Projects

The study examines the relationship between the lack of affordable housing, the increasing importance of institutional investors and the limited effectiveness of policy programmes to address the housing crisis in seven European cities. The research focuses on three questions: a) What influence do institutional investors have on the supply of affordable housing? b) Which housing policy strategies and measures to regulate and/or promote or cooperate with institutional investors can be observed? and c) How do policy-making processes in relation to institutional investors shape up? more

Whether it is protests against large-scale projects such as Stuttgart 21, wind turbines or development plans in growing cities: Spatial planning is increasingly confronted with conflicts. In this context, the classic forms of citizen participation are reaching their limits. The aim of this project is to further develop existing planning theories by distinguishing between rational, communicative and agonistic - i.e. conflict-related - types of planning in dealing with conflicts and by examining planning conflicts using empirical case studies in practice. more

Germany has officially been a country of immigration since 2005. Ten years later, the arrival and reception of Syrian civil war refugees, as well as the current arrival of Ukrainian refugees, have shown how much the state and society have changed. Since May 2019, the joint project StadtumMig I has been examining these changes in selected large housing estates in three eastern German cities. Building on these results, the second phase of the project will work on central challenges in the municipalities in greater depth. more

Since Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine began, more than 13 million people have left their homes. Six million of them left the country, with around 900 000 taking their residency in Germany. Of those who fled the country, over 700 000 found their refuge in Germany, which makes Ukrainians the biggest ethnic group of refugees in the country. However, according to the IOM data, the vast majority of refugees intend to come back home in soon perspective instead of settling down in their current places of residency. This project will explore how Ukrainian refugee women make their decision to come to German cities, how they see their stay in mid-term and long-term perspectives, and how they consider coming back to their home country. more

ExTrass wants to better equip medium-sized cities and towns in Germany against heat and heavy rain. To achieve this, the project examines the factors that hinder or enable urban climate adaptation and identifies examples of successful measures. One focus of the project will take place in three case study cities - Potsdam, Remscheid and Würzburg – which will test greening initiatives, pursue climate-adapted urban planning, extend datasets related to the urban climate, communicate climate risks to residents, and improve emergency planning. The project will also facilitate networking and knowledge exchange so that cities can learn from each other. more

This project, secured in cooperation with the University of Łódź, thematises various paths in the development of a number of neighbourhoods in both cities following the change of system over 25 years ago. The scientists strive to provide both new findings about the interplay of institutional contexts and socio-spatial differentiation processes, as well as about post-socialist urban development in Middle and Eastern Europe. more

For several decades, (some) cities have been active in climate policy. Previous research on urban climate policy has mostly focused on internationally well-connected and high-profile larger cities and on a handful of prominent smaller pioneering cities. But what about the cities in the second tier, which, unlike the leaders, usually (have to) work with very limited financial and human resources and without significant political and civil society support? This habilitation project focuses on the widest possible range of cities and explores the question of why climate policy activity emerges in cities and why it does not. more

The cumulative dissertation project tries to approach the topic of critical infrastructures with different approaches. Central aspects are "space" and "scale". First, the perspective of the nation state is examined, because nation states define sectors and infrastructures that are considered critical; they thus have a formative role. Then, the city level is examined as a planning unit, because decisions are also made at this level that influence the nature and functions of infrastructures. Finally, we zoom into the health sector in hospitals, because processes and decisions that change infrastructures also take place here.<br/>Critical infrastructures are inherently potentially affected by failure events, because "critical" refers to the possible failure of infrastructure. Therefore, concepts that guarantee maintenance occupy a special position. In Germany, the focus is on the protection concept, whereas in Nordic countries such as Sweden, resilience is significant as a concept. more

The PhD project investigates the negotiations of far-right contestations in urban planning and governance processes. It is supervised by Matthias Bernt (Lehrstuhl für Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie, Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) and Laura Calbet i Elias (Fachgebiet Theorien und Methoden der Stadtplanung, Städtebau-Institut, Universität Stuttgart). more