Raum als Schicksal? Geografie, Territorium und Landschaft bescheren seinen Bewohnern unterschiedliche Infrastrukturen, Sicherheitszonen und Lebenschancen

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.