New Publications

Digital freelance platforms advertise flexibility, independence and access to a global labour market. But what does it mean to organise and position yourself in this environment? In her dissertation "Global Platform Work", cultural scientist Anna Oechslen sheds light on the everyday life of graphic designers who receive orders from India via digital platforms worldwide. more info

An article by IRS researchers Andreas Kuebart and Martin Stabler recently published in the journal "Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology" looks at the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic at the level of German counties over time. The study shows: The first four waves of the pandemic were distributed very unevenly within Germany. However, even over long periods of time, the distribution remained surprisingly stable and the affected regions remained the same. more info

In addition to teaching and research, universities have a third mission: knowledge transfer. In a new paper in the journal “Local Economy”, Julia Stadermann and Suntje Schmidt report on Innovation Salons - a new transfer format that supports the emergence of novel problem solutions for societal challenges. In such salons, universities can work together with civil society on problem-driven innovations; for example, by co-developing the concept for a health centre in a rural area. more info

A recent IRS paper shows how university offshore campuses can affect the strategic positioning of cities. Tim Rottleb investigated the effects of the interplay between urban development policies and the internationalisation of universities in the Arab Gulf region. The study areas were the cities of Doha, Dubai and Ras al-Khaimah. more info

How can universities be anchor institutions for the development of cities and regions in their vicinity? This question continues to preoccupy decision-makers in politics and administration. Scientific literature shows that a strong regional anchoring of universities is not only important for regional development effects. A good regional anchoring also brings many advantages for universities and their core functions. In the meantime, however, it has also become apparent how universities are simultaneously expanding their purely local understanding of themselves and their role as actors in the course of internationalisation strategies: they are increasingly transforming themselves into institutions that act transregionally. A new paper shows which dimensions politics and administration should pay attention to in the field of tension between regional and trans-regional anchoring. more info

arge parts of the old building stock in the GDR were in catastrophic condition in the late 1980s. The state leadership did not succeed in preserving these inner-city neighbourhoods of old buildings on a large scale. In the last years of the GDR, citizens' groups, mostly under the umbrella of the church or the Kulturbund, fought against this decay. The work of these citizens' groups as well as other reform actors, their successes as well as how they and the old towns were dealt with in the transformation period after 1989 are analysed in an anthology co-edited by Harald Engler and with the participation of other IRS staff members of the "Stadtwende" project. more info

Climate change is not perceived, understood and evaluated in the same way everywhere. Accordingly, the practices of dealing with it differ considerably. Today, such climate-cultural differences are found less between nation states than between different groups of actors and socio-political coalitions. A new anthology edited by Thorsten Heimann, Jamie Sommer, Margarethe Kusenbach and Gabriela Christmann focuses on such "climate cultural formations" and their great diversity in North America and Europe: from cultures of climate adaptation in rural areas of Southern Europe and among the indigenous population of Northern Europe to culture-specific strategies for more climate protection in German cities or in the southern states of the USA. more info

Two new articles from the Research Group Urban Sustainability Transformations shed light on how cities are becoming pioneers in climate policy, both in climate protection and in climate adaptation. Instead of the metropolises often mentioned in this role, such as Paris, the authors take a look at smaller cities in Germany. In doing so, they show that even cities with difficult starting conditions can find their way into the top group. more info

Matthias Bernt, acting head of the Research Area Politics and Planning, examined gentrification processes in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg comparatively in his habilitation project "Gentrification and Housing Policy". He paid special attention to the effects of different forms of regulation and policies of the housing market, both on investments in the housing stock and on the displacement of low-income households. From his findings, Bernt developed the concept of the "comodification gap", which takes an institutionalist perspective on gentrification. Now his habilitation thesis is published as a monograph by Wiley. more info

In their newly published article "Choose France! Containment, Circulation and Postcolonial (Dis)Continuities in Transnational Education", Alice Bobée and Jana Kleibert show how French offshore campuses in Francophone Africa on the one hand implement French migration and higher education policies and on the other hand increasingly adapt to economic competitive pressure and the mobility desires of paying students. In doing so, they are imitating "Anglo-Saxon" market-oriented strategies. The article appeared in the journal Globalisation, Societies and Education. more info