Hans-Joachim Bürkner

Wissensmilieus — Zur sozialen Konstruktion und analytischen Rekonstruktion eines neuen Sozialraum-Typus

Das Verhaltnis von Wissensentwicklung und Raumentwicklung erfahrt derzeit in Forschung und Politik starke Beachtung („Wissensgesellschaft“, „Wissensstadt“). Die analytischen Zugriffe der sozialwissenschaftlichen Raumforschung auf diesen Entwicklungszusammenhang erscheinen allerdings weiterhin relativ oberflachlich — trotz einer steigenden Rate von Forschungen und Veroffentlichungen auf diesem Feld. Vor allem operieren viele Ansatze ohne ausreichenden Bezug auf die Differenziertheit konkreter Wissens-, Handlungs- und Strukturkontexte. Vielfach fehlen noch gegenstandsadaquate Untersuchungsverfahren. Dieser Beitrag entwickelt vor diesem Hintergrund das Forschungskonzept der Wissensmilieus. Leitende Absicht der ersten drei Abschnitte ist es dabei, soziale Strukturmuster der Wissen-Raum-Verbindungen, die fur neue stadtregionale Entwicklungen einschlagig sein konnten, konzeptionell angemessener in den Blick zu bekommen. In einem zweiten empirischen Teil (Abschnitt 4) werden dann unter dem Fokus „Wissensmilieus“ fur drei stadtregionale Fallanalysen (Frankfurt/Oder, Jena, Erlangen) exemplarische Formen der Ortsbindung okonomischer Akteure aus Hochtechnologiebereichen rekonstruiert. Ein besonderes Augenmerk gilt dabei der Rolle unterschiedlicher Wissensformen bei der Ausdifferenzierung von Wissensmilieus (vgl. unten im Abschnitt 1.3 die Abb. 1 zur Typologie der Wissensformen).

Antagonistic structures in border areas: Local milieux and local politics in the Polish-German twin city Gubin/Guben

Cross-border communication and co-operation at the Eastern fringe of the European Union seems so far to have been a matter of political initiative and a lot of good will at the levels of national, regional and local governance. This article maintains that everyday culture must be given more notice when cross-border activities are regarded at the local level, especially in twin cities. The case of the German-Polish twin city Guben/Gubin reveals a strong tendency towards a new divergence of thought and action between formal and informal levels of action, namely the level of local politics and governance and the level of local everyday milieux. While the politics of Euroregions, local administrations and local governments is very often directed towards establishing symbolic gestures of border-crossing and mutual understanding, social milieux at the ‘base’ of local societies are rather driven by a paradoxical mixture of hope, anxiety, resentments and prejudice, thus producing contradictions and even conflict with official political initiative.

Territorial Cohesion, Brain Drain and Digital Divide

Declining regional economies often trigger out-migration of the local population. Characteristically, this process is highly selective with regard to age and education: It is the best educated and youngest people who migrate first, leaving relatively disadvantaged, older-aged and immobile segments of the population behind. This gradual decline in the qualified workforce has become known as brain drain during the past few decades. In eastern Germany the general pattern of brain drain processes has been reinforced since 1990 due to a clear gender bias brought about by an increasing number of young women on the move. Additionally, severe and continuous population losses culminate in a characteristic cascade of economic crisis, e.g., rising unemployment, decreasing investment rates in traditional branches, and decreasing private and public sector investment into primary and secondary education and vocational training.

Brexit and New Autochthonic Politics of Belonging

ABSTRACT The outcome of the 2016 European Union membership referendum is re-shaping the United Kingdom’s relationship with the EU through shifting geopolitical positioning(s) and the (re)introduction of barriers and boundaries and also challenging British and EU citizens to revise their everyday sense of belonging. Accordingly, Brexit incorporates emergent and contested political projects of belonging, determining anew who belongs in a post-EU Britain. This paper discusses research directions focusing on the construction of political and everyday senses of belonging implied by public debates on Brexit, and critically examines the shifts in attitude towards received citizenship and different degrees of social exclusion.

Open workshops as sites of innovative socio-economic practices: approaching urban post-growth by assemblage theory

ABSTRACT Current debates on knowledge-based and creative locational development have come to deal with small urban places of novelty that formerly remained unnoticed. A plethora of new forms of producing and working recently emerged in unplanned and uncoordinated ways, bearing odd names such as FabLabs, Open Worklabs, RealLabs, Open Design Cities, Techshops, Repair Cafés, and more (Smith, A., M. Fressoli, D. Abrol, E. Arond, and A. Ely. 2017. Grassroots Innovation Movements. London: Routledge). Political initiatives have been taken by surprise; at the same time, standard epistemic tools of the social sciences and economics have been rendered unfit. More concise analytical reconstructions are needed to adequately capture the variety and complexity of these “labs”, their heterogeneous causation, their contingent proceedings, their surplus of latency, their peculiar power relations and their local embeddings. Urban social contexts have a strong triggering function as they help to re-configure older, and create new, combinations of heterogeneous social and economic agency. Meanwhile strong elements of grassroots innovation (Smith et al. 2017) have informed the formation of various models of alternative work and production. Taking the phenotype of open workshops as a revealing example, we take assemblage theory to describe the constitutive features of these new types of self-organised work, and the associated places of innovation. A fresh gaze on the complexity and open-endedness of socio-material formations may help to better understand the nature of emerging post-growth economies.

Spatial imaginaries and selective in/visibility: Mediterranean neighbourhood and the European Union’s engagement with civil society after the ‘Arab Spring’:

As part of a repertoire of the European Union’s (EU’s) geopolitical practices, the imaginary of Mediterranean Neighbourhood is a means with which to manage dissonance between the EU’s self-image as a normative power, changing political situations in the region and the Realpolitik of security. We argue that this also involved a ‘politics of in/visibility’ that promotes democratization and social modernization through structured cooperation while engaging selectively with local stakeholders. In directing attention to EU readings of and responses to the ‘Arab Spring’, we indicate how both a simplification of the issues at stake and highly selective political framings of local civil societies have operated in tandem. Drawing on a review of recent literature on civil society activism in the southern Mediterranean, we specifically deal with Eurocentric appropriations of civil society as a force for change and as a central element in the construction of the Mediterranean Neighbourhood. EU support for South Mediterranean civil society appears to be targeted at specific actors with whom the EU deems it can work: apart from national elites these include well-established, professionalized non-governmental organizations, and westernized elements of national civil societies. As a result, recognition of the heterogeneous and multilocal nature of the uprisings, as well as their causes, has only marginally translated into serious European Neighbourhood Policy reform. We suggest that an inclusive focus on civil society would reveal Neighbourhood as a contact zone and dialogic space, rather than a project upon which the EU is (rather unsuccessfully) attempting to superimpose a unifying narrative of EU-led modernization.

Scaling and Bordering: An Elusive Relationship?

ABSTRACT The emergence of theoretical approaches towards bordering and borderscapes entailed altered perspectives on scale. Borders are understood now to be shaped in variable manners by multiple and heterogeneous agents. However, the particular ways in which scales are continually created and rearranged through bordering have only occasionally been analyzed. This paper seeks to contribute to the debate a deeper contemplation of the emergence of border-related scales and related procedures of scaling. Starting from empirical observations of cross-border cooperation which exemplify the complexity of agent-driven scaling, the question is raised of how more theoretical explicitness might be achieved to account for the scalar implications of bordering. In particular, interdisciplinary scale theory is discussed for its potential contribution. An important task for future bordering studies is finally identified in the analysis of micro-scales.