Martina Löw

Martina Löw graduated in 1993 at the Goethe-University Frankfurt by Marianne Rodenstein with the thesis "Raum ergreifen. Frauen zwischen Arbeit, sozialen Beziehungen und der Kultur des Selbst“.[1] The habilitation was completed in 2000 in the Department of History, Philosophy and Social Sciences at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and she was awarded the Christian Wolff Prize for her previous work, in particular for her habilitation thesis on Sociology of Space.[2] From January 2002 to July 2013 she was Professor of Sociology at the Technical University of Darmstadt with a focus on spatial social analysis, urban and regional sociology as well as women's and gender studies. Since then she has been Professor of Sociology of Architecture and Planning at the Technical University of Berlin. She is speaker of the Collaborative Research Center 1265 Re-Figuration of Spaces.[3]

From 2011 to March 2013 she was Chairwoman of the German Sociological Association.

In 2001 Martina Löw published a much-noticed study on the Sociology of Space theorizing the constitution of space as a social phenomenon and hence a function of societal developments and action. Space is conceived as a relational ordering of social goods and living beings established by acts of synthesizing and placing these elements. This process approach to the conception of space contrasts with sociology's predominant view regarding space as the static (or preexisting) background of social processes. Based on this novel approach, Löw investigates how the social production of space is being transformed within and through electronic networks. Further research focuses on the relation between space, power and social differentiation, and also includes ethnographic studies in urban contexts.  

In the field of urban research, Löw is widely known for a new approach to analyzing the “intrinsic logic of cities”. This logic implies a complex ensemble of knowledge stocks, means of expressions and manifestations, which are intrinsically related and based on rule-governed, routinized forms of actions stabilized by specific resources. This line of argument implies that, over time, cities condense into distinct provinces of meaning.

From 2008 onward, Löw was coordinator of the focus project “Intrinsic Logic of Cities“, a cooperation between the Technical University Darmstadt and the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt, supported by the Land of Hessen Offensive for the development of scientific and economic excellence (LOEWE) program.[4] “Intrinsic logic” is a working concept to capture the specific, or “typical” characteristics of a city and its implicitly operative meaning-making processes. The research objective here is to analyze a city's fundamental structures and investigate relationships and similarities between cities, methodologically based on the instrument of city comparisons.

The intrinsic logic approach radically differs from methods used by most urban researchers doing research within cities but assuming the latter are given facts that do not need to be investigated further. In Löw's approach, however, the city itself becomes the object of investigation.

Present research focuses on the ongoing re-figuration of spaces. Löw's inquiries are based on the theory that nowadays the constitution of space is increasingly polycontexturally structured, which implies that multiple spatial orderings are more and more frequently effective at the same time in our actions and interactions. Along with Jörg Stollmann she is currently heading the research project on Smart Cities: Everyday life in digitized environments as part of the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 1265 “The Re-Figuration of Spaces”.

• Löw, Martina (2008): The Constitution of Space: The Structuration of Spaces Through the Simultaneity of Effects and Perception. In: European Journal of Social Theory 1, 11.
• Löw, Martina (2012): The Intrinsic Logic of Cities: Towards a New Theory on Urbanism, in: Urban Research & Practice Vol. 5/3. p. 303-315.
• Löw, Martina (2012): «Être-noir» (Blackness) - Une pratique collective à Salvador da Bahia: Faire de la sociologie urbaine après le «cultural turn», in: Articulo - Journal of Urban Research 8, online since 29 June 2012, http://articulo.revues.org/2039
• Löw, Martina (2013): The City as Experiential Space: The Production of Shared Meaning, in: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Vol. 37/3, p. 894-908.
• Löw, Martina; Steets, Silke (2014): The spatial turn and the sociology of built environment. In: Koniordos, Sokrates; Kyrtsis, Alexandros (ed.): Routledge Handbook of European Sociology, London: Routledge, p. 211-224.
• Löw, Martina (2015): Managing the urban commons: Public interest and the representation of interconnectedness In: Christian Borch und Martin Kornberger (ed.), Urban Commons: Rethinking the City, Routledge, p. 109-126.
• Löw, Martina (2016): The Sociology of Space - Materiality, Social Structures, and Action. New York, Cultural Sociology, Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-349-69568-3
• Löw, Martina; Fuller, Martina (ed.)(2017): Spatial sociology: Relational space after the turn. Current Sociology Monographs, Volume 65, Issue 4.

• Homepage of Martina Löw at the Technical University of Berlin
• Website of the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1265: "Re-Figuration of Spaces"
• Website of SFB 1265 Subproject B03: "Smart Cities"