Space is a fundamental category for any form of power. It is also a medium of social relations, articulated as physical and symbolic distance. The production and control of space is thus crucial to any execution of power, representing its potency, reproducing its social order, and neutralizing and naturalizing its objectives through planning processes that lead to a specific physical layout. Any claim to power and property manifests and institutionalizes itself in the act of territorialization. Infrastructure is a prominent practice of the organization of space. It formed a specific understanding of boundaries, zone of security and means of separation: interior/exterior, private/public, legal/illegal.
There have been many voices claiming, that the decisive borders of today’s social order can no longer be defined in space thanks to the impact of new media and the advent of the information and telecommunications revolution. This is seemingly true but geography still matters like Carl John A. Agnew said in the early eighties. So a closer look inspired especially by Carl Schmitt and his famous remarks post WK II in Der Nomos der Welt bears witness not only a massive fragmentation of the landscape but also the production of hermetic spaces and territorial and legal islands.

In the 1970s and 1980s two new approaches to an evolutionary explanation of technology emerged: While a new generation of sociobiologists increasingly started to view animal and human artifacts as an ,extended phenotype’ of humankind historians and sociologists of technology found in an evolutionary genesis of technology a third way between technological determinism and a social construction of technology. This evolution of technology seemed able to explain multi-causal coherences in the genesis of technology applicably by using allegedly simple rules.

This article highlights the historical and literary aspects of exile and punishment as a formative element in the spatial concept of Russian and Soviet empire-building. Using Siberia as a landscape of suffering, it em-pirically discusses the Foucaultian discourse on power and discipline of the modern state. It shows the continuity of the significance of punishment in Russian history in the decisive period of state formation in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Moreover, the attempt of the Russian state to modernize itself with violent measures provoked intellectual, especially literary dissension with a lasting impact on Russian historical memory. Prisons and Gulag labor camps in remote Siberia impose critical reflections on the development of a civil society.

The article highlights various aspects of the changes of a town in transition from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Times. Using pre-Medici Florence as an example, it is shown how economic change leads to new social and political formations. Characterized by an increasing industrialization of the manufacturing pro-cesses as well as a flourishing and expanding banking system with international capital interlocking, the new early-capitalist economic system provokes social upheavals that call for political solutions. As a conse-quence, the town and its inhabitants undergo devastating crises which are even accelerated by natural disasters and the spread of Black Death.

In the 1950s, the nuclear age was announced and propagated worldwide as a future blessing for mankind. “Atoms for peace” was the promising slogan, indicating that Western industrial nations denying the atomic salvation would be seriously threatening their own and the whole West’s economic prosperity. West Germany heavily embraced this technological utopia and relied on the development of nuclear technology since the 1950s. Despite continuous grassroot protest especially in West Germany, this resulted in a path dependency of a technical momentum (Thomas P. Hughes) in the system of the large-scale energy production until today, which only might have come to an end as a result of Fukushima’s super meltdown.

The article deals with the impact of automobile-culture between the 1950s and the 1970s in Germany. The progress of ‚Automobilism’ has pat-terned every-day-life and culture in the Federal Republic of Germany as intensively as the development of auto-industry in the couintry has influenced the economy. West-Germany became in this period highly dependent on the auto-economy, and became a modern ‚car-society’.

The phenomenon of consumption is based on the industrial production of both material and symbolic a-bundance. Until the 20th century, consumption was socially and regionally limited. Consumption in this traditional setting clearly had a status expressing function. The industrialization of the production of goods caused an expansion of material artefacts which could not have been imagined before and revolutionized the public and the private sphere. The civic concept of the city was replaced by a concept defining the public sphere as a warehouse, highly dependent on technical support. The conceptualization of the city as a sphere of consumption can be described as a distribution of electric lights. Electricity, advertising and brands sha-ped the technotopical ,format’ of the modern consumer mindset as spatial concept.

The conference report informs about the convention “Sustainability at Crisis? Global Governance for a futurable Global society”, which was held in July 2009 at Karlsruhe/Germany. Starting from the survey about “Sustainable Germany in a globalised world”, published in 2008, different speakers from research institutes (Wuppertal Institut für Klima, Umwelt, Energie) as well as from companies (e.g. Shell Germany) and policy consulting agencies (IFOK) clearly announced their perspectives. Beyond presenting these main theses, the following article reflects the term of “sustainability” as label, which seems, due to its conceptual flexibility, to be dedicated for the projection of various themes, relevance and attitudes.

The article traces the impact of Charles Darwins’ writings in 19th and 20th centuries’ social and political thinking. Implementing a hihgly suggestive teleological type of reasoning, darwinism supplied the intellectual grammar of the evolutionary mind set.

In the aftermath of „The Origin of Species”, several other authors of the 19th and 20th century recommended the application of new-born darwinism on the field of technology. This would happen in a metaphorical way, with the keyword „evolution” used synonymously for technological development as well as in a more ambitious try to reconcile engineering with natural sciences. At the beginning of the 21st century, the preoccupation with a possible evolution of technology is more topical than ever.