Focusing on the aftermath of the murder of 8-year-old Araceli in Vitória in 1973, the paper develops an approach to analysing necropolitical power through obfuscated traces of violence. For this purpose, archival research is combined with an account of recent mobilizations around the toponomy related to the murder. What thus emerges is a nuanced analysis of contested “signatures of power” that are inscribed into urban space.

In the paper, we shed light on the extent to which students who moved to a university city perceive their place of study as temporary or permanent. Furthermore, we explore the effects of temporary or permanent living arrangements on place attachments, belonging and feelings of home. The results show that students who moved to the university cities perceive themselves as residents after some years, and quite a few even aim to stay beyond their studies.

The paper shows that the fight against COVID-19 has contributed in manifold ways to establishing the air as an object of imagination, concern and practice, generating novel ways of understanding it, of experiencing it and of acting on it. From this, a series of important insights are derived with regard to our understanding of the “air” as a realm of reality that is dramatically underplayed in socio-spatial theory.

This article systematically reviews how research within the Alpine Arc explores open spaces, their ecosystem services, and their role in spatial planning processes and land-use decision-making processes. Results show a research imbalance and a lack of solution statements for identified problems in Alpine research. Open spaces require safeguarding beyond regional borders and beyond spatial planning documents in a more proactive manner to ensure long-term quality of life within and beyond the Alps.

The article examines how asylum seekers in the Greek refugee camp Moria were barely kept alive through different technologies and actors taking part in the field. It also examines the political purpose of placing asylum seekers on the brink of death in European refugee camps.

The analysis of the discourses relating to wild animals in urban administration and planning shows the spectrum of justifications on the grounds of which free roaming animals have been killed in German cities since the 1950s.

Using the example of resistance to a mega-project in southern Mexico, this paper explores the emotional connections between bodies and land. The mega-project in question is the Interoceanic Corridor, which connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, leading to significant territorial reorganisation. Based on interviews with women who identify as defenders of territorio, I investigate how the women use their emotional link strategically in their practices of resistance.

Empirical research on pet cemeteries demonstrates that ambivalent attributions to pets as social partners, material objects, and abject cadavers shape the place and related practices. Situated within the frameworks of more-than-human geographies and animal geographies, the article argues (1) that analysing the multidimensional status of dead animals provides a productive lens for understanding human-animal relations and illustrates (2) how loss processing can be read in a more-than-human way.

This article contributes to studies on and interventions in the quality of old persons' everyday environments. First, it draws on work in geography and psychology to develop an innovative theoretical and methodological framework for interventions aiming to improve the quality of this environment. Second, it shows, step by step, how this framework was used in the context of a project in Switzerland targeting the prevention of old people's social isolation.

The loss was commonplace in Aleppo during the recent war. This paper explores how various groups at the front lines in East Aleppo sought to preserve heritage to reconstruct it after the war. I argue that these individuals were exposed to existential fear. Their efforts to localize grief and loss imagined the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the old city of Aleppo as an eternal object that preceded their human life span. In exile, their attitudes diverted toward this legacy.

Using memes, maps, and audio collages, we discuss the politics of giving and its impact on urban development in the city of Heilbronn. Focusing on the activities of one powerful philanthropist, the perspectives of local residents reveal ambivalent interpretations of recent urban developments. While acknowledging the new opportunities and dynamics offered by philanthropy, they also raise concerns about its effects on local democratic decision-making processes and unequal urban power relations.

Drawing on auto-ethnographically documented experimental visualization practices and in conversation with critical cartography and the debates on diagrammatic reasoning in the arts, this paper argues that visualization should be considered more systematically as a method that bears self-reflexive and epistemic potential within qualitative research processes.

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.