Publications

The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife

With a population over one million, Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, faces serious challenges around provision of services, housing and infrastructure, all exacerbated by climate change...

How informal workers navigate the universe of rules that shape sanitation practices in urban Africa

This paper elaborates on Joan Tronto’s feminist care ethics with a particular focus on her relational principle of caring-with. Drawing on her broad understanding of care, which includes both informal and formalised forms of care, we argue...

Change processes on the Austrian student housing market using the example of Vienna and Innsbruck

Kooperative Stadt- und Regionalentwicklung (Cooperative urban and regional development) will be presented on March 12. Please register to attend the discussion with the editors Yvonne Franz and Martin Heintel.

This article takes stock of the 2030 Agenda and focuses on five governance areas. In a nutshell, we see a quite patchy and often primarily symbolic uptake of the global goals. Although some studies highlight individual success stories of actors and institutions to implement the goals...

The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine caused an escape of more than 7 million people to other European countries. In this extreme context, the accommodation of refugees has been an urgent need and an unexpected challenge for the host cities and societies...

Periods of forced migration to and in Europe have been common in the past decade and show no expectation of stalling due to ongoing armed conflicts, global inequalities and the adverse effects of climate change. Nevertheless, the provision of accommodation for asylum seekers and refugees continues to depend on temporary, ad hoc solutions...

Cities have become gamechangers of global and local change processes. Whether it's the climate crisis, the mobility and energy turnaround, digitization or demographic change - cities are not only places where these issues take place, they often also promise the leverage needed to locate and implement change, turnaround and transformation...

- Learnings and modifications in the aftermath of the long summer of migration in 2015 - Austria's exclusive model of citizenship, and restrictive policies on migration, refugee reception and asylum, dating back to the 1990s, create structural barriers to refugee integration in the country’s economic and socio-cultural life. In this article, we shed light on Vienna, a city renowned for its comprehensive social policies...

Why is cooperation needed in urban and regional development? What skills are needed for a career in cooperative urban and regional development?

Urban and regional infrastructures regain interdisciplinary interest in course of the ‘infrastructural turn’. Contemporary questions exceed beyond engineering and technology but reach into social, political, economic, and ecological spheres. Therefore, the ARL:Univie International Summer School 2021 “Urban and Regional Infrastructures” invited international young researchers to Vienna to discuss the state-of-the-art of infrastructure-related research...

The role of student housing within social infrastructure provision is arguably overlooked. This is a vital issue, as purpose-built student accommodation provides a significant stock of affordable accommodation for students in European university cities while also supporting their social integration in the urban environment...

Literature on urban ecosystem services (UESS) is vast, particularly on cultural ecosystem services. However, due to a lack of knowledge on individual urban green spaces on the site level, further research on enhanced methods is needed to underpin existing assumptions about the reasons why people are visiting urban green spaces and what kinds of ecosystem services they can expect, with a focus on recreational activities...

This open access book addresses the contribution of cities to sustainable development. The authors present the 2030 Agenda and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed upon by the member states of the United Nations in 2015. They show how the goals are implemented at the municipal level and what challenges arise...

Das Alltagsleben im Sinne des ›Ordinarylife‹ ist in der deutschsprachigen Stadtgeographie ein noch neues Thema. Es dominieren hier ›klassische‹ Stadtkonzepte und -strukturtheorien, die nur in einem geringen Ausmaß zum Verständnis des komplexen All tagslebens beitragen und sich wenig des analytischen Potenzials der Quartiersebene bezüglich gesellschaftlicher und planungsspezifischer Fragestellungen bedienen.

Given the potential of cities to contribute to a more sustainable world as framed by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN 2030 Development Agenda, this article focuses on Urban Sustainability Transformations...

Urban green spaces can have potential positive impacts on climate, biodiversity, health, and generally on the quality of life for urban residents and are of great importance for pursuing recreational activities...

Local implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is a major challenge for municipalities. But how can urban policy and administration be supported so that urban sustainability transformations succeed?

The United Nations (UN) 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, signed in 2015 and backed-up with its seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), mentions cities as key players for evolving actively towards more sustainability. This underpins that living in the cities of the urban age is increasingly becoming the focus of sustainability discussions...