How are terror threats and counterterrorism measures experienced in everyday urban spaces? We argue that thinking atmospherically about the spaces of urban encounters with (counter)terrorism is important, firstly, to identify and question feelings and dispositions shaped by discourses, practices, and infrastructures of (counter)terrorism; secondly, to contribute spatial perspectives of felt experience to literatures on security and (counter)terrorism in geography and beyond; thirdly, to connect official understandings of (counter)terrorism with its everyday felt experiences and materialities. We highlight two conceptual and empirical arenas - the crowd and the question of difference - where atmospheric approaches to urban (counter)terrorism can be developed.

In this article, we scrutinise the concept of 'affective atmosphere' at the Breitscheidplatz in Berlin, Germany. By unpacking key moments and elements in the Breitscheidplatz's history, when measures of security and counterterrorism transformed, we investigate how the felt experience of city dwellers and users of the square altered. We argue that the concept of atmosphere, taking the affective dimension of urban life into account, offers an enriching layer of understanding the everyday life in European cities. By focusing on the spatial and affective securitisation that was implemented before and after the attack in 2016, this paper converges everyday urban geopolitics and the concept of affective atmospheres. Bringing together the engagement with experiences of everyday urban life and the atmospheric situation that security and counter-terrorism measure entail in European urban spaces. This paper approximates the felt experience and intangible elements with the help of sensory ethnographies. Shedding light on the aesthetic and sensorial paradoxes of securitisation and counterterrorism measures, hegemonic practices of affective politics and discriminatory spatial expulsion are unravelled.

This paper develops three analytical categories – range, supporting capacity, exigency/notability – to capture how supra-individual phenomena affect the people studied by empirical research. Researchers face a tension between constructivist and realist perspectives as the examined phenomena are simultaneously social constructs, in the way people perceive and understand them, and social facts in their consequences. Taking a critical perspective on the notion of large social phenomena – popularized by Theodore Schatzki – the paper develops an explorative terminology that aims to facilitate practice-oriented field research. Examples of empirical research on transition and degrowth initiatives illustrate how research subjects estimate the range of a phenomenon by trying to grasp whether they are in or out of its reach; the supportive capacity of a phenomenon by exploring how far it carries certain processes; and they experience the exigency of a phenomenon and ascribe a certain notability to it. Taken together, this terminology grasps the way phenomena are matters of concern, rather than matters of fact, for the research subjects.

Zusammenfassung Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird ausgehend von der Frage nach der Studienmotivation in der Geographie erörtert, inwieweit das Hochschulfach Geographie ein Orientierungsfach darstellt und damit auch Möglichkeit zur Kritik in gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhängen gibt. Geographie zu studieren, bedeutet im beruflichen und persönlichen Lebensvollzug eine Antwort darauf zu finden, was die Geographie ist. Im Studium wird eine berufliche Sinngebung ermöglicht und erprobt, weswegen im vorliegenden Beitrag argumentiert wird, dass diesen Sinngebungsprozessen eine dezidiert kritische Orientierung zuträglich ist. Mit Rückgriff auf Anne Buttimer wird aufgezeigt, in welchen Haltungen berufliche Sinngebungen einerseits bereits im Studium der Geographie eingeübt bzw. durch die Hochschullehre befördert werden können und wie dies disziplingeschichtlich mit Denkstilen im Fach zusammenhängt. Ferner wird erläutert, was Orientierung bedeutet und wie dies mit Kritik zusammenhängt. Es wird abschließend mit dem Vorschlag, Kritik als Mediation zu verstehen, für die Notwendigkeit einer kritisch angewandten Geographie plädiert.

The paper provides a conceptual framework for understanding collectively shared political agency in public space. By using a phenomenological approach, it explores the spaces of protest movements by deploying Elias Canetti’s perspective on crowds and links this to an affectively embodied spatiality of protesting crowds, which is conceptually framed as atmosphere. This endeavour is substantiated with the differentiation between atmospheres and situations as in the neo-phenomenology of Hermann Schmitz on the one hand and the social theory of imitation by Gabriel Tarde on the other. The key argument of the paper is that the rhythmic appearance of imitative waves of sentiments and ideas within protest movements spatially manifests itself in an overarching atmosphere of protesting crowds. The paper contributes to a better understanding of the links between social movements, emotional crowd dynamics and the emergence of communal atmospheres of protest. It concludes with the argument that such atmospheres and techniques that facilitate them are of major importance for the understanding of the stability and sustainability of protest movements.

This article serves as introduction for a themed issue on Peter Sloterdijk's enormous philosophy of space. It invites scholars from various disciplines to critically engage with Sloterdijk's thought and discusses briefly the contributions made in this special issue. The paper gives some orientation on the anthropological and social philosophy Sloterdijk deploys within his oeuvre, and illuminates the various fields of social and cultural research his ideas have informed so far. The editorial identifies four possible fields of interest within human geography that could gain by engaging with Sloterdijk's thought, namely urban and architectural theory, new technologies, political geographies and critical social geography. The article also discusses the necessity of a critical distance to the philosophical premises on which Sloterdijk grounds his philosophy as well as his role as notorious commentator on political issues in Germany.

In the article, the German-speaking debate on Leibniz’ monadology within the social geographical framework of hermeneutics and action theory is linked with current usage of actor-network-theories and assemblage-theories in geographic inquiry. The monadology of Leibniz is deployed and discussed in the light of its interpretation within the social geographic frameworks of the 1980s and 1990s in Germany. With reference to Gabriel Tarde, the article argues that geographical research gains new impulses through the application of a neo-monadological perspective on the social. The implications of such a perspective are discussed in terms of methodological and methodical challenges on the one hand, and in regard to emerging opportunities for conceptual and thematic orientation on the other.

Based on a reading of the book Was Räume mit uns machen – und wir mit ihnen. Kritische Phänomenologie des Raumes by Jürgen Hasse (2014), the article discusses the noteworthy role of phenomenology within German-speaking human geography. The phenomenological work by Hasse and his close referring to the philosophy of H. Schmitz will be discussed in the context of the sociology of knowledge and the history of the discipline. In conclusion, the article pleas for a phenomenologically grounded discussion of the spatialities of feelings against the backdrop of the current resurgence of politics of feelings.

Anticipating the future is a key practice for the management of potential emergencies. Anticipatory action needs the future to become ready-to-hand. Focusing on the logics and practices of anticipatory action the paper discusses the relations between time and space in the context of risk and uncertainty. Spatializations of simulation technologies, preemptive emergency management and anticipatory action aim to disclose and extrapolate the future. In general, infrastructures are technologies which aim to materialize expectations concerning the future. In the case of emergency management infrastructural measures enable and/or constrain practices by inheriting specific logics.The concept of riskscapes (Miiller-Mahn and Everts, 2013) poses to be a promising framework to grasp these issues. In our perspective, extrapolated riskscapes treat the future as an already interpreted and symbolically structured world. This involves not only looking at the temporality of riskscapes, but also dealing with geographies of inscribed futurity. Two case studies focusing on emergency management practices of firefighters will be deployed for illustration: the first observes the logics of preemptive emergency management and anticipatory action inscribed into materialities of infrastructures in the context of rail-bound hazmat transports; the second shows how computer simulations for crowded geographies facilitate decision-making and action for policing and crowd management.Instead of treating future in riskscapes as neutral, we highlight the politically situated practices that co-evolve with these technologies and their spatializations. The article discusses the dimension of time within riskscapes to gain a better understanding of the temporalization of space as in simulations and the spatialization of time as in infrastructures of emergency "management.

This short paper provides the initial provocation for a themed issue that emerges from a conference on the topic of geographies of social crises/crises of social geographies. The article calls for a (re)consideration of the “social question” in the 21st century. We call for social geographers to engage with the historical dynamics of places and milieus to understand novel class societies and the violence that underpins social inequalities. The article makes a case for an empirically saturated social geography. We believe this provides a useful programme which helps to understand current phenomena of political, social and economic crises.