Overall aims of the institute

In the different research projects the IfR wants to - beside the in each case specific investigations - pursue three higher aims:

• Up to now concealed research fields should be developed or old, but meanwhile buried research fields be opened up again. Examples are the development of the redevelopment and consolidation politics of the state, the federal states and the local districts. In this partial field of industrial politics it is tried to prevent small and medium enterprises from the bankruptcy in existence miseries by financial and consultation aids.
  Another example is the revival of social-scientific questions which hardly got lost during the last years: the regional disparities and their reproduction as well as the social disparities which are reproduced especially in bigger cities by a specific distribution of infrastructure facilities.


• With sober empiric work the IfR wants to clarify, that in fact society changes are often different and more slowly than public, science and politics supposes. For example: suppositions, that in new established regions everywhere quickly functioning networks and innovative environments are developed, does not come up to the very much differentiated development in different region types.
  To be able to contradict over-hasty generalisations in a theoretical and empirical way, the IfR has developed an own system of concepts and theories. Conceptual reasonable and empirically descriptable concepts like normal region, network stone or cluster politics are called exemplary.


• Against the actual trend of a 'decomposition science' (with extremely specified object areas which are analysed meticulously), the IfR takes care of setting regional developments close to reality with superior economic, social and ecological processes. Also here it is the social-scientific aim of demystifying rash acceptances, for example, of a narrow connection between the globalisation with the regionalisation and the loss of control ability of a nation-state.