European Cities in Globalization: A Comparative Analysis Based on the Location Strategies of Advanced Producer Services

Today there is a key question that lurks behind any consideration of Europe and its cities: is this foundation core zone of the modern world-system showing symptoms of dropping out of the contemporary core zone? It certainly appears that in the period of crises since 2008, Europe has been falling behind other major world-regions. Dubbed the “austerity region” of the world, such an interpretation sees Europe as the first part of the world-economy core to be subject to what are effectively structural adjustment programmes, largely self-imposed but still resulting in a process of peripheralization. Although uneven in impact, this is clearly a result of Europe’s states failing to adequately manage and regulate the economic activities within their territories. However it is far too soon to say whether such a monumental global economic shift is happening but we can investigate the current unevenness of economic globalization amongst European states. We compare three of these states that represent different degrees of potential peripheralization: Spain showing the stronger symptoms, Germany with least symptoms, and Britain somewhere in between. Our study is based upon an original analysis of advanced producer services that combines comparisons between countries and relations between cities

From places to flows? Planning for the new ‘regional world’ in Germany

This is a conference paper. The proceedings are available as a print publication from The Regional Studies Association: Contested Regions: Territorial Politics and Policy(2011) ISBN 978-1-897721-40-7 http://www.regionalstudies.org/publications/rsapub.aspThe last two decades have been dominated by discourses describing a resurgence of regions. Part and parcel of this discourse has been how leading proponents of what is labelled the ‘new regionalism’ documenting how the collapse of Atlantic Fordism and onset of globalization is seeing the region challenge the nation-state as the ‘natural economic zone’ (Ohmae, 1995), alongside its primacy as the site/scale at which economic management is conducted, social welfare delivered, and political subjects are identified by their national citizenship. Captivating academics (interested in interpreting capitalism’s new economic and spatial form) and policymakers (casting increasingly ‘envious eyes’ toward the regional zones of the Atlantic and European growth economies) alike, the new regionalist orthodoxy of the mid-to-late-1990s saw the region canonized in academic and political discourse as a functional space for economic planning and governance. Nevertheless, despite largely unprecedented levels of intellectual and political energy being invested in the conviction that regions are central to modern life, critics of the new regionalism generally, and normative claims relating to the formation of the ‘regional world’ in particular, responded to the blind faith in which regions were being championed to expose a series of deep-rooted problems, contradictions, and challenges. Of paramount concern among critics has been the exposition of widespread conceptual amnesia when it comes to defining the region. Often assumed, rarely defined, it is hard to dispute how the region remains an ‘object of mystery’ (Harrison, 2006), an ‘enigmatic concept’ (MacLeod and Jones, 2007), and a ‘complicated category’ (Paasi, 2010) for those trying to engage with this most durable of constructs. Even in the work of the political scientist, Michael Keating, one of the most consistently insightful scholars on this aspect of the new regionalism, while it is acknowledged that regions take various forms (e.g. administrative, cultural, economic, governmental, historical) his focus, and that of those advancing claims we were now living in a ‘regional world’, became narrowly focused and remained principally with regions as actual or potential subnational political units – be they administrative or governmental

Operationalization and contextualization of sustainability at the local level

Due to its fuzziness, the model of sustainable development has to be particularized and contextualized before it can be used as a yardstick. A local indicator system for two German cities has been developed to meet these requirements using a new conceptualization of sustainability. Initially, local problem areas were identified in a bottom-up approach by local authority personnel. These problem areas were contrasted with a set of sustainability rules, which had been systematically derived from a basic sustainability norm that gives minimum requirements for sustainable development. Indicators were specified at the interface between local problem areas and sustainability rules. The indicators are expected to provide information on whether the city is over time becoming closer to or farther removed from the respective sustainability goals in its problem areas. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Beurteilung der Feuchteproduktion durch Klimamessungen in natürlich belüfteten Wohnräumen

Dieses Kapitel spricht über Anforderungen an den Mindestwärmeschutz zur Vermeidung kritischer, Feuchteproduktion in Wohngebäuden und Modellannahmen für hygrothermische Berechnungen. Im Gegensatz zur relativen Luftfeuchte ist die Taupunkttemperatur ein Maß für die im Luftvolumen enthaltene Wasserdampfmenge. Sie dient außerdem zur Bestimmung des Tauwasserrisikos. eine ausreichenden Wärmeschutz in Form des Mindestwärmeschutzes eine wichtige Rolle bei der Verhinderung von Tauwasser und Schimmelpilzbildung zu. Die Kenntnis der Feuchteproduktion ist ferner auch zur Bestimmung der Kühllast für die Auslegung von Klimatisierungsanlagen erforderlich. Für die Modellierung der relativen Raumluftfeuchte wird der Feuchtegehalt der Außenluft vernachlässigt; es wird lediglich zwischen normaler und hoher Belegung des Gebäudes unterschieden. Ein Ziel dieses Projekts ist es, gesicherte Daten über das Innenraumklima in Wohngebäuden zu erlangen. Aus den Messergebnissen werden sowohl Jahresgänge abgeleitet als auch die Abhängigkeiten des Raumklimas von Einflüssen, wie beispielsweise dem Außenklima oder der Belegung, bestimmt. Die entwickelten Jahresgänge der Temperatur‐ und Feuchteverläufe zeigten im Vergleich mit Ergebnissen des IBP Holzkirchen den Einfluss regionaler Klimaunterschiede und des Nutzerverhaltens