderen Gruppe sowie dem Wunsch nach Frieden und der persistenten Konstruktion des Erbes sowie dem schweren Schritt der Vergebung ableiten. In the example of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in Israel, this study examines how environmentally-based peace building measures change the perception of a conflict between those parties at the grassroots level. The initial thought is that the environment should not only be interpreted as a part of the conflict, but rather as a conflict-neutral catalyzer. The change in perception of a conflict achieved is conceptualized in the form of constructed room images (being discussed in human geography), with the social construction of spaces and places as well as building blocks of reconciliation, (known from peace research in the field of political sciences). The empirical insights of this study show, on the one hand, the importance of physical and social locations, and rooms as a frame for a constructive dispute. On the other hand, in regards to the perception of a conflict, a bridge can be constructed between the positive change in the awareness of the other group, the desire for peace and the persistent construction of heritage, as well as taking the difficult step towards forgiveness.

Geo-spatial data available to researchers and practitioners has increased substantially over the last decades, forming new opportunities of analyzing and characterizing locations and their spatial environment in an objective way. Such descriptives also allow for use in discrete locations choice models which model relocation behavior and generally implement three groups of variables, representing attributes of the alternative, the decision-taker and the location. With the growing availability of spatial data on a disaggregated level, a large number of location variables have been reported in these models, which reduces their comparability and their transferability to other study areas. Residential location choice models are a well-known example of such location choice models often reported by researchers. In this thesis a wide range of these studies is reviewed in order to propose a common classification for location variables and categorizes their findings. Similar preferences are found, but different measurement methods and market segments across different study regions. It becomes obvious that the inclusion of socio-economic environment is more common than the representation of the built environment due to the availability in census data. Various studies in the field of Urban Planning and Design have given recommendations on "good urban form", suggesting that specific spatial characteristics inform the quality of an urban landscape and the way persons perceive it, respectively behave in it. This demonstrates the need to reflect such spatial characteristics through quantitative attributes when modeling spatial behavior in form of location choice. The options to characterize the urban morphology with such attributes are numerious and leave the researcher with the question which attributes are necessary to reflect characteristics of the urban morphology and how these can be calculated from the given data. In this thesis this question is approached by giving an overview of quantitative descriptions of the urban morphology. The basis is a data model that is simple enough to allow the reproducibility in any study area. These attributes are classified in multiple scales to reflect different perceptions of the urban morphology, i.e. the object, the composition, the neighborhood and the municipality. A case study of the canton of Zurich furthermore shows how these characteristics allow for definition of urban typologies for the proposed scales. Three cluster algorithms are applied to define such typologies: kmeans, kmedoid and latent class clustering. The cluster results are compared on their descriptive statistics, their consistency for different number of clusters, their spatial distribution and their interpretation in maps. The final part of the thesis evaluates the impact of the proposed variables on residential location choice for the Canton of Zurich: first the standard set of variables of the review,then the newly proposed morphological attributes and cluster outcomes. The standard set of variables proves to be of high value as initial setup for residential location choice models, but a comparable model quality is found for the alternative model definitions with morphological attributes, which furthermore give the a better feedback on planning policies. The low number of observations in the survey does not allow dedicated models for different household types, but the descriptive analysis given at the end of the thesis show a variation of preferences which recommends such modeling in further studies.