Working title "The learning city"

Anna Caroline Aigner

Planned completion: 2027

Supervision: Simon Güntner

Anna Aigner's dissertation project focuses on the relationship between experimentation and learning in urban areas, in particular on how urban actors can learn through experimental interventions to improve urban development processes and promote urban resilience to climate change. By analysing successful urban experiments, such as the 'Wiener Klimateam', the aim is to identify how these interventions contribute to improved understanding and adaptation to social and environmental challenges and how they influence long-term urban planning practices. The focus is on how learning from these experiments influences and institutionalises new modes of action and practices in urban development.

Working title „Refiguration ländlicher Räume durch Caring Communities“

Nina Faltermayr, opens an external URL in a new window

Planned completion: 2029

Supervision: Ariane Sept

The growing demand for care work due to demographic change, as well as the insufficient supply of high-quality care services, are key factors driving the current care crisis. These and other pressing social challenges underscore the need for social change. This dissertation project draws on the theory of refiguration as a framework for understanding social transformation that encompasses space and time, as well as the coexistence of different logics, contradictions, and tensions. Rural areas offer significant potential for driving the necessary transformation at the local level. The holistic understanding of neighbourhood care services in caring communities represents a potential approach in this regard. The aim of the research project is to determine the extent to which caring communities contribute to the refiguration of rural areas.

Sozialraumanalyse für Straßenraumgestaltungen 
Klassentheoretische Perspektiven und ihre Relevanz in Planungsprozessen

Johanna Gassner

Planned completion: 2028

Supervision: Alexander Hamedinger

In the face of multiple crises and growing social inequalities, spatial planning faces the challenge of adequately capturing the complexity of social processes. Current social science research also confirms that the crisis has a socio-ecological class dimension. This is where the doctoral project comes in, examining how social space analyses can be expanded to include a class-theoretical perspective. Most class analyses reveal an analytical gap: the spatial level is given only limited consideration, both theoretically and empirically. Conversely, social space analyses often lack a perspective on class relations, even though this planning tool offers potential for capturing complex social dimensions and social inequalities. Against this backdrop, the thesis develops a theory-driven and empirically tested system of indicators for a class-sensitive social space analysis. Street spaces are understood as concrete localities in which conflicts materialise and become visible. The aim is to further develop social space analysis into a critical planning tool that reveals who is involved in planning processes, who remains excluded, and how class relations are spatially organised and reproduced in planning processes.

Energiekonsum, Stadt & soziale Milieus

Nadine Haufe

Expected completion: 2024

Supervision: Jens Dangschat

As the effects of climate change and discussions about the energy and transport turnaround become increasingly clear, as well as the demand for livable cities, there is a growing realization that individual consumption of energy in cities must also change in order to achieve the Paris climate goals and thus limit negative long-term consequences for the environment and society.

In order to increase the effectiveness of measures to promote sustainable energy consumption practices in the CO2-intensive areas of housing and mobility, social milieus, i.e. attitude-based approaches, have been used for several years to segment the population into (target) groups - all too often, however, spatial-material aspects remain unconsidered and desired successes fall short of expectations.

The aim of the dissertation is to determine a milieu-specific model for describing and explaining individual energy consumption in the areas of housing and mobility, including the spatial-material dimensions, in order to better promote ecologically sustainable energy consumption with a target-group-specific approach. Socio-spatial conditions for ecologically sustainable energy consumption in the city and milieu-specific barriers to behavioral change in the areas of mobility and housing will be identified on the basis of a Viennese study, and consequences for the actions of social actors (politics, municipalities, companies, associations, initiatives) or the setting of measures (information campaigns, funding policy, regulatory instruments) will be derived.