Challenges for the Public Space Policy in Buenos Aires and Vienna.

The urban policies in Vienna and Buenos Aires are currently shaped by new challenges, such as fundamental changes in cultural diversity due to various migration movements. Public spaces, in particular, appear as new focal points on the political agendas of both capitals. However, and this is the central hypothesis of the project, Vienna and Buenos Aires are dealing with a qualitatively new generation of public space policy compared to political programs and interventions regarding public spaces initiated in the last decade in various metropolises in Latin America and Europe.

The binational project team views these public spaces as analytical entry points to empirically explore the risks, but especially the potentials of this new cultural diversity for urban development across disciplines. In this context, we use the normative concept of social innovation. We understand social innovation as all those changes in urban societal actions that aim to improve or seek to improve the quality of life in a socially inclusive and socially just manner. Social innovation is not product-centric but process-immanent, making theoretical discussions on relational spatial concepts ideal for methodological reflection and theoretical interpretation of the results of empirical case studies.

To what extent does urban policy in Buenos Aires and Vienna recognize, advocate, and use public spaces as a strategic spatial sphere to enhance the social innovation potential in cities? To operationalize this central research question, which can be addressed through a tightly organized work program within a two-year binational project, we first explore on the empirical level which cultural practices are currently gaining momentum in public spaces and to what extent they already generate social innovation or have the potential for it. In the analysis of current cross-disciplinary urban development measures, we inquire how these sociocultural changes are materially expressed in urban design changes. In addition to the interest in knowledge, our research project is characterized by an application-oriented approach in the sense of policy, planning, and design consultancy: In dialogue with involved stakeholders, we aim to bring the results back to urban society, for example, in the form of an interactive, dynamic guideline.