In July 2019 the book ‘Keunings Erfenis – Beelden uit de geschiedenis van de Faculteit Ruimtelijke Wetenschappen van de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen’ [Keuning’s Heritage – Views form the history of the faculty of spatial sciences at the University of Groningen] was published. The Geography Department, where I started my Geography Education and did my Bachelor – at that time in the Netherlands still denoted as ‘candidates exam’ – as well as my Master [‘doctorandus exam’]. This book reflects the history of the Faculty of Spatial Sciences of the University of Groningen. A history full of memories. It covers the period from 1948, when Dr. Henk Keuning was appointed professor of economic and human geography, up to the year 2018. The book ends with a look through to the contemporary Faculty of Spatial Sciences.
I myself studied Geography in Groningen from 1976-1982. It is rather unfortunate that the title of the book refers so specifically to the founder of the Geography Department, while I myself, and I assume many others after me as well, do not have any memory of Prof. Keuning, and the name of its founder is, in my memory, also not that representative for what I experienced at the Geography Department in Groningen.
In that respect, Prof. Piet Lukkes, to whom also a full chapter is dedicated, to which I also contributed a short recollection, has been much more important for me personally. He was the one who, with his emphasis on research methodologies, put me on the ‘research track’, and he was also the one who taught me how to set up problem-oriented, theory-driven empirical research. 
He named his specific approach ‘Regiology’, the science of spatialisation. Prof. Piet Lukkes himself was not a typical critical geographer, rather on the contrary, but he certainly wanted that geography would make a difference in practice, and therefore always started his research projects with a practical problem he wanted to help to solve with his research. Science for the sake of Society! So this is still motivating our geographical research at the Radboud University, although, we are much more focusing on current pressing societal problems, and engage with these problems in a more critical way.
Through my studies in Groningen, during our fieldwork excursion in Switzerland, led by Jan Dekker and Jan de Vries, I also met my wife. So, one can imagine that these are also my dearest memories of my study in Groningen. I still refer to it when I nowadays inform our new students about our fieldwork excursions and the importance they have for our academic life. As far as I can remember I was also one of Prof. Pieter Lukkes’ first students to continue after the Master degree with a PhD, which I completed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ).
Another person at the Department of Geography in Groningen, who became one of my tutors and friend in my later academic life, was the late Gerrit-Jan van den Berg. He was a self-made Professor in Spatial Planning, and a strong proponent of an emancipative approach, engaging for the less privileged in society. A professor with a real ‘1968’ kind of attitude. A full Professor without a PhD-degree, so also in that respect ‘different’. A person who was ready to take a different route and to break with the hitherto practices which he observed with a critical eye. In his field, he was an admirer and scholar of the ‘father of urban planning’, John Friedmann, well known for his seminal book (1987) Planning in the Public Domain: From Knowledge to Action. Princeton University Press, Princeton, a book which, very much in line with Gerrit-Jan van den Berg’s thinking, calls for an actionist spatial planning.
Looking back, I certainly also feel gratitude to them for fostering and forming my intellectual development. I still also feel closely related to the Geography Department in Groningen, and keep up good collaborative relations. There are also some commonalities between both Geography Departments in Groningen and at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. They are both not located in the core conurbation and economic and political centre in the Netherlands, the Randstad. That puts them in a position beside the crazy hectics and fierce competition and struggles for which the Randstad is well known. Of course, both universities are as ambitious as any other university but are a bit less affected by these delusions of the day, and are therefore in a slightly better position for thorough thinking and for the nowadays so desperately wanted ‘slow science’…
Last Wednesday, Dr. Vincent Pijnenburg, succesfully defended his PhD thesis, about collaborative borderscaping in the Dutch-German borderland. In his thesis he focuses on cross-border spatial planning practices, In relation to Placemaking, one of the issues at stake here, is that it is exactly the relation with the ‘other’ which creates the incentive for active Placemaking. Placemaking within an existing administrative realm, with the usual rather homogeneous normative targets, procedures and conditions, is a rather boring activity (think also of the PhD thesis of Anke Strüver from 2004 about the ‘Stories of the Boring Border’), with boring results. However, the heterogeneity of the border landscape and of the different 
administrative systems meeting each other at the border create an active and innovative setting for Placemaking for cross-border planning and maybe even for spatial planning as such. It is at the borders, where also the core is made. Placemaking is almost by definition a bordering activity, irrespective of the place where it takes place. It is in these situations where we meet the eye from elsewhere and as such learn about ourselves and about our ‘system’ of spatial planning. In these interactive settings borders are not just shaped but also changed and transgressed. Vincent specifically elaborated and experimented extensively with interactive Design Ateliers for this borderscaping, providing a taste for more…
Next to this innovative aspect, his thesis is also a very comprehensive overview of everything relevant written about border-studies, cross-border cooperation, and cross-border spatial planning, and as such a seminal piece of work.
On our annual trip to an interesting city, with our group of three ‘Placemaking experts’ enjoying live geography…, we visited Rome this year — the city where I once lived for a bit more than a year –, to get an impression of newest developments of ‘overtourism’ and ‘urban development’, but of course also to get a real ‘feeling’ of the city and of the typical Roman atmosphere, as expressed by a real Italian coffee, unbeatable in quality, speed in processing, and… in price.
Interesting enough all the highlights of Rome are nowadays highly securitised, because of terrorist threats. So if you go to a church to participate in the holy mess, you might need to pass heavily armed security personnel and have your day-packs checked. This is supposed to provide a feeling of safety, a rather ambivalent feeling in such a setting, and a topic for further research on Placemaking as our colleague Prof. Ben Anderson in his article on ‘
While exploring Rome, we also visited the 
A former PhD students of mine, Dr. Marlies Meijer, focused her research on spatial planning under these new circumstances, and investigated what she called ‘more informal’ ways of doing spatial planning. Of course informal ways of policy making, are well known from many countries in the global South, where it sometimes is the only way of getting things done and problems solved under the condition of more or less failing states and failing governance. Traditionally these were practices which some spatial planners in Western countries, such as the Netherlands – as the traditional ‘best practice’ country with respect to spatial planning – looked down at. One might say that this is almost a kind of post-colonial reflex. Under these new circumstances, however, this could radically change. All of the sudden, one could also turn it around, and ask one self, what we in the Netherlands can learn from these informal practices. It is revealing to reflect on this change of perspective, but of course it is also not that black or white, and there are many nuances in between.
Geography is also often described as an integrative discipline bringing together what is otherwise often studied in isolation. But then, as a small, though very fine, geography department, how do you teach geography within the limitations of a regular bachelor or master programme? That seems to be a sheer impossibility and thus in sharp contrast to the comprehensive ambitions of our discipline. One just cannot address everything, and certainly not if one also seeks to provide in depth knowledge of it. Time to do so would never be sufficient, and also the expertise of the team of our extremely competent lecturers would be totally overstretched.
Applied to the design of a curriculum or a course this implies that in a first step we try to provide a general overview of all the elements, streams of thought, theories, approaches, methods or empirical fields which could be relevant without going in details. In the following steps, we select one specific example, and in a number of hermeneutical steps, students are challenged to deepen the knowledge and understanding of that specific example. The focus on the analytical meta-skills allows students to deal with other topics themselves and allows to leave certain topics out of the curriculum. In this way setting up a high quality geography curriculum becomes feasible without attempting, the impossible, namely to be fully comprehensive. It allows to have the courage to leave gaps…
Dr. Bianca Szytniewski, successfully defended her PhD-thesis on Dec. 7, 2018, on exactly this topic, focusing on cross-border shopping behaviour.
According to various scholars not only familiarity but also unfamiliarity can encourage cross-border practices. Unfamiliarity resulting from differences in, for instance, culture, landscape or facilities between the two sides of a state border can trigger interest and curiosity, and consequently lead to cross-border mobility. This dissertation further unravels this notion of familiarity and unfamiliarity in relation to encounters with differences and similarities in European borderlands, by offering theoretical reflections on familiarity and unfamiliarity, and examining cross-border mobility, shopping practices in particular, in the Dutch-German, German-Polish and Polish-Ukrainian borderland.’ If you are interested in reading more, click 
However, spheres are of course not closed bubbles but partly overlapping and in direct relation with each other, and therefore there is also a ‘politics of spheres‘. Peter Sloterdijk addresses this when he conceptualises the current world of bubbles as ‘Foam’. In my recently published article in Geographica Helvetica I introduce but also criticise his rather reactionary view on these bubbly spheres.
Today Dr. Jos van den Broek successfully defended his PhD thesis on Cross Border Innovation Spaces. In his PhD research he focused on the how successful Cross Border Innovation Spaces are very dependent on institutionalisations and institutional entrepreneurs, to sustain them. The dynamics of this institutionalisation needs to be seen as an evolutionary process, which is not necessarily one-directional. This PhD thesis contributes to the better understanding of these processes and of what is really taking place in this respect in cross-border regions.
Innovative spaces, or, given the main topic of this web-blog, probably it would be better to speak of innovative places, in general seem to thrive in (hyper)diverse milieu’s. The diversity, creates tensions, uncertainties, risks, and challenges but also seems to stimulate, inspire, and create unexpected combinations, and sparks new ideas, and offers possibilities for the impossible. These differences are thus always burdensome, sometimes even obstructive (the border as barrier) and need continuous investments and efforts, but the innovative opportunities these diversities offer are constitutive for any kind of innovation process. So probably it would be useful to re-conceptualise the border not just as barrier but also as opportunity. This would also imply a totally new look at the fuzziness of these places. Fuzziness as a resource and as something to celebrate. Jos van den Broek, with his main focus institutionalisation, speaks e.g. of ‘fuzzy governance spaces’ as a precondition for successful cross-border innovation processes.