Stefan Rettich - Böcker

In the 1930s, Walter Christaller used new media to work out his central place theory by counting telephone lines to identify centralities that connected multiple spaces: Today, digitization has a formative effect on space—on cities, the countryside, and mobility. Or when it is lacking, disruptions are the result. The contributions to the book offer an introductory examination of the effects of digitization on space and deal with the topicality of Christaller’s central place theory. The book does so both theoretically and practically, by examining spatial policies of current regional development programs, different conceptions of public services, and the tasks medium-sized centers in urban and rural areas. The second part of the book discusses which structural changes are to be expected in the course of digitization, especially through new mobility, and how this might affect the attractiveness of rural areas and the tasks of medium-sized towns. Finally, it examines the causes of populist tendencies and experiences of loss produced by processes of globalization and social division, as well as right-wing extremist developments in rural areas.

We live on the ground and with the ground. It feeds us and it cools the earth’s atmosphere. We need it for housing, we use it for leisure and for work: without free access to land our economic model would not work. But this has changed significantly since the global financial market crisis. Since conservative investments lost their economical appeal, our land has become an international asset in high demand. Rising rents are one of the main symptoms. But essentially, this affects far more: Our social market economy, our community, and a successful approach to climate change are at stake. The main part of the book is a manual covering 36 different aspects of the land issue, featuring clear graphics and categorized into the three sub-areas of climate, economy, and the common good. Five essays and one interview by well-known authors provide references and possible solutions for one of the most pressing questions of our time.

Our nuclear power plants stand like landmarks on German river landscapes – they are constructional witnesses to a bitter social and political dispute about energy, the economy and the assessment of the consequences of technology. Today, in the middle of the energy crisis, this dispute is more pertinent than ever. After the nuclear disaster of Fukushima, Germany decided in 2011 to phase out nuclear power: but why should all power plants now be renaturalised to green fields? Because only around 3 percent of the grey energy that the gigantic building volumes harbour is actually radioactively contaminated. This book offers a factual approach to the history of nuclear power, the technologies sued, their renaturation, as well as monument protection aspects. A photo essay by the contemporary witness Günter Zint documents the protest culture associated with this. Seven possibilities for reusing these awkward monuments are also shown – an approach that for a long time was not considered possible.