Informed by longstanding artistic practice, this doctoral thesis approaches entanglements of Swiss coloniality in Brazil and Switzerland under the lens of land, archive, and visuality. The enduring legacies of imperial capitalism in the former Colonia Leop ...
This thesis focuses on English invention drawings between 1750 and 1850. These visual documents offer a perspective on a technical aesthetic linked to the rise of English machinery at the turn of the 19th century. In this work, I focus on two specific corp ...
What is social housing, is it a right or a property? Is it guaranteed for all by welfare state or non-governmental organizations or a commodity in capitalist production and market relations? According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, h ...
Innovation is crucial and decisive for the long-term development of a metropolitan region in the global economy. While firms certainly play a significant role in the development of specific innovation, the environment that nur-tures innovative firms and di ...
This thesis presents four essays providing novel empirical and theoretical insights on the incentives and institutional structures that favor knowledge production and diffusion. The first two studies analyze these processes in the realm of scientific resea ...
Purpose This paper aims to discuss the nexus between two societal (sub) systems of housing and energy supply to shed new light on the key institutional barriers to socio-technical energy transition in the built environment. The key research question is to ...
Agricultural crop residues serve as a renewable source for production of bioethanol and other value added chemicals. Optimization of enzymatic saccharification may ensure cost-effective production of bioethanol and other industrially important products. He ...
Contemporary architecture and urbanism concern everyday life in multiple contradictory ways. Floating between alienation and hope, post-industrial and other interstices often hold beautiful and poetic aesthetics of decay, attracting people driven by curios ...
This study concerns the economics of innovation in the area of medical innovation -new diagnostics, medicines and vaccines-, and in particular how innovation contributes to meeting public health needs. Significant advances have taken place in medical scien ...
The work described is part of a long term program of introducing institutional robotics, a novel framework for the coordination of robot teams that stems from institutional economics concepts. Under the framework, institutions are cumulative sets of persis ...
In this paper, we first discuss the concept of Personal Learning Environment (PLE) with respect to higher- education institutions and Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). This discussion rapidly confronts us to the place of the PLE and self-directed learn ...
Italy is a multi-level polity where policymaking and implementation involves both public and private actors. Both territorial and functional decentralisation have an impact on the final results of policy making. In fact, territorial decentralisation implie ...
Architectural competitions have a long tradition in Switzerland that is usually cited as one of the European countries with the largest numbers of competition procedures per year, along with Germany and some Northern countries – Finland, Denmark and Sweden ...
Within the context of the liberalisation of the electricity sector, the government’s aim to increase renewable energy sources and post-Kyoto regulation, this paper aims to identify and develop institutional mechanisms to facilitate mini and small hydropowe ...
The various actors in the regulated industries relate to each other within a broader institutional framework, i.e., by way of formal and informal rules. An important role in the implementation of liberalization processes is given to regulation and thus to ...
The paper aims to contribute towards further shaping of the institutional framework in Switzerland in order to facilitate the development of small hydropower (
Within the current context of globalisation, trasnationalism has acquired importance as a social phenomenon and an object of study, since it shows the value that the diasporas' own decentralized mechanisms have in promoting development in the countries of ...
