I ask how creativity-based ideas of regional development are applied in the European Metropolitan Region of Nuremberg (EMN). The paper focuses on the different ways of "networking" related to "creatives" in the EMN and on the former brownfield called On AEG, because this allows for understanding the logics of the application. Drawing on a mix of methods including walking and photo interviews and coding, I reconstructed a bias towards a technology and business orientation in networking.

The spatial economy approach (Raumwirtschaftlicher Ansatz) in the German economic geography is usually characterized as neoclassical, chorological and neo-positivist. Based on a literature review and a contextualization from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, the article shows that this approach was pluralistic and informed spatial planning processes, and that in the late 1970s, it became a distinct branch of economic geography in the literature of the German-speaking regions.

Through a case study of Toronto's 2011 Core Service Review, this paper sets out to examine the textually mediated practices through which policy knowledge is generated and contested. It highlights how management consultants make use of evaluative texts in lifting out ideas from other places and folding them into the policy-making process. However, while these texts are presented as a pure lens of cost savings, they are often built on tenuous connections that can be publicly disassembled.

With this contribution I show how scientific publications on environmental issues in Western China implicitly reproduce social ideals and social relations and thus ultimately contribute to the perpetuation of existing power constellations. This stresses that there can be no scientific expertise that does not take a normative position. Accordingly, what drives me to do research is to show the political implications of academia and to contribute to making science a politico-ethical endeavor.

Drawing on ethnographic research in a center for unaccompanied minor asylum seekers (UAM) in Switzerland we explored educational experiences of UAM. Our results show that attending internal schools should be time-bound as it can hinder the recognition of UAM’s previously acquired educational knowledge. Further, UAM attending mainstream schools experience feelings of not belonging, which seem to be caused by having the life experiences of a UAM and stereotypes about refugees and asylum seekers.

Drawing upon a quantitative opinion survey conducted in the Swiss Canton of Neuchâtel in 2015, the paper provides insight into how far the current proliferation of private drones truly reaches. The paper also studies how the usage and societal diffusion of civil drones is perceived and lived by the population at large. Such a perspective is needed to understand the driving forces that shape current drone developments, and to explore the wider societal implications of the technology.

From the colonial era up to the present, mega-irrigation projects have played a key role in Sahelian Africa. It is possible to interpret them as territorial traps: they set up boundaries (physical, relational, cognitive and operative) that force evolutive trajectories along rigid pathways. After the failure of the mega-irrigation projects, farmers are faced with significant constraints. They identified a means of escape from these catastrophes by transgressing the boundaries imposed.