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The utilization of urban planning practices for political purposes has become an issue of planning theory in the last decades. Until the 1970s town planning was considered to be a neutral and rational instrument for the purpose of spatial regulation and administration as well as the general improvement of living conditions. Only recently with the rise of communicative planning theory this perspective has been complemented by critical perceptions of the political and ideological role of planning practices within society, their context-dependence, legitimization, normative purposes and also its interlinkages to individual aims as well as political and economic power. Jerusalem, the (partly occupied) capital of Israel, is a prototypic example of the utilization of urban planning for (even geo) political ends. This article is based on qualitative fieldwork and aims to scrutinize the scalar political consequences of various urban planning practices in Jerusalem. We undertake an analysis of the reciprocal relations of local, national, and geostrategic interests as well as the resulting actions by the relevant stakeholders. Theoretically informed by postcolonial geographies and performative approaches the paper concludes, that urban planning in Jerusalem is a highly political instrument that is strongly involved in the performative implementations of particular geographic imaginations of Jerusalem as a united capital of the state of Israel and historic as well as religious symbol of the Jewish nation. Hence urban planning in Jerusalem is an active element in the enforcement of hegemonic political interests which reach beyond the local context of Eastern Jerusalem.

the paper discusses the two theoretical concepts super-gentrification and metropolitan habitus established by British gentrification research. Both concepts are more or less unknown in German urban geography. Super-gentrification is looking at the gentrification of already gentrified urban neighbourhoods. Metropolitan habitus explains the affinity of specific social groups for very specific neighbourhoods in big cities. the paper starts with criticising both concepts for their missing explanation of influences of the qualities of urban space on habitus and super-gentrification. Secondly,the paper introduces the concept of residential capital, be un- derstood as inclusion of spatial qualities in social practices. in doing so, the theoretical gap of metropolitan habitus and super-gentrification can be bridged. In conclusion, the paper identifies some research questions for German urban geo- graphy that might be answered with the help of metropoli- tan habitus, super-gentrification and embedded residential capital.

The paper presents the thesis that the administration should be the target for innovation research. In the context of the promotion of innovations the administration deals with a threefold paradox. Innovations are non-intendable, the administration forms a non-innovative environment and the administration is dependent on majority decisions. Using the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen as a case study the paper scrutinizes the internal handling of these obstacles of the administration. As a main empirical finding it shows up that presentation and delegation are the main methods the administration uses to encounter its own endogenous resistances in the context of the promotion of innovation.

Because of their constitution, the usage of performative techniques in qualitative social research must deal with a paradox. Acting as performance takes place in the present and it takes place just once. One result of this is that every representation of a performance be it as text, discussion or film refers to the past. Performative social research solves this paradox by conceptualising performance as a kind of liminal phase of a ritual. Our thesis is that by simple outsourcing the problem of present in the theory of ritual, performative techniques commit the logical mistake of genetic fallacy, i.e., the mistake of forgetting that the primary value or meaning of an event has no necessary connections with its genesis in history. Therefore, a new methodology for qualitative social research after the performative turn requires a theoretical position which does not fall back to a position of causality as the temporal consequence of a cause and effect, as maintained by ritual theory. In this essay we suggest a "non-representational theory" for this venture, and point out how a methodology for qualitative research could be constituted "after" the performative turn. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0802558