Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine
Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance
Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust
Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
Luxembourg Centre for European Law
Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental Systems
Bastian Lange; Christian Schulz; Hans-Martin Zademach: Transformationsbricolagen. Impulse für regionalisierte Wohlstandsalternativen. Geographische Zeitschrift 114, 2026/1-2, 54-81. DOI 10.25162/ GZ-2026-0004.
Abstract
The article aims to open up a critical and constructive debate In the discourse on transformation and sustainability based on the heuristic concept of transformation bricolages, thereby developing a conceptually guided perspective of spatially sensitive, transformative practices in politics, government, business, and civil society. The starting point is the observation that there is relatively little internal coherence between the recent normative and socially critical expert debates on socio-ecological transformation on the one hand, and the application and implementation-oriented planning and spatial development discourses on the other. Transformative bricolages, i. e., cultural techniques of exploratory experimentation or ‘tinkering’, as originally conceptualized by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966), open up a level in this field that can mediate between ambitious, sometimes overwhelming top-down specifications and local, activist practices and initiatives, with increasingly broad social impact. This argument is illustrated in the article with a series of practical insights.