Images of space. Historicity and mental constructs of space as a political challenge.

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Susanne Kost
• Subject Area: Urbanism, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 416794929

Spaces are continually changing. They are shaped by social interactions, knowledge regimes and power relations. Landscape can be understood as a cultural code in this context. The (implicit) connection of history and present in the process of perceiving and making spaces produces and reproduces collective, spatial memories and forms a cultural (regional) memory. Perception, behaviour, language and communication, however, do not simply exist, but are based on existing knowledge regimes that influence the respective actions. Attitudes and values are produced and reproduced, social discourses are structured, knowledge regimes are produced, established and secured. This includes a recursivity that oscillates back and forth between language, imagination and practices as well as between history and the present, society and the individual, and space and time. Regional memories can be understood as catalysts for spatial political action, enabling or preventing spatial political action by relating place, history, structures, institutions, experience and memory. Their implicit existence is rarely reflected in society or in planning and in most cases taken for granted. When, how and why cultural-historical representations of space become valid in the context of planning, however, has not yet been explicitly investigated. This is where the research project comes in and investigates which spatial images of the past have an impact on today, in which contexts these spatial images are received or activated (politics, economy, society) and to what extent the mental constructions of space developed from them and their spatial structures lead to forms of inclusion, exclusion and demarcation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Hiram Kümper