Finished Research Projects

German-Polish Science Foundation

Since Poland's accession to the EU, economic and social interdependencies between the Polish city of Szczecin and its rural German hinterland in Western Pomerania and the Uckermark have increased. These processes are interpreted as an expression of cross-border regional formation "from below" or as a metropolization of the city. In the greater Szczecin area, local, national and European integration processes overlap and influence each other. The TransBorder Szczecin project aims to create knowledge about which endogenous processes contribute to or hinder the establishment of progressive governance in the region. 

Aims of the project:

• Recording cross-border processes in the Szczecin region
• Conceptual reflections on regionalization and metropolization "from below" in European border regions
• Proposals for the design of regional governanc

German Academic Exchange Service

The project focuses on the development and subsequent testing of an analytically and methodologically up-to-date approach to a multidimensional analysis of urban change in a post-socialist context. Urban change is interpreted as a long-term dynamic process with evolutionary characteristics. Both abrupt and incremental changes can occur, development trends can prevail or lead to a dead end. Urban change takes place on various levels: quite obviously in the area of urban development, but also on a social and economic level. As part of the project, these different dimensions of urban change are to be recorded and analyzed in their relationship to each other using the example of spaces of liminality to be identified from an evolutionary perspective.

The programmatic introduction of organizational routines into economic geography took place in Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG). However, there are conceptual and ontological tensions between the evolutionary economic black box routine approach used in EEG and a relational economic geography inspired by organizational theory and sociology. This results in challenges for the integration of organizational routines into relational economic geography. In the research project, the black box routine is opened up based on the organizational-theoretical-sociological routine concept of Feldman and Pentland and integrated into a relational-spatial perspective using the example of change and diffusion.