Research Interests

I’m an anthropologist of law and technology interested in land governance in the context of the twin digital & green transition. Together with spatial planners, economists, and data scientists I investigate data (infrastructures) that contain and process spatial sustainability information and operationalize sustainability related practices within state administrations, corporations and the financial sector. I combine a critical data perspective on sustainability indicators, standards and data grounded in science & technology studies with empirical studies on land use efficiency, flooding risk and ESG to enhance credibility, utility and goal-orientation of sustainability information and regulation.

(Spatial) sustainability indicators

I am initiator and project lead of "Green Data, Indicators, Algorithms: Connecting Green Finance and Smart Cities" (GreenDIA). GreenDIA is an interdisciplinary consortium research project with three partners. The Chair for Land Management (Prof. Walter de Vries, TUM), Chair for Remote Sensing (Prof. Michael Schmitt, Uni BW) and Chair for Data Science & Statistics in the Humanities (Prof. Frauke Kreuter, LMU). It investigates cross-sectoral standards and criteria of sustainability evaluation in regard to land sealing and land use for residential buildings (including biodiversity, climate adaptation, climate protection, sufficiency). It is funded by the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.

In subprojects of GreenDIA we extract legal information with NLP from local land use plans and create maps and visualizations of the spatial distribution of  legal ordinances (B-Plan-Project). For the creation of a dashboard we join this data with environmental and land use change data sets to create sustainability indicators focusing on efficient land use for the housing sector (LUE Project).
Together with Bundesbank and LMU, we extract and structure spatial information from corporate sustainability reports (Spatial Cues Project) and at the same time develop a typology of biases and errors we encountered during annotation and prompting (with Klimatkollen).

Transparency of land and real estate ownership

The very German attitude towards privacy of wealth has sparked my interest to understand, how state registers constitute this privacy and thereby the way we think and act with regard to and ownership. In my thesis I investigated the architecture of the German land registers, cadastres and commercial registers that constitute property in land and corporations. Identifying the legal, technical and administrational barriers has also constituted crucial knowledge to develop practical data access strategies for  empirical ownership research in Germany.

Data Infrastructures, state administration, values and digital transformation

While my current work is focused on digital transition processes in finance and regulation my research has long been engaged with ‚old‘ data infrastructures. I’m fascinated by the slow and continuous making of state administrative data infrastructures that shape the way we see the world, economy, and society. I argue, that bureaucracies contain different sediments of values and imaginations of desirable futures that were inscribed into their data infrastructures in the historical processes of creating, adapting and maintaining them.

Medien & Outreach

Reaching out to stakeholders and audiences beyond the academic bubble is important to me. I have given talks, faciliated panels, and contributed to events for many institutions, including Project Together (Farm Food Climate Nexus), Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Bits & Bäume, Andreas Hermes Akademie, Umweltstiftung Michael Otto, Rotary Club Berlin, FEPS Europe, Bayrische Elite Akademie (Hackathon), Umweltbundesamt, Otzenhausener Kolloquium.

 

Related to the munich rent brake survey

The Rent Survey Munich has gained particular attention. The ARD documentary 'Gau am Bau - Deutschland in der Wohnungskrise' first reported on the Munich rent survey in May. The study was reported on locally in the Abendzeitung newspaper in March and November 2024. An article appeared on the Tagesschau homepage. ARD Plusminus interviewed Felicitas Sommer in August.  Deutschlandfunk reported in the Nova program and in the Länderreport. In October, Felicitas Sommer was a guest on the BR talk show 'Politik und Wir' live on Twitch and in the ARD Mediathek. Felicitas Sommer was interviewed on Quer mit Christoph Süß in November.

 

Related to land and property

2025 Sommer,Felicitas, Dženeta Hodžić, Theresa Jedd, Verena Maleska: “Was schützt uns vor zu viel Wasser?” Wasser-Atlas

2025 Podcast 361° Sozialkompass KSOE „Der Traum vom Eigenheim“ 

2024 Youtube-Tutorial „How to research agricultural land ownership and corporate structures“

2023 Blog-Artikel bei Verfassungsblog "Nachhaltigkeit codieren"

2022 Blog-Artikel bei Politik & Ökonomie „Wie staatliche Bürokratie Eigentumsparadigmen codiert“ 

2021 Blog-Artikel Exploring Economics „Die Moral der Bürokratie“ 

Teaching

2023 Seminar: Alternative and future economic forms: A collaborative online seminar with practitioners and anthropologists, Institute of Anthropology, University of Leipzig

2024/2025 Lecture: Introduction to Administrative Law, School of Engineering and Design, Technical University of Munich

Selected Talks

Being a scholar working at the intersection of scientific communities I visited conferences and workshops of various disciplines connected to sustainability, corporate and land ownership. These disciplines include Statistics, Architecture, Planning, Earth Observation, Philosophy, Law, and (of course) Social & Cultural Anthropology. Here’s a selected list of talks, panel discussions, and presentations:

2024-09-06 Invited Presentation: "Financial regulation as leverage for land take reduction?" in Workshop "Being serious about no net land take: Can other policy areas help to get closer to this goal?" online, Umweltbundesamt

2024-06-20 Invited Panel Discussion: "Navigating Through Generative AI: From Unknown Unknowns to Known Unknowns" at the International Conference on Establishment Statistics of the American Statistical Association Glasgow

2024-06-06 Talk: "Nachhaltigkeitsindikatoren und die fehlende Raumkomponente der Energieeffizienz" at "Suffizienz im Gebäudebereich im Rahmen des Low Tech & Suffizienz Symposiums 2024 Berlin

2024-03-21 PLPR 2024 in Munich. Presentation „Transparency of land ownership in Europe - Understanding differences and their implications for land policy“ 

2023-10-04 Invited Presentation Workshop "Land Use in Sustainable Finance" at Indo-German Workshop on Open Spatial Data Infrastructure for Sustainable Urban Development, Center for Applied Geomatics and IÖR India

2022-06-30: Universität Duisburg-Essen, philosophisches Symposium "Eigentum zwischen „absolutem dominium“ und institutionellem Regime - welche Eigentumstheorie brauchen wir" 

2021-09-28: „Welten-Zonen-Atmosphären: Seismographien des Anthropozäns“ Tagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie (DGSKA). Presentation „Seeing companies like a company: the statistical production of complex corporate structures in Germany“

2020-11-22: „The Privacy of Property“ at Birkbeck, University of London, School of Law. Critical Perspectives On Land Registration 

Memberships & Associations

Participant in BERD@NFDI

Member of the International Academic Association on Planning, Law and Property Rights (PLPR)

Associated with special research project „Structural Change of Property“ 

Associated with Social Data Science and AI Lab (Prof. Frauke Kreuter), Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich

Fellowship at The New Institute in 2023 in the program „Reclaiming Common Wealth“ (cancelled after two months for reasons related to personal ethics)