Angelina Göb presented a paper on ‘Mapping social cohesion via social infrastructure’ at the internati-onal conference of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in conjunction with the Institute of British Geographers (IGB) on 28 August.
In the session ‘Mapping and sharing knowledge on social infrastructure’, she presented the latest rese-arch results from the two BMBF-funded projects of the Research Institute Social Cohesion (RISC) that are being conducted at the IWKG. The focus of her presentation centred on the role of public libraries as places of encounter and democratic education in and for the neighbourhood. In addition, transfor-mation and legitimation processes from the current discourse on the development of social infrastruc-tures were addressed and empirically traced on the basis of the participatory formats of meaning map-ping and a photo exhibition. The emerging cohesive and conflicting issues were explained and it was shown how and with whom public libraries – as an integrating and integrated structure – can be constructed in the future.
