Bioclusters’ promise of helping achieving sustainable bioeconomies has invoked great interest among policymakers and academia. However, bioclusters are not intrinsically sustainable. If they are to fulfil their promise, bioclusters must undergo green-restructuring. While cluster-research has...

We examine how local socioeconomic, institutional and political factors shape climate transformation pathways in 23 mid-sized German cities. We group our cities into three types: industrial cities (which may have experienced recent structural change), historic cities (in which a significant...

This paper is concerned with how the rise of far-right politics is normalized in local participatory processes. Starting with the observation that emerging accounts in planning scholarship scandalize the far right as an extrinsic threat to planning paradigms, I set out to challenge this line of...

The evolution of EU rural development policies and imaginaries have entailed that rural areas in Europe and their residents have been assigned specific roles concerning local responsibility and identities when it comes to attaining positive territorial development. The paper approaches the...

In this paper, we use the notion social innovation to shed light on the complex interrelations between the emergence and consolidation of new policy approaches and their geographical mobility. Empirically, the paper deals with learning region policies in Germany, which epitomize a shift of the...

The number of publications on social innovations has significantly increased over the past decades. Meanwhile even policy-makers build their hopes on socially innovative solutions and their ‘transformative power’. However, what is still needed is a better understanding of the processes and...

The aim of this paper is to understand the social process of the emergence and institutionalization of innovations in spatial planning (which we describe as ‘social innovations’). The paper is based on a recently finished empirical and comparative study conducted in four distinct areas of...

The clustering of firms in related fields has a positive impact on economic performance and innovative behaviour. The cluster lifecycle model provides a framework in order to add a temporal dimension to this ongoing debate. This model conjectures that clusters undergo various phases, in each of...

Venture capital (VC) firms are crucial actors in entrepreneurial ecosystems. Through the development towards a digital economy, they have gained further relevance, which caused the VC industry to diversify in terms of business models. This article offers a new heuristic to study the VC industry...

Immigration is one of the most contentious fields in policy-making, not only on the European and national, but also on the local level. Due to the declining and ageing populations, European cities today increasingly need immigration. On the other side, right-wing populist parties are increasing,...