Recently we finished a research project, applying an assemblage approach to the process of gentrification in the Fashion Quarter (Klarendal) in Arnhem. Of course gentrification has been investigated already for more than thirty years, and there is a large body of knowledge about it. In the literature one usually finds two different competing perspectives on gentrification. One which assumes that the driving force behind gentrification is mainly economic speculation, resulting in rising living costs and displacement of original inhabitants. One could say that that is the “it’s the economy stupid” hypothesis. On the other hand we have the scholars who support the hypothesis that gentrification is mainly the effect of a cultural development, making these places attractive for a specific class of people such as hipsters, Yups, and creative class people. That could be denoted as the “it is the culture stupid” hypothesis. More research of the same kind would probably only reproduce these positions and not contribute much new. In our opinion, however, reality is a bit more complex, and especially if one wants to lead the process of gentrification into a more sustainable and just direction, we need to know more about these complexities. Therefore we chose an assemblage approach and tried to get rid of the usual blinkers of the traditional gentrification research. The research showed to be revealing, and also suggests, that gentrification policies, need to take a much more experimental trial and error approach, working in small steps on the ‘configuration’ of all the different elements and relations contributing to the process, in stead of the often reductionist and simplistic ‘if-you-do-this-than-that-will-happen’-approach.
Recently a series of popularising articles (in Dutch), authored by the researchers of our project, about gentrification in the Fashion Quarter in Arnhem have appeared in the glossy journal ‘geografie’ published by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society (KNAG).
A former PhD students of mine, Dr. Marlies Meijer, focused her research on spatial planning under these new circumstances, and investigated what she called ‘more informal’ ways of doing spatial planning. Of course informal ways of policy making, are well known from many countries in the global South, where it sometimes is the only way of getting things done and problems solved under the condition of more or less failing states and failing governance. Traditionally these were practices which some spatial planners in Western countries, such as the Netherlands – as the traditional ‘best practice’ country with respect to spatial planning – looked down at. One might say that this is almost a kind of post-colonial reflex. Under these new circumstances, however, this could radically change. All of the sudden, one could also turn it around, and ask one self, what we in the Netherlands can learn from these informal practices. It is revealing to reflect on this change of perspective, but of course it is also not that black or white, and there are many nuances in between.
Geography is also often described as an integrative discipline bringing together what is otherwise often studied in isolation. But then, as a small, though very fine, geography department, how do you teach geography within the limitations of a regular bachelor or master programme? That seems to be a sheer impossibility and thus in sharp contrast to the comprehensive ambitions of our discipline. One just cannot address everything, and certainly not if one also seeks to provide in depth knowledge of it. Time to do so would never be sufficient, and also the expertise of the team of our extremely competent lecturers would be totally overstretched.
Applied to the design of a curriculum or a course this implies that in a first step we try to provide a general overview of all the elements, streams of thought, theories, approaches, methods or empirical fields which could be relevant without going in details. In the following steps, we select one specific example, and in a number of hermeneutical steps, students are challenged to deepen the knowledge and understanding of that specific example. The focus on the analytical meta-skills allows students to deal with other topics themselves and allows to leave certain topics out of the curriculum. In this way setting up a high quality geography curriculum becomes feasible without attempting, the impossible, namely to be fully comprehensive. It allows to have the courage to leave gaps…
Dr. Bianca Szytniewski, successfully defended her PhD-thesis on Dec. 7, 2018, on exactly this topic, focusing on cross-border shopping behaviour.
According to various scholars not only familiarity but also unfamiliarity can encourage cross-border practices. Unfamiliarity resulting from differences in, for instance, culture, landscape or facilities between the two sides of a state border can trigger interest and curiosity, and consequently lead to cross-border mobility. This dissertation further unravels this notion of familiarity and unfamiliarity in relation to encounters with differences and similarities in European borderlands, by offering theoretical reflections on familiarity and unfamiliarity, and examining cross-border mobility, shopping practices in particular, in the Dutch-German, German-Polish and Polish-Ukrainian borderland.’ If you are interested in reading more, click 
However, spheres are of course not closed bubbles but partly overlapping and in direct relation with each other, and therefore there is also a ‘politics of spheres‘. Peter Sloterdijk addresses this when he conceptualises the current world of bubbles as ‘Foam’. In my recently published article in Geographica Helvetica I introduce but also criticise his rather reactionary view on these bubbly spheres.
Today Dr. Jos van den Broek successfully defended his PhD thesis on Cross Border Innovation Spaces. In his PhD research he focused on the how successful Cross Border Innovation Spaces are very dependent on institutionalisations and institutional entrepreneurs, to sustain them. The dynamics of this institutionalisation needs to be seen as an evolutionary process, which is not necessarily one-directional. This PhD thesis contributes to the better understanding of these processes and of what is really taking place in this respect in cross-border regions.
Innovative spaces, or, given the main topic of this web-blog, probably it would be better to speak of innovative places, in general seem to thrive in (hyper)diverse milieu’s. The diversity, creates tensions, uncertainties, risks, and challenges but also seems to stimulate, inspire, and create unexpected combinations, and sparks new ideas, and offers possibilities for the impossible. These differences are thus always burdensome, sometimes even obstructive (the border as barrier) and need continuous investments and efforts, but the innovative opportunities these diversities offer are constitutive for any kind of innovation process. So probably it would be useful to re-conceptualise the border not just as barrier but also as opportunity. This would also imply a totally new look at the fuzziness of these places. Fuzziness as a resource and as something to celebrate. Jos van den Broek, with his main focus institutionalisation, speaks e.g. of ‘fuzzy governance spaces’ as a precondition for successful cross-border innovation processes.
created are of equally great importance. Seniority expressed in this kind of knowledge and experience, often in a very specific specialised field, therefore is an important resource, and often the main criteria for appointing professors. At the same time especially full professors as chair holders are supposed to also have the scope and overview over the broader disciplinary and inter-disciplinary field, as well as the ability to think outside of the box based on experiences with doing ‘science’ in very different organisational situations and settings. These are essential qualification for leadership in knowledge oriented organisations. So even when we would seek to create a flat organisation, we need to accept that we are dealing with a situation where there is a kind of natural hierarchy with respect to the professional background and experience. On the other hand in this situation also an autocratic authoritarian leadership will always fail. There is no-one able to have the competence to overview it all and know it best. So hierarchy is somehow naturally given within specific professional fields, but respectful collegial team work between peers in different disciplinary fields is needed.
consensus model in which final decisions need to be taken by unanimity, or to put it in other terms, that each of the members of the decision making body have a right to veto the decision. In a working consensus model this will probably be a very rare case. In case of a consensus decision, in a collegial system this decision is also presented as a joint decision, and the decision making body would also be jointly responsible for the implementation of the decision. If no consensus can be reached usually the next higher level of authority would come to a final verdict.
It doesn’t take long before the woman at the hotel reception pulls out a city map of Porto. Look, she says, there’s the Old Town and the Douro, there’s the harbour and here, by the way, the pride evident in her voice, is the world’s most beautiful bookshop: Livraria Lello.
It sounds fantastic and the place looks even more amazing in the photos. It’s located in a two-story, neo-Gothic building with lots of dark wood, an abundance of old books, ornamentation and stained glass, and a curved staircase right in the middle. It was opened in 1906, a cathedral of books, a dream for voracious bookworms from all over the world. When traveling, we often look more for the beauty of the past than that of the present. We may even buy a book for vacation reading, to while away evenings on the Atlantic coast. It has been said that J.K. Rowling often visited the Livraria when she lived in Porto at the beginning of the 1990s, a time when she taught English and began dreaming up the Harry Potter series.
Porto is not a big city — with just over 200,000 inhabitants, the Old Town is easily manageable. The first thing you notice when approaching the Livraria Lello is the long line in front of it. Young Japanese travelers, Scandinavian backpackers, families from France, couples from China, Americans and Germans.
The bookstore is every bit is as beautiful as the one in the photos, even if it’s not much of a bookstore these days. No one browses through the merchandise here. They all seem to be taking pictures with their smartphones — photos that look exactly like the more than 7,000 images already posted on TripAdvisor, the world’s largest travel website, where Livraria is listed as one of the city’s top sightseeing attractions.
Yesterday (18.09.2018), Marc Tribelhorn, a geographer by education, published a commentary in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), the Swiss quality Newspaper about the 
development of ‘Bureaucracy’ in today’s world which resembles a lot of what we observe in modern universities and which is next to continuous budget cuts one of main reasons for a killing work load and crumbling quality of teaching and research. Not very new, but story which is right from the heart of many scientists working at universities and doing their utmost to inspire and educate our future generation and to create the knowledge our society needs to address the problems of tomorrow. Here is my free translation of that brief commentary:
Those who want to express the discomfort in our service society in one word are well served by the Anglicism: ‘bullshit jobs’. For example, David Graeber, ethnologist, anarchist and professor at the prestigious London School of Economics, described a phenomenon which is not limited to public sector, but can also be found in board rooms of private companies: jobs of which do not seem to make any sense and which you probably will also not miss it if they did not exist. Graeber coined this idea on the basis of the answers to the question ‘What do you do for a living?’ posed while socialising at parties. Increasingly the answers puzzled him when professions like ‘Human Resources Management Consultant’, ‘Regulatory Compliance Manager’ or ‘Senior Compensation & Benefits Specialist’ were 
mentioned. In England, in a representative study, nearly 40 percent of respondents said they do not contribute anything useful to society through their wage labour. Graeber first wrote an essay and then a book on this issue that caused a stir around the world because they strike a nerve despite the thin empirics: Many contemporaries have the impression that in the administration and in the middle management of companies more and more well-paid people work without being productive in the narrow sense of the word, i.e. without contributing to consumption and investment. Worse yet, the bullshit jobs are not just an expression, but are the drivers of ever more bureaucratic excesses.
Undoubtedly, more and more activities require more and more time to document the work done and to justify the future work, as the Zurich economics professor Bruno S. Frey stated several years ago. We all know this from our everyday work? Everything is diligently questioned, controlled, administered, optimised and reformed, supervised, outsourced, reintegrated and harmonised – in an endless Möbius loop. Rarely, this results in something tangible and useful, but it always produces a lot of paper and ever more administration. What is sold as a recipe for simplification, streamlining and improving work processes often cause exactly the opposite.
The concept of bureaucracy, when coined in the 19th century, was limited to actions and functioning of powerful civil servants. The sociologist Max Weber later enthused about the ‘formally most rational form of exercise of power’, an ideal for a lean and efficient organisation that guaranteed standardised processes for modern societies. But soon there were signs of degeneration. The dubious reputation of the bureaucracy, for example, observed by British historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson, who had a keen sense of the absurdities of the world of work. In the mid-1950s, the ‘Darwin of the Manager Age’ (‘Time’ 
magazine) published its famous Parkinson’s Law on Administration, which basically anticipated Graeber’s bullshit job thesis. Firstly: ‘Every employee wishes to increase the number of his subordinates, but not the number of his rivals’. Secondly, ‘Employees create work for each other’. And Parkinson says this work will never end because it will always expand, in the same rate as the time available for it. So the bureaucracy keeps on growing – no matter if its actual tasks are reduced or not.
The emeritus Bernese professor Norbert Thom for economics, who spent decades researching ways of reducing bureaucracy, also observes how the zeitgeist is characterised by the drive to avoid uncertainty and to permanent preservation of evidence. Therefore, with Swiss precision everything is logged, evaluated, quantified and controlled from above, which has led to a massive increase in internal bureaucracy. The corresponding departments would develop a considerable life of their own and grow steadily.
This ‘all risk’ mentality, based on dense regulations, but without any error culture, has consequences that go beyond the loss of efficiency and the immediate cost increases: It smothers the cardinal liberal virtues of employees such as personal responsibility, intrinsic motivation, expertise and common sense. Ultimately, it also undermines the mechanism that, according to sociologist Niklas Luhmann, reduces complexity in modern societies and in companies – trust.