Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology
Urban and Environmental Sociology are fields of study focussing on society's relations with its built and natural environments, typically emphasizing the social and cultural dimensions of ecological problems and possible paths towards resolving them. Since modern societies are increasingly faced with the need to cope with environmental risks of their own making the Department’s research is focussing on processes by which ecological problems become defined and socially constructed in different ways. This is important since the perception of environmental topics does not only depend on their physical-material constitutions, but especially on different mass media, cultural constructions, and public narratives of all sorts.
Current research of the Department especially focuses on societal coping capacities (e.g., in face of extreme weather events), on strategies towards sustainable development in different societal areas and on different scales (region, cities, district), decision making under situations of new risks and knowledge gaps (e.g., ignorance, uncertainty, nonknowledge) as well as on advancing new methodologies, such as computational environmental sociology (e.g., via natural language processing) to extract relevant information on cultural patterns as well as media representations of environmental themes from different sources. One of the central tasks of sociologically informed research at UFZ is to deliver a better understanding of the related cultural and social foundations in the human-environment relations relevant for a sustainable society.
The Department builds on a rich tradition of scholarship in human ecological research in geography and sociology. Our research is highly inter- and transdisciplinary and focuses on different spatial-temporal scales. Besides a broad range of sociological and human geographical theories our department’s research builds on a variety of methodological approaches ranging from data processing to questionnaire-based surveys as well as participant observation methods, data analytics, visualization and statistical modelling. Our department’s disciplinary backgrounds include expertise from human geography, urban planning as well as different environmental sciences. We work closely together with natural and engineering sciences, with numerous research partners in the region but also internationally, and with policy makers and implementation partners on research projects with a focus on achieving greater sustainability.
Our team of scientists is heavily involved in third party funding, top-notch scientific publishing and editing (including journal editorships and full-length monograph authorships), as well as hands-on work with stakeholders and policy makers both locally and nationally. Press coverage of the Department’s work ranges from national and global dailies and weeklies, prime time TV and radio news as well as more specialized news magazines. The Department also hosts the editorial office of the interdisciplinary journal Nature + Culture.