The present report is an attempt to provide an overview over intersecting beginnings,

emergencies, and prolongations that reinforces a theoretical reflection on contemporary

cultural debate and its repercussions on societal development. With the current research

overview, we want to draw attention to assumptions about culture(s), as they are played out in

the intersection of migration and sustainable urban development. Multi-layered and doubleedged,

‘culture’ often comes with territorial postulates and implicit ideas about belongings and

borders, movements and rights of priority. The report approaches these entangled issues from

several angles. With the point of departure in current environmental policy, the first section of

the report, therefore, approaches ideas of “sustainability” via the notions of “culture” and

“locality”. A second section briefly discusses the methodological challenges of researching

emergent cultural phenomena across both geographical and disciplinary borders. In a third

section, we turn to three research reports, a sampling of the report literature, but representative

of how global, regional and local perspectives on culture today are ‘scaffolded’ in relation to

mobility and migration. A fourth section introduces emergent transversal, i.e. non-categorical,

approaches to cultural research, primarily focusing on how notions such as transnationalism

and translocality may inform new modes of research and urban development. A fifth section

finally, articulates some recommendations about how to relate to translocal space and

translocal subjectivities in practice and how to craft research approaches that not only involve

interlocutors but also answers to and actively engage in current spatial and cultural changes.