Search

In recent years, various low-threshold and often creative methods and tools have been developed, considering the specific requirements of vulnerable persons to explore their identities, experiences, knowledge, opinions and needs. The idea of LEGO® Serious Play® is based on play pedagogy. Playing allows to distance oneself from everyday life by sliding into a world of imaginations, ideas and utopias while concurrently keeping the ties to reality (Heimlich, 2015). LEGO® Serious Play® uses metaphors to enable participants to express playfully their thoughts and ideas. As the building process with Lego bricks is physical and haptic, LEGO® Serious Play® is a low-threshold method to work with vulnerable groups (Cavaliero, 2017). The following article will concentrate on the use of LEGO® Serious Play® as creative exploration method and its possibilities and limitations when used to empower young migrants in vulnerable conditions in the Germany and Luxembourg in the H2020 research project MIMY.

Der Beitrag behandelt die Steuerung des Siedlungsflächenwachstums im Großherzogtum Luxemburg aus der Perspektive von Informalität. Luxemburg steht unter einem hohen demographischen und ökonomischen Wachstumsdruck in allen Landesteilen (Hauptstadt, altindustrialisierter Süden, ländlicher Norden), der das Planungssystem stark herausfordert. Zugleich gibt es keine formelle Regionalplanung, allenfalls Ansätze interkommunaler Kooperation, die überwiegend freiwilliger Natur sind. Anhand von empirischen Fallstudien in zwei wachstumsstarken Gemeinden (Junglinster, Schuttrange) skizziert der Beitrag Planungsentscheidungen im institutionellen Dreieck zwischen Kommune, Staat und privaten Trägern. Informalität dient hier nicht nur zur Kompensation fehlender planerischer Steuerung, sondern auch dem Umgang mit der komplexen Rechtsmaterie des Landes. Informell kommen auch die vitalen Interessen der Grundeigentümer ins Spiel: Da ein Teil derWohlfahrtseffekte des Landes über Grund und Boden realisiert wird, sind Spekulationsinteressen immanent, haben ein hohes Blockadepotenzial. In diesem Kontext formuliert der Beitrag erste Überlegungen für ein regionales Wachstumsmanagement, das die Lücke zwischen staatlicher Landesplanung und kommunalem Eigensinn schließen könnte. This paper deals with the management of settlement growth in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg from the perspective of informality. Luxembourg is subject to high demographic and economic growth pressures across all parts of the country (capital, old-industrialized South, rural North), which strongly challenges the current planning system. At the same time, there is no formal regional planning, apart from approaches of inter-municipal cooperation, which are mainly voluntary in nature. Drawing on empirical case studies in two high-growth municipalities (Junglinster, Schuttrange), the paper outlines planning decisions in the institutional triangle between municipality, state and private institutions. Informality serves here not only to compensate for a lack of planning control, but also to deal with the country's complex legal framework conditions. The vital interests of landowners come into play informally as well: since parts of the country's wealth emerge from the valorization of property, speculative interests are immanent, and thus block development processes. In this context, the paper addresses elements of a regional growth management that could close the gap that exists between state planning and municipal autonomy.

This study is the first to employ panel data to examine the time-varying effects of internal and international parental migration on the psychological well-being of children who stay behind in an African context. The analysis employs data collected in 2013, 2014 and 2015 from school going children aged 12-21 in two urban areas with high out-migration rates in Ghana - Kumasi and Sunyani. Using children's self-reports, an analysis was conducted separately for boys (N = 7 81) and girls (N = 7 05). Results indicate that girls and boys with the mother away internally or internationally are equally or more likely to have higher levels of psychological well-being when compared to boys and girls of non-migrant parents. A higher level of well-being is observed amongst girls when parents migrate and divorce. However, parental migration and divorce are more likely to increase the psychological vulnerability of boys. In Ghana, the psychological well-being of children is nuanced by which parent has migrated, marital status of migrant parent and the gender of the child.

This special issue of Comparative Migration Studies on the occasion of the IMISCOE 2021 Conference with the theme “Crossing borders, connecting cultures” features five invited contributions by several conference speakers as well as an article by the host university.

This paper’s main argument is that housing financialisation can be understood as a set of intertwined digital/material processes, and that resisting housing financialisation requires activism that recognises and capitalises on this dynamic. Drawing from Desiree Fields’ (2017a) work on urban struggles with financialisation, this conceptual argument is unpacked through a case study of post-crash Dublin, an urban space reshaped by housing financialisation and struggles resisting it. Housing has been a key subject of contention in post-crash Dublin and activists’ digital/material struggles illustrate how digital technologies and platforms can be and are appropriated to resist housing financialisation. The paper traces the intertwining of housing financialisation, resistance, and the digital in post-crash Dublin and argues that future research on platform real estate, urbanism, and automated landlord practices must take seriously the ambivalent opportunities, agency, and counter narratives that housing activists create through their digital/material practices.

This paper describes the process and findings of a critical evaluation conducted for a custom-made Location based game (LBG) designed to support reflection on social history. We use a mixed-method protocol to answer the following research questions: “Can a LBG be designed to stimulate situated reflection on social history topics? and “What form and type of reflections can occur when participating in a LBG? Using an innovative approach that took inspiration from the field of museum studies and computer science. We chose a Think-aloud protocol to conduct an evaluation in Valletta, Malta and adapted the Remind study protocol to explore participant experience in Luxembourg. We combined transcripts from both sets of experiments wiith user-generated content to complete a systematic analysis using a predefined set of qualitative codes. We were able to identify that LBG can support reflection on social history topics but the depth of and type of reflection depends on the social history content, the individual locations in the city, and personal connections players are able to make to both.

This paper explores possible responses to some of the main challenges associated with conducting elite and expert interviews as part of qualitative research in human geography. Drawing on the example of the dynamic fintech industry, the paper outlines some similarities and differences between elite and expert interviews, and uses this to identify and discuss possible responses. Against this backdrop, the paper also reflects on advantages and disadvantages of using the professional social networking site LinkedIn as a research aid for sampling and contacting interviewees as well as for interview preparation. The paper is anticipated to be of interest to those conducting qualitative research involving limited subject sample sizes who are potentially difficult to find.

Recently, the notion of spatial justice has been discussed as a possible conceptual foundation for rethinking EU Cohesion Policy. While scholars have adopted a dual distributive and procedural understanding of spatial justice, the paper argues that, applied to cross-border areas, such a conceptualisation is challenged to explain how the border contributes to disparities. We argue that actively questioning the role of law is paramount for better examination of the dynamics within border areas. An understanding of spatial justice informed by legal geography allows examination of how law fosters and impedes movement across borders. The paper presents three recent examples where policy representatives from affected communities have fought to adapt legal provisions to cross-border spatiality. Whether such initiatives increased border communities’ capacities to shape their own development (i.e. European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation) or not yet (i.e. co-development at the Lorraine-Luxembourg border; European Cross-Border Mechanism), these examples show that analysing EUropean borderlands as a spatiolegal category helps understanding of how space and law constantly struggle with one another, and how spatial justice emerges from a movement out of this conflict. The paper concludes by discussing the practical and conceptual implications of combining legal geography and spatial justice for analysing EU Borderlands.

In 2015 and 2016, the enormous increase in asylum seekers travelling along the Balkan Route confronted the Member States of the European Union with an exceptional pressure on national asylum systems. Since then academic literature has revealed a reappraisal of the Common European Asylum System at regulative and policy implementation level, notably regarding the fair distribution of asylum seekers across Member States and regions. Yet we know very little about the locational choices of forced migrants or how those choices evolved and transformed during their journey. In this paper, we aim to shed light on those decision-making processes and (individual, subjective) locational choices based on the aspiration-ability model, drawing from a series of qualitative interviews with migrants held in Luxembourg and Germany in the context of the H2020 project CEASEVAL. We focus on the migrants’ journeys to their actual recipient countries, highlighting mobility trajectories from the moment of first departure and on the process of decision-making regarding their choice of location. Then, we examine further mobility aspirations, which may lead to secondary mobility within or out of the country of residence. In the concluding section, we discuss the consequences of our findings for migration and asylum politics against the background of the “autonomy of migration” framework. * This article belongs to a special issue on "Refugee Migration to Europe – Challenges and Potentials for Cities and Regions".

This article outlines the community economies of Esch-sur-Alzette, the ‘second city’ of Luxembourg. ‘Community economies’ – an approach outlined by J.K. Gibson-Graham – draws attention to alternative narratives of economic development and the representation of economic identity. Despite (the Grand Duchy of) Luxembourg’s reputation as a European Union centre, with substantial finance and tax activity, Esch-sur-Alzette is a post-industrial and multilingual melting pot. The alternative narrative here is of the multiple community-based organisations and movements in Esch-sur-Alzette: an energy cooperative, urban gardening, an upcycling clothing factory, a local food shop and restaurant, and vibrant civil society discussions and interventions in (inter)national politics. Civil society, while central to both understandings of grassroots environmental action and the community economies framework of Gibson-Graham, takes on quite a different flavour in Luxembourg. This article then takes the case of Luxembourg to reread the relationship of the state to the so-called third sector, in doing so defending the political possibilities of community economies.

‘Smart cities’ has become a hegemonic concept in urban discourses, despite substantial criticism presented by scholarly research and activism. The aim of this research was to understand what happens when one of the big digital corporations enters the field of real estate and land use development and urban planning, how existing institutions respond to this, and how modes of urban governance are affected. Alphabet Inc.’s plans for Toronto’s waterfront provided insights into these questions. Our investigations traced a complex web of place-making practices that involved all levels of government, the general public, and networks of actors throughout the private sector. Methodologically, the discourse was reconstructed with local fieldwork, interviews with key actors, participating in tours and public meetings, and secondary sources. It was found that Alphabet Inc.’s plan to build a world-class digital city contained some lessons for urban studies and urban planning practice. First, Alphabet Inc.’s plans, which unfolded amidst initiatives to expand the knowledge economy, confirmed concerns that the trajectory of neoliberal, market-driven land use and speculation along the waterfront remains unchanged. Second, digital infrastructures are potentially a Trojan Horse. Third, it was seen that municipalities and their modes of urban planning are vulnerable to the political economic manoeuvrings of large corporate power. Fourth, Alphabet Inc. operates as a post-political package driven by a new coalition of politics, where the smart city is sold as a neutral technology. The controversies surrounding the project, however, stirred a civic discourse that might signal a return of the political.

Our article addresses two aspects of young migrants’ understandings of integration: their own ideas of what integration is, and their perception of the destination society’s concepts and expectations regarding their integration. We analyze qualitative interviews which were conducted in the Horizon 2020 project MIMY, in Germany, Luxembourg and Norway, using the grounded theory methodology. Our exploration shows that the young migrants’ awareness of the existing ideas of integration surrounding them creates a complex reflective interaction between their own ideas and the (perceived) expectations from society. We identified aspects of consonance, where young migrants’ ideas coincide with the expectations they perceive. More importantly, however, our research has discovered that the youth experience tensions and dissonance between their own ideas of what integration should be and the concepts and expectations regarding integration they feel confronted with by society. Our analysis revealed that while young migrants’ understandings of integration are very close to state-of-the-art scientific conceptualizations of integration, this view is not matched by the meaning of integration they perceive around them.

There is limited evidence on the time-varying effects of migration on the psychological well-being of children who stay behind in African contexts. This study is the first to employ panel data to examine this nexus in the context of Ghana. Data were collected in 2013, 2014, and 2015 from school-going children in the age group of 12-21 years. Using children’s self-reports, an analysis was conducted separately for boys (N=781) and girls (N=705). Results indicate that girls and boys with the mother away internally or internationally are equally or more likely to have higher levels of psychological well-being when compared to boys and girls of nonmigrants. Higher level of well-being is observed amongst girls when parents migrate and divorce. However, parental migration and divorce is more likely to increase the psychological vulnerability of boys. In Ghana, the psychological well-being of children is nuanced by which parent has migrated, marital status of migrant parent, and the gender of the child.

Cross-border cooperation, border regions, soft spaces? This special issue approaches cross-border informal planning processes in cross-border regions by analysing them from a perspective that combines networks, governance and territorialization. Such a relational perspective will be developed by papers which deal with a variety of European cross-border regions and empirical evidence related to the nexus of networks, governance and territorialization.

Research on the governance of refugees has until recently remained conceptualized with the national perspective as a starting point. This article compares asylum governance at the local level between Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, focusing on the often sensitive and highly debated issue of reception and accommodation. The central idea is to determine convergences and divergences of local reception structures and efforts, and how they are linked to the governance levels situated above them. Despite municipalities having been greatly affected by, and having shaped in practice, reception and integration processes of asylum seekers and refugees, so far there has been little in terms of comparative research across countries in Europe. Our findings emerging from the comparison suggest that top-down implementations of asylum reception have created numerous problems and protest on the ground, especially when the local population and local stakeholders were not involved in the decision-making process. On the one hand, the case studies show that within each national setting, the local regimes and agencies can shape divergent reception outcomes in terms of integrative or disintegrative policies. On the other hand, converging developments in the local cases across national contexts, such as the impact of the local political climate, suggest the crucial impact of local reception regimes and agencies, notwithstanding varying regulatory frameworks and procedures. We thus underline the importance of local-to-local comparison, and not only national-to-national, when it comes to analysing refugee reception. Forschungen zur Implementierung von Asylpolitik verbleiben meist auf der nationalen Betrachtungsebene. Dieser Artikel nimmt einen lokalen Fokus ein, um Aufnahmepolitiken von Asylsuchenden in Deutschland, Luxemburg und den Niederlanden zu vergleichen. Der Beitrag hat zum Ziel, konvergierende und divergierende Strategien, Praktiken und Effekte zu identifizieren und die Verbindungen zu den übergeordneten Politikebenen zu analysieren. Obgleich die kommunale Ebene ganz wesentlich die Aufnahme von Asylsuchenden verantwortet und individuelle Aufnahme- und Integrationspraktiken entwickelt, gibt es dazu bislang kaum länderübergreifende vergleichende Forschung. Die Befunde unserer vergleichenden Lokalforschung zeigen, dass die zentrale Steuerung der Aufnahme Asylsuchender auf kommunaler Ebene verschiedene Probleme und Protesthaltungen erzeugt hat, insbesondere wenn die Bevölkerung und die Entscheidungsträger vor Ort nicht in den Entscheidungsprozess einbezogen wurden. Es zeigt sich, dass innerhalb des identischen nationalen Rahmens Aufnahmepolitiken höchst unterschiedliche Resultate zeitigen können, z.B. durch die Implementierung integrativer oder partikularer Politikansätze. Andererseits weisen konvergierende Entwicklungen in unseren Fallbeispielen auf die Bedeutung lokaler Aushandlungsprozesse und Diskurse hin, die sich trotz unterschiedlicher nationaler Regulierungen und Rahmenbedingungen in vergleichbarer Weise entwickeln können. Dadurch unterstreicht dieser Beitrag die Bedeutung von länderübergreifenden Lokalstudien und die generelle Bedeutung der lokalen Ebene in der vergleichenden Implementierungsforschung.

Die Auffassung, dass Grenzen aus sozialer Praxis hervorgehen und soziale Praxis hervorbringen, hat in den letzten Jahrzehnten für eine Reihe an Ansätzen und Begriffen gesorgt. Der Beitrag versucht diese zu systematisieren und stellt einen processual shift, multiplicity shift und complexitiy shift vor. Diese Trends beschreiben verschiedene analytische Schwerpunktsetzungen und eine zunehmend differenziertere Beschäftigung mit Grenzen. Abschließend wird auf die noch unzureichend bestimmte Kategorie der sozialen Praxis und auf das Potential der Praxistheorien für die Grenzforschung eingegangen.

When first established in 1987, the Erasmus programme (rebranded Erasmus+ in 2014) aimed to encourage transnational collaboration between higher education institutions without involving national authorities (Ribeiro 2021). One of its first functions was to enhance cultural integration (Gonzalez et al. 2011), but within a few years the European Commission started to include topics such as social and economic inclusion, which led to a diversification of its programmes (Cairns 2017), culminating in Erasmus+ encompassing areas such as volunteering, entrepreneurship and training (European Commission 2018: 3). The objective of this chapter is to look at this expanded range of opportunities for internationalized learning, focusing on experiences in Norway, Romania and Luxembourg, and a process we have called ‘Erasmus-ization.’ In practice, this can take many forms. For example, the interviews from Romania describe an enculturation to European values and global citizenship (Deardorff 2006), and experiential learning (Kolb 2014). In the case of Norway, a broadening of opportunity structures and an elongated transition to employment is found, and for young people who move to Luxembourg the future after Erasmus+ and the intrinsic value of exchanges can manifest many years after the experience. We therefore have a diversification of meaning, as well as a broadening of programmatic scope.

Ziel dieses Beitrags ist es, räumliche Transformation in die Debatte um raum- und planungsbezogene Leitbilder einzuordnen. Ausgangspunkt ist die sehr heterogene und im Zeit-ablauf wechselhafte, gelegentlich opportunistische Praxis der Formulierung planungsbezo-gener Paradigmen und Leitbilder. Sie folgt zwar spezifischen Problemwahrnehmungen, ist aber auch abhängig von temporären Moden, Konjunkturen und Konstrukten. Die erkenntnis-leitende Frage ist, inwieweit Transformation Leitbildcharakter hat, und wenn ja, worin sich dies äußert: in analytischer, normativer und prozeduraler Hinsicht. Ist das Leitbild allgemein (generell) oder spezifisch ausgerichtet – was ist seine konkrete Zielformulierung? Oder ist Transformation primär als prozedurale Richtschnur zu verstehen, als Metapher zur kollektiven Mobilisierung von Wandel, dessen Inhalte im Schatten partizipativer Prozesse stehen? Der Charme von Transformation liegt womöglich darin, dass dieser Begriff eine an-gemessen differenzierte Vorstellung von evolutionären gesellschaftlichen Veränderungen bietet. Ob es zum Konzept reicht, um intendierten Wandel auf robuste Weise anzuleiten – oder ob sein Mehrwert schlicht darin liegt, Realität zu „verzaubern“ (Tom Sieverts) – wird im Beitrag diskutiert.

The origins of logistics lie in military and imperial methods of expansion and control of geographical space. It is principally associated with the more recent contexts of business management and engineering. Logistics systems are now the conveyor belts of the global system of trade, commerce and production, and its associated techniques and strategies aim at optimizing flows and throughput within discrete units (such as firms), in economic networks and across geographical space. Because flows are important determinants for the development of places, logistics has the power to structure territories. Therefore, it has raised considerable interest in the field of geography, not only with regard to cities and their dense agglomeration of people, buildings and infrastructure, but also in geopolitical terms as it fosters the exploration, control and surveillance of areas. The paper presents a critical account of logistics operations and their relevance for the making (and unmaking) of territories, related policy dimensions and future challenges for research.

This article was adapted, revised and updated from the original, “Sidewalk Labs is closing down – Lessons from Toronto’s realpolitik” published at Urbanization Unbound, the blogspot of urban geographers at the Department of Geography and Spatial Planning of the University of Luxembourg, edited by Constance Carr and Markus Hesse.

The idea of a “Europe without borders” has been contested for the last decade and is increasingly overshadowed by rebordering phenomena. This development has sparked debates within border studies on how borders should be thought of and investigated. The introductory article deals with this and reconstructs the formation and differentiation of the bordering approach. Furthermore, the concept of border experiences is determined as an investigative perspective that is interested in everyday cultural arenas of bordering processes. It puts the agency of ‘border(lands) residents’ in the center and provides insights into everyday cultural border (re)productions.With this in mind, we will present the book articles in the final section.

Luxembourg is characterized by phenomena of mobility that includecross-border commuters and residential migrants. While both groups havebeen mainly examined from a socioeconomic perspective, this paperadopts a sociocultural approach. We will focus on the question of the ex-tent to which cross-border mobility in everyday life promotes cross-borderlifeworlds. This will involve examining people’s social contacts at theirplace of work and/or place of residence as well as the spatial organizationof practices of the everyday life of both groups. The paper gives insights in-to everyday lives at the EU’s internal borders, whose organization into na-tion states is subordinate and at the same time constitutive.

Cet article tente de retracer une histoire, celle de l’évolution de ma propre réflexivité durant le temps d’une thèse intitulée « Aménager les frontières des périphéries européennes. La frontière Serbie/Croatie à l’épreuve des injonctions à la coopération et à la réconciliation » (thèse de doctorat, Tours, Université François-Rabelais, 2016). Mon propos ici est de rendre compte d’une conviction, la nécessité de s’engager dans une démarche réflexive et critique avant, pendant et après la production de la recherche en elle-même. Cet article constitue ainsi une tentative de démonstration par l’exemple de l’intérêt d’une telle posture. Je vise, d’une part, à exposer comment j’ai construit mes réflexions épistémologiques, par une déconstruction progressive des cadres théoriques classiques (nationalistes, post-socialiste, post-yougoslave) choisis ou imposés. D’autre part, j’expose les aboutissements de cette réflexivité, c’est-à-dire principalement ma prise de conscience de la colonialité du savoir (et du mien en particulier). Cette gymnastique m’a permis de parfois dépasser certaines limites de mon travail, et plus souvent d’en rendre compte, mais aussi d’accepter l’indépassable lié à certains aspects de ma situation de recherche, de la manière dont je l’ai énoncée et conduite. Mener ce type d’exercice et en rendre compte contribuent alors à mieux préciser les conditions de validité scientifique de ces travaux, à mieux situer le propos et l’apport du chercheur, sa position et donc sa positionalité., This article is a story narrating the evolution of my own reflections during my Ph.D.: “Planning at the Borders of European Peripheries: The Serbia/Croatia Borderland and the EU Cooperation and Reconciliation Injunctions” (Ph.D. thesis, Tours, Université François-Rabelais, 2016). Using auto-ethnographic methods, this article demonstrates a conviction, the necessity to engage with a reflexive and critical approach, before, during, and after the production of research. I show first how I built the thesis’ epistemological approach, by progressively deconstructing classical theoretical frameworks (nationalist, post-socialist, post-Yugoslav). I expose and discuss then the outcomes of such a reflexivity, in particular how I gradually became conscious of the coloniality of (my) knowledge. These mental gymnastics allowed me to occasionally overcome – but regularly report on – the limits of my research, but also to recognize the unsurpassibility of certain aspects of my work connected to the situation in which I stated and conducted it. Reflecting on epistemological reflexivity contributes to clarifying scientific (in)validity of research, and better situates researcher’s arguments, their position and positionality.

This paper has a quintessentially explorative character. It aims at identifying existing as well as potential (yet missing) links between the finance industry and local businesses that aspire to more sustainable economic practices. Building on the observation that green investments have been gaining weight in global investors’ strategies, we analyse how sustainable – in the most comprehensive sense of the word – green investments could ultimately be(come), when green assets are still managed according to the logic of “financialised finance”. This latter’s technologies of commodification, securitisation and derivatives-trading allegedly oppose alternative economic practices that pursue economic sustainability through social and environmental gains. In contrast, we investigate how the finance industry relates to alternative financial practices, products and organisations that offer sustainability-oriented financing services, – for example, regional banks, cooperatives and the like, – with a specific focus on green, social and solidarity businesses. Both approaches subscribe to apparently contradictory ideologies. We establish a beneficial dialogue between the opposing models of “green capitalism” and “alternative economies” so as to identify potential points of intersection. The context of Luxembourg’s local/regional economies provides a great opportunity to empirically access three levels of investigation: the private sector, the public sector and an international financial centre, a key facilitator for green finance, thus utilising insights from the concept of bricolage. Whilst supporters of Luxembourg’s emerging green finance profile recognise its positive impact on the small country’s national branding, in combination with economic stimuli, more critical commentators point to pure “green washing” effects.

Following the terrorist attacks in Paris (November 2015) and Brussels (March 2016), several EU Member States have decided to re-establish border controls or to build walls inside the Schengen Area. Although these decisions are temporary and legally framed by the Schengen code, their extent disrupts the free movement within the Schengen Area, in particular in border areas. While lawyers and economists have analyzed the impacts of this situation, the spatial perspective has remained rather neglected. This exploratory contribution aims to address this gap in the literature by outlining the spatial significance of reintroduced controls for border areas inside the Schengen Area. This contribution firstly undertakes a literature review of the different conceptual tools at hand. These are then compared with a set of exploratory empirical materials. The article focuses more precisely on the Greater Region where France and Germany have reintroduced border controls, thus disrupting in particular daily cross-border flows with Luxembourg and Belgium. The analysis demonstrates that the border acts as a filter, disrupting cross-border flows and cooperation. Also, it sheds some light on the important role played by the ideational perception of the border for practitioners and decision-makers. This contribution concludes by suggesting several paths for a future research agenda.

This article excavates the role, function and practices of community within Transition, a grassroots environmentalist movement. It does so to pursue a quest for understanding if, how, and in what ways, community-based environmental movements are ‘political’. When community-based low carbon initiatives are discussed academically, they can be critiqued; this critique is in turn often based on the perception that the crucial community aspect tends to be a settled, static and reified condition of (human) togetherness. However community—both in theory and practice—is not destined to be so. This article collects and evaluates data from two large research projects on the Transition movement. It takes this ethnographic evidence together with lessons from post-political theory, to outline the capacious, diverse and progressive forms of community that exists within the movement. Doing so, it argues against a blanket post-political diagnosis of community transitions, and opens up, yet again, the consequences of the perceptions and prejudices one has about community are more than mere theoretical posturing.

Many scholars have been interested in studying patterns of language shift or language maintenance of migrants during their diaspora. One way of sustaining the development of a home language can be the attendance of a complementary school. This paper explores the differing perspectives on teaching and learning Greek in a complementary school in multilingual Luxembourg. The participants include the two teachers of this school, the mothers of three newly migrated families, and their children. The children are multilingual and attend the Greek complementary school once a week. The data, which stem from interviews with all participants, have been analysed thematically. The findings show that the children’s understanding of the purpose of attending the school and their experiences within the school, varied with age and school friendships. The teachers were aware of the children’s different levels of motivation, which they associated with language competence and opportunities for socialisation. Although they valued the children’s multilingualism, they did not build on this their lessons which were underpinned by a monolingual policy. While the parents had high expectations regarding competence in Greek, and enrolled their children to develop this competence, they nevertheless did not seem to perceive Greek as an educational priority. The findings of this paper encourage teachers to reflect on their language policies and teaching approaches and encourage them to capitalise on their students’ heterogeneity.

À travers une analyse des camps de réfugiés palestiniens en Jordanie, cet article montre que, afin de rendre compte de la multi-dimensionnalité qui caractérise l’expérience des réfugiés dans les camps, il est nécessaire de s’intéresser aux processus complexes par lesquels ces espaces deviennent des lieux « exceptionnels », mais aussi « ordinaires ». Le fonctionnement des camps en tant qu’ « espaces d’ambiguïté » est ainsi le concept qui permet le mieux de saisir leur nature. En Jordanie, c’est le caractère ambigu des camps de réfugiés palestiniens qui permet de garantir une forme de stabilité politique. Afin de mettre en évidence cette ambiguïté, après avoir étudié son origine et sa mise en place, les auteurs analysent sa spatialisation dans les camps, en s’intéressant à la gestion de ces lieux. Il montre que la re-production de cette ambiguïté est le fait des acteurs en charge des camps, ainsi que des réfugiés eux-mêmes. This article looks at the evolution of Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. To understand the complexity of refugees’ experience, it is necessary to move beyond the discussion of whether refugee camps are « spaces of exception » or « ordinary spaces », and examine how exceptionality and ordinariness are dimensions ultimately interconnected in the camp. The authors argue here that the concept of « spaces of ambiguity » is the analytical category best suited to grasp the complex nature of refugee camps and the crucial role that they have played to the very political stability of Jordan. To show this, the article will explore the institution of this ambiguity, its spatialisation and its re-production within the camps. It will do so by looking at the management of camps and the main actors involved.

Knowledge coproduction between practitioners and scientists offers promising opportunities for the emerging research field of the geography of sustainability transitions. Drawing on experiences from an international research project on urban green building transitions, this article explores the potentials and challenges of interactive and collaborative knowledge generation methods in understanding sustainability transitions. Our results show that ongoing engagement with local experts and practitioners through interactive World Caf e workshops and follow-up exchanges allows for a better understanding of the research context and knowledge exchange to all participants involved in the research process.

Maintaining cognitive function is a prerequisite of living independently, which is a highly valued component in older individuals' well-being. In this article we assess the role of early-life and later-life nutritional status, education, and literacy on the cognitive functioning of older adults living in poverty in Peru. We exploit the baseline sample of the Peruvian noncontributory pension program Pension 65 and find that current nutritional status and literacy are strongly associated with cognitive functioning for poor older adults. In a context of rising popularity of noncontributory pension programs around the world, our study intends to contribute to the discussion of designing accompanying measures to the pension transfer, such as adult literacy programs and monitoring of adequate nutrition of older adults.

During the 1980s, refugee camps along the Thai–Cambodian border constituted the power base for the civil war parties opposing the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK, 1979–91). Politics of accommodation and basic services also played a key role in the ‘original accumulation’ of political power by the new regime in Phnom Penh. The resettlement process of Cambodia’s deserted cities developed into a major playground for clientelism, the founda-tion of Cambodia’s state-building process after the Khmer Rouge. Focusing on the archival heritage of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cam-bodia (UNTAC) 1992–93, a spatial analysis of Phnom Penh’s political geography from the late 1970s to the late 1990s will be provided. This paper argues that the UNTAC time marked a watershed, whose impact has been underrated for Cambodia’s political future: the transition in the accommodation policy of a besieged regime. UNTAC did not end the civil war, but changed the political economy of the country. As the need to ‘camp-in’ and share billeted living space gradually diminished, the socialist ‘moral economy’ mutated into quick money politics and political family business to ensure the hegemonic status of Cambodia’s ruling party further.

Grenzen sind in der Planungspraxis vielfaltig vorzufinden. Vor allem nationale Grenzen definieren das Territorium, in welchen Planungsinstitutionen und -kulturen verankert sind und ihre Planungsbefugnisse gelten. Im Rahmen der europaischen Integration gibt es zwar verschiedene Instrumentarien einer grenzubergreifenden Raumplanung, da jedoch die Europaische Union keine Raumplanungskompetenz besitzt, sind diese stets im Kontext nationaler Raumplanungsgesetze und -kulturen zu verstehen. Der Beitrag zeigt, welche Masnahmen die Europaische Union getroffen hat (z. B. INTERREG, Territoriale Agenda 2007 und 2020, makroregionale Strategien), um nationalen Grenzen in der Raumplanung weniger Gewicht zu geben und die territoriale Kohasion zu fordern. Gleichzeitig zeigt sich aber auch die Definitionsmacht nationaler Grenzen in diesem Kompetenzfeld.

The Climate Challenge Fund (CCF) is the Scottish Government’s flagship initiative addressing the twenty-first century’s core concern: environmental challenges. The CCF seeks to reduce carbon emissions explicitly through community. Building on community’s long and strong social science heritage, this paper outlines the CCF’s tacit and unspoken community assumptions. Through these assumptions, this policy (re)produces, prefigures and performs a particular form of community, this being community’s elision with locality, and synonym for place, rurality or neighbourhood. Taking on these tacit assumptions is demonstrative of their belief in the effectiveness of such community. After exploring the CCF, its source and structure, the paper delves into empirical work situated at all levels of the CCF’s funding chain. It then teases out how the assumptions around – and the need to demonstrate – community help determine the projects selected, and subsequently the vision of community chosen, enacted and mobilised. The CCF (re) produces a particular vision of community with implications for who receives funding, how environmental action is framed and also for the future of community in Scotland.

This article addresses the narrowing interpretation of community when governmentalised: that of community’s elision with local. First it surveys five broad academic and policy interpretations of the community implied in low carbon transitions. These demonstrate the persistence of community’s broad and open-ended polysemy today. Second it looks more closely at the role community plays in UK environmental governance today, including specific evidence from two such government-funded community initiatives used to meet global environmental challenges: Transition Towns and Carbon Conversations. Third it provides a critique of community governance-beyond-the-state. It argues that community used to “jump scales” in response to global challenges like climate change, is often at its most narrow: local and governmentalised. Doing so helps contextualise the governmentalisation of (local-) community in UK environmental governance. Often it is localised in order to delegate (perceived) agency and responsibility onto individual actors at a local level.

Sustainable development policies are on the move. Cities the world over are reposition-ing, repackaging and remarketing themselves as green and sustainable, and sustainable development is the moniker imported to spark the process. At the same time, sustainable development, as a normative point of departure, is itself going through cycles of reinterpretation and re-composition. The research in this paper aims to understand this process by mapping the trajectories of sustainable development policies, and understanding sustainable development as a contextually grounded policy in motion. In Luxembourg, as planners are confronted with finding ways to manage growth, sustainable development has come to permeate all levels of the planning system. To understand how this came into being, research methods were employed that include document screening and a series of conversational interviews that were later transcribed and coded. In so doing, the discourse around sustainable development policy could be reconstructed and analysed. The results showed that the multi-scalar, cross-national, and simultaneously micro-level governance structures pose many obstructions to the implementation of sustainable development policies that are imported from abroad. Thus, policy is ultimately immobile, and a policy paralysis can be spoken of.

Landnutzungssysteme und die Vielfalt der Biodiversität lassen sich in Deutschland anhand des Netzes von Großschutzgebieten untersuchen. Im vorliegenden Schwerpunktheft stehen Natur- und Nationalparke sowie Biosphärenreservate im Fokus, die sich in unterschiedlicher Weise mit Flächenkonkurrenzen und Akzeptanzproblemen auseinandersetzen müssen. Der Arbeitskreis „Biodiversität und nachhaltige Landnutzung in Großschutzgebieten“ der Akademie für Raumforschung und Landesplanung (ARL) hat sich mit dieser Thematik befasst. Der vorliegende Beitrag zeigt dabei die Forschungsfragen auf, die in den nachfolgenden Beiträgen dieses Heftes debattiert werden. Dazu gehört, welchen Einfluss unterschiedliche Landnutzungssysteme auf die Beschaffenheit von Ökosystemleistungen haben, wie die Großschutzgebietstypen hinsichtlich ihres jeweiligen Beitrages zu Erhalt und Entwicklung von Biodiversität zu bewerten sind, welche Rolle speziell dem Wald und dessen Bewirtschaftung im Hinblick auf Biodiversität und nachhaltige Landnutzung zukommt und welche Konfliktmuster durch Raumnutzungskonkurrenzen bestehen. Untersucht werden auch konkrete Governance-Ansätze in Großschutzgebieten vor dem Hintergrund von Flächenkonkurrenzen und es wird der Frage nachgegangen, wie in Großschutzgebieten gewonnene Erfahrungen auf die Gesamtfläche übertragen werden können. Darüber hinaus liefert dieser Beitrag die grundlegenden Definitionen zum Thema des Heftes. Schließlich werden aus unterschiedlicher fachlicher Perspektive Forderungen an politische und planerische Akteure gestellt, die eine nachhaltige Entwicklung von Großschutzgebieten in Deutschland unterstützen sollen. Eine stringente Stärkung des Stellenwertes von Großschutzgebieten auf Bundesebene mit entsprechenden administrativen Strukturen steht hier ebenso im Fokus wie die Forderung nach einer stärkeren Qualitätssicherung und -entwicklung der Großschutzgebiete. Auch das Spannungsfeld zwischen der Notwendigkeit des stärkeren Prozessschutzes und der Intensivierung der Landwirtschaft im Zuge der Gemeinsamen Agrarpolitik der EU wird in den Forderungen aufgegriffen. Land-use systems and biodiversity in Germany can be investigated using the network of protected areas. This issue focuses on nature parks, national parks and biosphere reserves that are confronted with various problems related to competition for land and acceptance. The working group “Biodiversity and sustainable land use in protected areas” of the Academy for Spatial Research and Planning (ARL) has tackled this topic. This paper reviews the research questions that are debated in this special issue of “Raumforschung und Raumordnung”. These questions include the influence of different land-use systems on the state of ecosystem services, how the different types of protected areas should be evaluated in terms of their individual contributions to the conservation and development of biodiversity, the role played specifically by woods and forestry management with regard to biodiversity and sustainable land use, and the patterns of conflict that exist due to competing land uses. Attention is also paid to concrete governance approaches in protected areas against the background of competition for land and the question of how experience gained in protected areas can be transferred to ‚normal‘ landscapes. The paper also provides basic definitions relevant to the topic. Finally, from the perspective of various disciplines, the working group calls for policy and planning actors to support the sustainable development of protected areas in Germany. Here the focus is not only on a stringent strengthening of the status of protected areas on the federal level combined with appropriate administrative structures, but also on promoting improved quality assurance and quality development of the protected areas. Of further relevance to these calls for action is the field of tension between the necessity for strengthened process protection and the intensification of agriculture in the context of EU Common Agricultural Policy.

Urban green space (UGS) has many environmental and social benefits. UGS provision and access are increasingly considered in urban policies and must rely on data and indicators that can capture variations in the distribution of UGS within cities. There is no consensus about how UGS, and their provision and access, must be defined from different land use data types. Here we identify four spatial dimensions of UGS and critically examine how different data sources affect these dimensions and our understanding of their variation within a city region (Brussels). We compare UGS indicators measured from an imagery source (NDVI from Landsat), an official cadastre-based map, and the voluntary geographical information provided by OpenStreetMap (OSM). We compare aggregate values of provision and access to UGS as well as their spatial distribution along a centrality gradient and at neighbourhood scale. We find that there are strong differences in the value of indicators when using the different datasets, especially due to their ability to capture private and public green space. However we find that the interpretation of intra-urban spatial variations is not affected by changes in data source. Centrality in particular is a strong determinant of the relative values of UGS availability, fragmentation and accessibility, irrespective of datasets.

What is the SaarLorLux Greater Region? Is it one or more realities of life? One or more political constructions? Or: Is the SaarLorLux Greater Region perhaps something completely different? These are questions that are investigated in this part.

This paper presents a method for determining and mapping suitable locations for development using Multi Criteria Analysis and the Analytical Hierarchy Process and considering uncertainties in the process. The method is applied to the case study of Howth (Dublin), where development suitability is assessed against specific protection and conservation areas as well as ground water vulnerability. Uncertainty is incorporated using a Monte Carlo simulation into the Analytical Hierarchy Process calculations to determine criteria weightings. A map is derived, which includes, for all locations, both site suitability for development and the level of uncertainty attached to this suitability. The map combines a double categorization of suitability and uncertainty. The method allows for increased transparency in decision making regarding site suitability for development, as well as increased confidence in decision making to allow for reduced risk in terms of the potential impact of development.

Erfahrungsbericht vom Einsatz prozessualer bzw. kommunikativer Planungsformen in einem tendenziell nicht-kommunikativen Milieu.

Le système luxembourgeois d'aménagement du territoire fait actuellement l'objet d'une réforme fondamentale visant à en restructurer totalement certains aspects. Le présent article passe en revue les changements en trois phases. Nous allons dans un premier temps décrire brièvement le contexte territorial du Luxembourg, lequel présente certaines spécificités en raison de la petite taille du pays et des taux de croissance élevés de son économie et de sa population au cours des dernières années. L'article propose ensuite une évaluation synthétique des instruments, actuels et envisagés, d'aménagement du territoire et des institutions responsables de ce domaine au Luxembourg. Enfin, nous examinerons les arguments étayant le positionnement du Luxembourg dans le contexte des cultures européennes d'aménagement du territoire. Luxembourg’s planning system is currently undergoing fundamental reforms that aim to establish completely new structures within it. The present paper discusses these developments in three steps: It will begin with a brief description of Luxembourg’s spatial context, which is characterised by a number of peculiar features due to the country’s small size and high economic and populations growth rates in recent years. Secondly, the paper will provide a synthesis and appraisal of those Luxembourgish spatial planning instruments and institutions that are already in place as well as those that are envisaged for the future. In a third step, arguments defining Luxembourg's position in the context of European planning cultures will be examined. In Luxemburg wird derzeit das Planungssystem grundlegend reformiert und in Teilen gänzlich neu etabliert. Der vorliegende Beitrag reflektiert diese Entwicklungen und geht dabei in drei Schritten vor: Erstens wird der räumliche Kontext Luxemburgs kurz geschildert, der aufgrund der geringen Größe des Landes und der weit überdurchschnittlichen Wirtschafts- und Bevölkerungsentwicklung der vergangenen Jahre einige Besonderheiten aufweist. Zweitens wird eine synthetische Bestandsaufnahme der bereits etablierten und zukünftig vorgesehenen Instrumente und Institutionen der Luxemburger Raumordnung gegeben. Drittens werden Argumente für eine planungstheoretische Verortung auf europäischer Ebene diskutiert.