In the struggles on the decarbonization of the mainly fossil-based heat supply in German cities competing actors and corporations try to achieve their strategies. Especially in Berlin these debates are fierce. Those disputes crystallize in the question whether the corporate gas-based infrastructure will be adjusted by means of green gases resp. hydrogen or whether it will be transformed to a new system based on renewable energies resp. heatpumps.

Focusing on Gymnasia, Zurich's selective public secondary schools, this article analyzes how Gymnasium staff and education policies address students and how students perceive the Gymnasia. Students learn to see Gymnasia as stellar schools for hard-working and intelligent students who earned their privileges and coproduce and legitimize their privileged status by drawing on their merit. These processes contribute to a hierarchization of Zurich's schooling landscape.

This article explores people's narratives about changing shipyard work in East Germany since 1989. The shipyard serves as a central place where loss, emotions and memory condense. Using oral history interviews with former workers, it delves into their experiences and emotions about (the fear of) losing their jobs. This sheds light on how transformations affect people emotionally, highlighting oral history's role in capturing personal experiences in geographic research.

Critical geographers in recent years became interested incidents of failure, disruption and glitches in digital technologies. While we sympathize with the basic assumptions of this discussion this paper proposes an opposing perspective. Using the example of Internet infrastructures, we focus on the work of preventing glitches and maintanance. We are particularly interested in the production of resilience the rationalities of redundancy and addressing latency.

The terms left behind, Abgehängte (suspended), and structurally weak have gained popularity to describe regions with increased support for right-wing populist parties in Germany and elsewhere. These concepts are not clearly defined. We give meaning to left behind places in Germany both by identifying the dimensions and varieties of left-behindness and by framing it as an outcome of peripheralisation processes. 

This article explores how LGBT organizations in Germany create safer spaces for queer asylum seekers and refugees. With the help of interviews with experts and an analysis of their websites, different constructions of space are identified. Although the organizations use different concepts of safer spaces, they mainly fall back on essentialist notions of space. The assumption of an essentialist safer space bears the risk of oversimplification, which does not meet the needs of the target group.

The governance of urban drug use and its economies has played an important role in the production and control of public space in numerous cities of the global North since the 1970s. Using the example of Görlitzer Park in Berlin's Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district, this paper argues for a spatially sensitive perspective on the spatializing practices of urban drug policies.

Smart home technologies promote ageing in place as solution for the care crisis in ageing societies. Based on an ethnographic investigation in technology showrooms and interviews with developers, we show how smart home technologies construct images of active age on the one hand, and dependent old age on the other. We show that images of ageing are also spatial constructions that idealize the home as a place of active age and devalue the nursing home as a place of old age.

Decades of neglect and disinvestment have left Detroit with many abandoned buildings, ruins, and empty lots. These structures and materials can act as catalysts, substances, and co-creators of artworks. By focusing on the two Detroit artists Olayami Dabls and Scott Hocking, the paper explores how art, space, and materials interact and how materials actively contribute to art.

In a 2010 survey, Central Asia was absent from the representations of the World of students in 18 countries. The survey was repeated in 2018–2019 in Kazakhstan, on the assumption that Central Asia would be represented by the students. The results support the theory of social representations of space, but shed some original light on the issue, particularly the importance of states in the way the world is divided up.

Why do isolated Swiss ski lifts die? A comprehensive survey of all isolated lifts ever established in Switzerland is conducted. Using a set-theoretical method (qualitative comparative analysis), it is shown that closed isolated lifts tend to be outdated and have no technical snowmaking facilities. Moreover, it is evident that the simultaneous occurrence of the lack of lift facility replacement, lack of snowmaking and high ski area competition has caused the closure of most isolated lifts.

This article explores whether the reduction in geographical knowledge leads to better Education for Sustainable Development or to a general loss of quality in Geography teaching and learning.

Renewable energy technologies require land. Landowners therefore often play a crucial role in wind energy development, shaping participation opportunities of various groups. Through case studies of the Netherlands and Scotland, we unpack how landownership influences the possible strategies for community energy. We find that securing community ownership of the land or wind resource itself is a potentially powerful, long-term strategy for community energy movements to achieve their goals.

This paper explores the role of power, institutions, and actors in climate change adaptation. We introduce reflexive capacity, which is the ability of organizations to include diverse stakeholders and knowledge in decision-making. By analyzing a case study from Germany, we highlight how this capacity can transform over time and impact adaptation strategies. We conclude that understanding power and agency in this context can provide important insights for improving climate change adaptation.

This paper develops a situated governmentality approach to the particularities of energy transition projects, focusing on smart grid strategies in Germany and India. By analysing the underlying rationalities and power dynamics driving these energy transition projects, we challenge the dominant perception of smart grids as a universal solution. Our findings emphasize the different contexts in which smart grids are being developed and the various technologies of power at play.

A critique of critical posthumanism from the perspective of the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner argues that practitioners of critical posthumanism are too quick with their critique of hitherto used conceptualisations of the human and too easily assume their utopian thinking to be the end of the debate, instead of engaging in a continuing search for a more human or posthuman world. This reflection could help to make critical posthumanism even more critical.