KoMet Award Jury has made its decision! Congratulations! Katja Schimohr and Lisa Sieger are the winners

Katja Schimohr receives one of this year's KoMet Awards 2025 for outstanding dissertations for her dissertation “Mobility Behavior and Attitudes as Determinants or Effects of Spatial Structure at the Place of Residence: A Quantitative Panel Analysis of Residential Location Decisions and Everyday Mobility (in german: 

Mobilitätsverhalten und -einstellungen als Determinanten oder Effekte der Raumstruktur am Wohnort: Eine quantitative Panelanalyse von Wohnstandortentscheidungen und Alltagsmobilität)”. Her dissertation deals with the subject area of ‘Impact relationships between spatial structure, mobility attitudes and everyday mobility’. Despite extensive research, these are still not clear. The dissertaion is based on a clearly and concisely formulated theoretical framework. The methodological framework is based on the evaluation of a unique panel survey of people moving house using complex statistical procedures. Three essays form the core of the work, each dealing with clearly defined sub-questions. The interpretations of the findings are exceptionally thorough. The reference to metropolitan research results from the regional focus of the sample: the Ruhr area (approx. 30% of respondents), Berlin (approx. 50%) and Munich. The supervisors are Prof. Dr. Joachim Scheiner and Prof. Dr. Eva Heinen. 

Lisa Sieger with her dissertation “Empirical analyses of market outcomes regarding energy efficiency valuation and renewable energy investments” receives the second KoMet Award 2025. Ms Sieger has written an interdisciplinary thesis on the relationship between energy sustainability and real estate prices or residential rents. She uses very detailed data in conjunction with various innovative methodological approaches so that, among other things, she succeeds in working out the specifics of the rental housing stock in the Ruhr metropolitan region in comparison to other regions. It also shows that it is not only energy efficiency and CO2 emissions that influence prices in the market, but that the energy source used is also a price-relevant feature for tenants and landlords. At the same time, it becomes clear that, particularly in the rental housing market, rents do not adequately reflect proven differences in energy efficiency. But if landlords provide more information, especially on heating costs, then this “efficiency gap” disappears almost completely. This dissertation was supervised by Prof. Dr. Christoph Weber and Prof. Dr. Florian Ziel. 

We congratulate both of them on the KoMet sponsorship award 2025 for outstanding dissertations in the field of metropolitan research. This year too, the theses will be presented and awarded at the KoMet Tag (December 5th, 2025).

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The prizes are supported by the Emschergenossenschaft. We thank you for this generous support!