Institute of Geography

Research

Political Urbanism and Sustainable Spatial Development

Research Focus

 

Our research focuses on institutions – understood as the “rules of the game” – and how they affect environmental uses:

(1) How and why are resources (e.g. urban land, housing, alpine foodscapes, scenic landscape) regulated? 
(2) Which strategies do actors develop to secure their access to resources? 
(3) Which institutions can contribute to strong sustainability?

Over the years we have contributed to the development of a specific analytical framework, the Institutional Resource Regime (IRR) framework (e.g. Gerber et al. 2020).
After 20 years of existence and continuous development, the IRR framework has been established as an important supplement to existing (neo)institutional approaches focusing on the management of natural and human-made resources.

Projects

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Subject
 Research Question
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 COMMONPATHS

 Commonification: Transition pathways for urban sustainability.
 How do processes of creating new commons influence urban sustainability by providing new solutions beyond market and state inabilities? - project page

- Interview with Jean-David Gerber (principal investigator)

ARTS - Agroecology for Resilient Territories in Senegal

 Initiative to support the transition towards sustainable agri-food systems in Senegal. What are the enablers and barriers to agroecological transformation and development context-relevant transformative pathways? - project page

Spatial Understanding of the care gap

Habilitation project  Dr. Deniz Ay

  The mitigation of the care gap through densification by socially sustainable residential arrangements in urban settlements. How does the densification of residents and uses affect the demand and the supply for care provision: What are the institutions, actors, and formal and informal arrangements that determine the relationship between the care gap and densification? - project description

- more about Dr. Deniz Ay

CoTenure

 The potential of collective tenure in agricultural investments for gender equality. Under what conditions and mechanisms can arrangements of collective tenure contribute to gender equality and better distributive outcomes for all resource claimants? project page

CommonFood

 Self-organised forms of evaluating, managing, sharing and selling food in Peru and Switzerland. How do collectively self-organized farmers reconcile the tension between the monetary valuation of food and the multiple contributions of food and agriculture to society and the environment? project description

Publications

Publication Year Type