Research
Surface Mining, ca. 1900
ongoing
The history of extracting raw materials from the earth’s surface did not start in the 19th century. However, by the close of the century mining in open pits and quarries had entered into a new dimension. Driven by industrialization, both in terms of the technology available for mining and in terms of consumption of the materials conveyed, surface mining significantly changed topography and land-use patterns.
The development of surface mines and quarries can be analyzed by adopting Theodore Schatzki’s concept of “practice-arrangement nexuses”. Schatzki introduced the idea of substituting the notion of a nature culture dichotomy by examining human practices in their relation to physical properties of materiality. In many ways, this reflects empirical findings faced when the changes in the earth’s surface by open pits as they are the result of structured human action in relation to geological characteristics.
The Interdependence of Protest and Urban Renewal, 1950s-1980s
2005-2010 (PhD dissertation)
Urban renewal nowadays is quite different from how inner cities were reconstructed in the 1960s. What used to be attempts to modernize urban society from above by intervention of local and national authorities has changed to network oriented betterment of neighborhoods in cooperation with their inhabitants. It has been stated that the development of an urban “civil society” owes much to the activities of social movements during the 1970s and 80s. Still historical research dealing with this topic is scarce.
What impact did protest and social movements have on urban renewal? What was the role of protest in the change of urban policy? In order to assess the protest movements’ influence it is necessary to contextualize oppositional actions on the background of specific urban renewal projects. This leads to the suggestion to conduct case studies in the cities of Cologne and Philadelphia. Both cities witnessed strong protest against urban renewal schemes during the 1970s including striking similarities regarding the issues at stake and the respective lines of argumentation. Yet, ideas on public participation and civic engagement constitute two distictively different backgrounds in both societies.
The Squatters Movement in Hilden, 1980-1982
2004/2005 (M.A. thesis)
During the years 1980-1982 West-Germany saw the largest wave of squatting actions in it’s history. Despite the fact that cities such as Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt or Freiburg were in the limelight, the phenomenon was much more common in small and medium sized cities such as Hilden. The micro-study of a local conflict over squatted houses also highlights more clearly the dynamics of protest in the early 1980s.
