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Workshop Invitation: Roads to Happiness. Traffic Infrastructure in Southeast Europe, Hegemonic Discourse, and its Challenges


The CoMoDe team cordially invites you to the workshop “Roads to Happiness” held by the Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient in corporation with the Humboldt University Berlin, happening 16th to the 18th of March.

Next to many other exciting and diverse panel discussions, Lyubomir Pozharliev will contribute a talk on the topic of Eastern Trolleybuses vs. Western E-Buses whilst putting an emphasis on decolonial insights from Sofia. The talk will be part of the decolonial panel which is being held on Friday, the 17th of March, from 4 to 5 pm.
The workshop program is convened by Malte Fuhrmann and Hannes Grandits. 

Download the full program here:  Roads to Happiness Program

Continue reading “Workshop Invitation: Roads to Happiness. Traffic Infrastructure in Southeast Europe, Hegemonic Discourse, and its Challenges”

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Microtransit – Alternative mobility offers in Germany, 2022

In the scope of the PUTSPACE project at IfL, Lukas Adolphi, Wladimir Sgibnev and Tonio Weicker published an open-access article on their research and cartographic visualizations on alternative mobility offers or so-called microtransit in Germany in the Journal of Transport Geography.

The paper discusses the role and possible impact of microtransits within mobility transitions through analyzing its hybrid nature in between car-usage and public transport in connection with its further potentials, limitations and corporate structures. The authors dive deep into the current status of microtransit distribution and trends. It is taken into consideration that any growth in this field of mobility happens rather slow and is subject to several limiting factors, so that project initiations rely heavily on experimental clauses by local governments and the existing forms of microtransit are rather diverse, small-scale and cater to very different groups of citizens. Going from there, the article aims to frame a future perspective of microtransit in Germany and sheds a light on this mobility phenomenon with all its struggles and promises through a unique methodology and via providing the first officially published, nationwide mapping in this form of all known microtransit offers.

Read the whole article here.

The interactive version of the mapping, initially published by Wladimir Sgibnev and Lukas Adolphi at Nationalatlas Aktuell can be found here.

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Open Call for Tbilisi Symposium

Open Call for Participants to the Symposium:
Knowledge Production in Public Transport – Normativities. Actors. Outcomes.
Tbilisi, Georgia, 18 – 21 March 2023

The Leibniz research group “CoMoDe – Contentious Mobilities: Rethinking Mobility Transitions through a Decolonial Lens” at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography welcomes participants to the interdisciplinary symposium “Knowledge production in Public Transport. Normativities. Actors. Outcomes”, which will take place from 18 to 21 March 2023 in Georgia´s capital Tbilisi.
Continue reading “Open Call for Tbilisi Symposium”

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Buchpräsentation: Der Kampf um das Rioni-Tal im Spannungsfeld zwischen Politik und Zivilgesellschaft

Am 9. Dezember 2022 erschien Lela Rekhviashvilis neues Buch über ihre Forschung zur Protestbewegung von 2020 und 2021 im Kontext der Verteidigung des georgischen Rioni-Tals vor einem Staudamm-Projekt . Am 9. Dezember 2022 organisiert die Böll-Stiftung im Südkaukasus eine Buchvorstellung zur Publikation, welche auf Georgisch und Englisch gehalten wird und Online besucht werden kann. Es sprechen Lela Rekhviashvili (IfL) und Ia Eradze (Ilia State University). Mehr Informationen zur Veranstaltung und den Registrierungs-Link zur Online-Teilnahme finden Sie hier.
Continue reading “Buchpräsentation: Der Kampf um das Rioni-Tal im Spannungsfeld zwischen Politik und Zivilgesellschaft”

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Beyond fear and abandonment: public transport resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic

New in: A collaborative paper by Louise Sträuli, Tauri Tuvikene, Tonio Weicker, Wojciech Kębłowski, Wladimir Sgibnev, Peter Timko and Marcus Finbom, published in the scope of the Putspace project at IfL.

´The authors investigate how the Covid-19 pandemic affected both the accessibility of urban public transport and its structures themselves. It takes a closer look on the specific governmental regulations regarding urban mobility and points out the struggles of people who were especially affected by the Covid regulations on urban transport systems.

In an extensive mixed-method study, data on the behavior, emotions and struggles of public transport users and urban citizens from Berlin, Brussels, Stockholm and Tallinn has been collected. It is shown, how the regulations transformed general passenger behavior  in terms of usage, distances and frequency of travel and that certain narratives and passengers emotions as well as their socio-economic conditions have to be taken into account when trying to understand the realm of public transport in times of crisis.

Read the full open-access paper here!

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Mobility and Extractivism: Disrupting the Logistical Ecosystem of Capitalism

A new collaborative text by Tim Leibert, Lela Rekhviashvili and Wladimir Sgibnev explores the complex, structural and historic linkage between capitalist neo-extractivism and mobilities of globalization. It brings up the argument, that facets of mobility should always be taken into consideration when talking about extractivism and calls for a general shift in perspective on debates regarding sustainable development and mobility transitions. The authors argue that mobilities of a consumerist culture almost automatically exacerbate extractivism at the cost of the global south and exploited regions on multiple levels.

The text was originally published in german on the “Berliner Gazette” as a contribution to the ongoing series on the BG platform “After Extractivism”, which can be read here. The english version was published on Mediapart.

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Railway Conjunctures: Postcolonial and Postsocialist Trajectories of Urban Renewal

In their newest open access article Wladimir Sgibnev, together with our colleagues Laura Kemmer, Tonio Weicker and Maxwell Woods showcase how postsocialism and postcolonial studies can be brought into dialogue and learn from one another. Their contribution is based on the comparison of the historical case studies of tramway lines construction in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Kharkiv, Ukraine.

The article further investigates specific historical trajectories of mobility development in the postsocialist urban context and thereby draws converse lines to western hegemonial narratives of the modern city.

Read the full article here.

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Dance with electrical traction for urban buses: the case of Leipzig

Battery bus in Leipzig | © Egor Muleev

Egor Muleev and Jonathan Wich discuss the historical as well as contemporary underpinnings in the city of Leipzig for favoring battery electric buses over trolleybuses. The authors initiate a debate about the possible trolleybus network, which could have been introduced to the city. It is a public matter, which never attracted significant attention in the past, and a trolleybus network which never came into being. Yet, the decisions taken by the administration and the multiple players involved, favoring one technology, namely the E-buses, instead of another – the Trolleybuses, have already their impact in the city of Wagner and Bach.

More details and the whole article can be found here in the newest entry on  the IfL-Blog.

The study was made during the internship of BA student Jonathan Wich within the CoMoDe project that is part of the Mobilities and Migration Research Group at the IfL.

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Neuer Kartenbeitrag in der online-Zeitschrift Nationalatlas: Endstation Grenze? Die aktuelle Situation des grenzübergreifenden ÖPNV

Lukas Adolphi, Wladimir Sgibnev und Tonio Weicker widmen sich dem grenzüberschreitenden ÖPNV:

Innerhalb Deutschlands gehört die Sicherstellung einer ausreichenden Bedienung der Bevölkerung mit Verkehrsleistungen im ÖPNV zur rechtlich verankerten Daseinsvorsorge. Doch wie sieht die konkrete Situation in den Grenzregionen aus? Bestehen genügend grenzübergreifende ÖPNV-Angebote zwischen der Bundesrepublik und Ihren Nachbarn? Mittels umfangreicher Recherchen konnten deutschlandweit 179 grenzüberschreitende Verbindungen per Regionalzug, S-Bahn, Straßenbahn, Fähre, Bus, Ruftaxi oder Taxibus ausfindig gemacht werden. Es gibt jedoch erhebliche regionale Disparitäten, wie die aktuelle interaktive Übersichtskarte verdeutlicht: Mit Hilfe des Tooltips kann jede Verbindung mit Verkehrsmittel, Taktung, Bedientagen und Sitzplätzen angezeigt werden.

Viel Vergnügen beim Schmökern.

Dipl.-Geogr. Volker Bode
Forschungsbereich Geovisualisierung
Redaktion Nationalatlas aktuell

 

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The Soviet city as a landscape in the making

Aerial view of Samarkand in 2020 showing the old city (yellow), the colonial city (green), and Soviet-era apartment blocks and micro-rayons (orange). The areas of the city that are not coloured feature a mix of private dwellings, commercial and administrative buildings. The white box indicates the boundaries of the map by Ernst Giese (see Figure 1). Numbers indicate the approximate location of respondents’ houses
(c) Copernicus Sentinel data 2020, modified by the authors.

Following the launch of the mass housing campaign under Nikita Khrushchev, the cityscape of Soviet Samarkand still remains some changes and continuities of it. This paper examines the planning, building, appropriation, and renovation of public and private housing on the level of practices rather than policies and discourses. It relates these practices to the specific temporalities of Samarkand’s landscape, such as the life cycles of inhabitants, the change of seasons, or the timelines of material decay, among others. Continue reading “The Soviet city as a landscape in the making”