Projects

The project "Remaking: REmote - working Multiple impacts in the Age of disruptions: socioeconomic transformations, territorial rethinKING, and policy actions" understands remote work as a lever that contributes to shaping ongoing social, economic and spatial structural transformations. The project aims to create a policy-oriented framework that reflects the new and multi-layered realities of work and facilitates policy makers to pursue place-based policies that balance the opportunities and risks of remote forms of work, and to exchange practices to promote mutual learning on remote work in the context of disruptions and megatrends. more

In an era where digital innovation and entrepreneurial dynamism take centre stage, a deep understanding of the startup ecosystem in Europe is imperative. The overarching objective of this project is to holistically shed light on the intricacies, challenges, and opportunities permeating Europe's startup domain. Based on a tender of the European Commission's Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, the project aims to craft an insightful narrative about Europe's startup ecosystem. more

Disruptive events such as the reorganisation of borders after the Second World War have a profound impact on how societies and spaces change. This leads to a fundamental question: how do we remember these borders, and what influence does this memory have on the concept of a borderless Europe? The Emmy Noether Independent Junior Research Group "The Social-Spatial Memory of European Borders: Dispositifs of Remembering and Forgetting" explores how past disruptive events, such as wars, geopolitical conflicts and political unifications, have influenced the current state of borders. more

How can regional innovation policies be developed in structurally weak regions that mostly lack a critical mass of actors, institutions and a "creative buzz" to generate innovations from endogenous potentials? The research project "Strong through Open Innovation Regions" aims to close this explanatory gap by systematically interweaving regional conditions (regional innovation ecosystems) and supraregional references (translocal innovation ecosystems). To this end, we are developing an original contribution to the conceptual sharpening of societal innovation capacity with the Social Open Innovation Region (SOIR) approach. more

Digital (planning) tools are changing the way we communicate. While urban areas seem to process these changes without tension, tensions between digitalised forms of action and more traditional, analogue forms are assumed for peripheralised rural areas. These are the focus of the project. Using rural areas in China and Chile as examples, the project will examine from different perspectives of action and actors (1) which digitisation strategies have been pursued and which digitisation processes have taken place, (2) which changes can be observed in the actions of actors against the backdrop of the available digital technologies and applications, and (3) to what extent spatial constructions of rural spaces in the respective cultural contexts are changing as a result. more

CORAL aims to unpack the latent dynamics and impacts of collaborative workspaces (hereafter CWS, such as coworking spaces, fablabs, creative hubs etc.) in rural and peripheral areas and integrate them as development tools in local and regional policies to open up new potentials for socio-economic development. Whereas we have observed the rapid rise of CWS in urban agglomerations in the past 15 years, there is now a gradual rise of CWS in rural and peripheral areas too. The CORAL project offers specialised and tailor-made training to 15 Early Stage Researchers (ESR: PhD candidates), helping them to better understand and support the development processes of CWSin rural and peripheral areas and their wider impacts at the local and regional level as well as at the level of the individual worker and the enterprise. more

Das Projekt befasst sich mit den Machtungleichgewichten, die mit lebensstilbedingten Arbeitsmobilitäten einhergehen, indem es untersucht, wie mobil Arbeitende ihre relativ privilegierte Position im neuen räumlichen Kontext der Ankunft nutzen. Durch die Fokussierung auf ihre sozialräumlichen Praktiken und die Aushandlung ihrer eigenen Position innerhalb des lokalen Umfelds, liefert das Dissertationsprojekt Erkenntnisse darüber, wie lebensstilgeleitete Arbeitsmobilitäten lokale Gemeinschaften und sozialräumliche Transformationen beeinflussen. more

In his dissertation project, Jonathan Hussels researches the construction of value in rural innovation processes. To this end, a social constructivist approach is chosen, which pays particular attention to the negotiation and contestation of value. more

In her dissertation project, Jae-Young Lee investigates how residents in mountainous rural areas negotiate the concept of "rurality" in the face of the commodification of rural spaces and urban hegemonies. The work is based on two field studies in rural areas in Chile and South Korea. more

In her dissertation, Federica Ammaturo investigates the role of collaborative practices in regional development in rural areas in Italy, Germany and France. She pays particular attention to their added value for the regions. One of the project aims is to offer policy recommendations for implementing and developing more place-based collaborative spaces. more