Born
in a small village in the mountains of Tyrol (Austria) in 1945 and growing
up from my seventh year in the highly industrialized city of Dortmund in
the Ruhrgebiet (Ruhrvalley) in Germany, may be important to understand the
focus of my later scientific work. The changing urban-rural-relations, the
change of landscape, the interconnection of nature and society, and the
importance of esthetical Gestalt‘ for the perception of these patterns
can describe one of my main working fields.
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The
study of the regulation of urban and regional development in the context
of the modernization of society and the empirical reconstruction of these
processes are the more pragmatic frame of my scientific work.
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I
started to study sociology and ethnology in München in the year 1965. In
Wien, (Austria) I had a good chance to study and get practice in empirical
field studies. I finished my diploma in sociology and psychology in
Mannheim. Immediatly after my diploma in the 1969 I start to work as a
assistant researcher at the University of Mannheim. After two years I
moved to Michigan University in Ann Arbor, (USA) to study Econometric
statistics, which I carried on one year later in Colchester (GB). I
finished my PHD in 1973 in the field of organizational sociology and
founded my first little research institute for urban studies, especially
the development of the urban housing market and migration. At the end of
1977 I left Mannheim to travel thru the Sahara desert to Niger, Mali and
Senegal. One year later I had the chance to become professor for urban and
regional studies at the University of Kassel (Germany). Since this time I
work as a teacher at that department in teaching students of planning and
architecture. My research concerns regional and international aspects. So
I did a study about the role of self-regulation in the development of
Athens in Greece and San Juan in Costa Rica. About regional development I
also worked in Ecuador and Bolivia.
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My
focus is now on sustainabel urban and regional development on the one hand
and the impact of migration and cultural diversification on the other. As
You may understand in reading the list of selected publications, water and
the different cultures in understanding and using water, has been the main
field of theoretical and empirical work about sustainability.
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