Biographie

My work is mainly focused on teaching and researching the role of spatial planning in the challenges of the future society, investigating major topics such as the influence of social trends on spatial development and strategies to meet the needs that climate change will bring to society. For example, I research how climate change manifests itself spatially and try to discover long-term protection and adaptation strategies, or how different mobility transitions could look in urban and rural areas. In my research, I combine planning theory approaches with specific spatial impacts of societal trends and their influence on planning practice. My doctoral thesis, which I wrote during my time as a research assistant at Leibniz Universität Hannover, deals with planning cultures in inner-city riverscapes. In my postdoctoral work I applied these earlier findings to the transport sector. As head of the MoveMe research group at the Technical University of Dortmund, I have been able to investigate the transformation of mobility from a spatial planning perspective and its effects on socio-spatial systems.

As my favourite punk band would say: ‘I can change, you can change, we can change, the world can change, we can be the leaders of tomorrow’ (Perkele).