An Overview of the Research Fields

The competence field “Metropolitan Research” was, among other things, conceived as a research network. The approx. 100 participating academics have come together to form seven research fields that are concerned with current and relevant topics in metropolitan research. Their interdisciplinary integration has allowed them to raise funds for cooperative projects and been a galvanizing element for joint research. These synergies are not just a result of their interdisciplinary collaboration, but also of the thematic intersections established through their exchange with other research fields.

The following Metro-Map shows the research fields with their thematic emphases and intersections with the other fields.

The research fields are:

Urban Form, Society and Culture

The city with its buildings and spaces, and with its utilisations and reutilizations, shapes perceptions, ideas, interpretations and appropriations as well as narratives, scripts and medialisations of urbanity.

Mobility and Logistics

Urban Health

The city influences the health and living quality of the population with its architectural design and functionality.

Resilient Infrastructures

Sustainable urban development increasingly requires operationable solutions for a long-term, stable and thus secure metropolitan system.

Transformative Governance and Participation

From a political-institutional perspective, the rescaling of statehood and of economic and societal fields of activity as well as the shift in power resources of actors demand a renegotiation of regulative arrangements on the level of metropolitan spaces.

Urban Ecosystems

Cities are complex ecosystems that are marked by rapidly increasing strains, pressure for utilization, compartmentalization and a significant proportion of invasive species.

Knowledge Metropolises

The increasing relevance of knowledge for both the economy and society is expressed in the concepts of ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘knowledge society’.

Methodologies in Metropolitan Research

The central challenge of inter- and transdisciplinary metropolitan research is the understanding of common research questions, concepts and methods that facilitate the productive cooperation across disciplines and departmental cultures.