The Challenge of Urban Futures: governing the complexities in European cities

The pivotal characteristic of the Research Platform “The Challenge of Urban Futures” is its epistemological breadth, in that it aims at scrutinising ecologies of relations that connect multiple thematic areas. The Platform aims at unravelling the social, cultural, economic and politico-institutional mechanisms underlying the convergences and divergences across European cities to track the transformation of urban structures over the last four decades.

Given the wide gamut of issues cities are facing, we focus our research endeavours on five thematic areas: Society and Culture, Economy and Redistribution, Environment and Sustainability, Technology and Surveillance, and Urban Government and Governance. More in detail, our research activities will sit at the intersection of these multiple thematic areas. To achieve this ambitious task, our Research Platform will bring together researchers both within and outside the University of Vienna sharing complementary expertise on the multifarious facets of urban studies.

Transformations and Eastern Europe

The research platform aims to further strengthen the traditionally excellent profile of the University of Vienna as a center for the interdisciplinary study of Central and Eastern Europe. We will combine methodological approaches from history, cultural studies, historical sociolinguistics, social anthropology, sociology, economics and law in order to study and conceptualize processes of deep political, social and economic transformations affecting the region since the late 1980s and in earlier periods. Our overarching aim is to rethink transformation as: a) multi-dimensional processes, b) as processes characterized by the impact of different temporalities, including past experiences and future expectations, c) as processes entailing a combination of macro- and micro-levels of analysis, and d) as processes characterized by changes in material settings and by a reconfiguration of legal and institutional structures. A profound historicization of transformation processes will provide a better understanding of contemporary political and economic developments that have their roots in recent and earlier transformations. Conceptually, we can benefit from the innovative approaches that have been developed by members of our team within the framework of the Research Center for the History of Transformations and East Central Europe (RECET), such as the notion of "co-transformation" (Philipp Ther) and "counter-transformation" (János Kovács). We also intend to utilize the writings of Karl Polanyi to widen the cross-disciplinary cooperation and the regional scope of our research and to overcome the teleologies of the post 1989 transformation studies.

 Further information

• Research platforms at the Faculty of Social Sciences
• Research platforms at the University of Vienna