Recent  

The paper examines the contribution of Italian academic geography to the processes of nation-building between ca. 1880–1920, especially in defining the national space and its boundaries. Italian geographers were particularly influenced by new approaches introduced by German scholars such as Friedrich Ratzel. Scientific theories and representations proved highly significant in influencing the political debate.

The relevance of the outbreak of the First and Second World Wars to the posthumous reception of Ratzel's work cannot be overestimated; Kjellen in particular was one of the main protagonists of Ratzel's revival. Kjellen and Schmitt appropriated and transformed Ratzel's concepts for their research aims, in order to highlight a new turning point in the political and juridical sciences and in politics. As a consequence, their Ratzel was oriented toward militant aims.

This article examines a collaborative theatre project on the climate crisis from an autoethnographic perspective. The collaboration of scientists and artists created affective atmospheres that opened up spaces for reflection on scientific practice in the context of posthumanist theories: To what extend do we perceive our material environment as powerful? How are bodies and affects entangled in knowledge production? In what ways we still reproduce dualisms and fixed identities?

Wir untersuchen wie BürgerInneninitiativen im Kontext emotionalisierter Umweltwahrnehmungen Rhetoriken von Nähe nutzen, um sichere Fahrradinfrastruktur einzufordern. Wir zeigen durch Bild- und Sprachanalysen wie Anliegen von Sicherheit und Lebensqualität in einer Sprache der Nähe artikuliert werden. Nahes wird so zum Eigenen und Selbstbestimmten. Diese Raumaneignungen markieren Fahrraddemonstrationen als relevante Protestform, die Emotionen transformieren und Umweltwahrnehmungen intensivieren.

The paper explores the reception and re-elaboration of Friedrich Ratzel's political geography in Italy from the beginning of the 20th century to the Second World War, by focusing on the concept of spazio vitale (living space) and its use by fascist intellectuals and propagandists, who promoted expansionism and the trilateral collaboration with Germany and Japan.

We modelled potential regional energy landscapes that can be derived from the two-degree target and visualised them based on Geographical Information Systems by using five scenarios involving changes to the planning guidelines. The analyses reveal that the development of a carbon-neutral energy system is possible. Yet the potential spatial patterns of renewable energies differ considerably.

Political ecology emerged half a century ago and was introduced in German speaking countries twenty years later. The article evaluates perspectives (views, arguments, positions) of the first generation of research and compares them with second generation research. It is argued that old and new approaches are to be blamed for their ambivalence towards policy. With a focus on emancipatory perspectives, a repositioning is suggested on radical geography roots.

With this contribution (which is designed as a positioning), the author pleads for a more consistent consideration of structural influences in the discussion of mortality in (textbook) population geography, and for a critical discussion of these influences. He refers to various conceptions that already have fixed places in human geography – but not in population geography – and that offer starting points for corresponding discussions.