Andreas Novy

Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre: Social Innovation and the Dialectical Relationship of State and Civil Society:

This article focuses on the identification and role of social innovation in urban development. The aim is to further the understanding of the contradictory relationship between state and civil society, using a thorough analysis of the process of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, the capital city of Rio Grande do Sul—the most southern state of Brazil. The first section spells out four different concepts of the relationship between state and civil society and their implications for social innovation. In the second section, these popular movements are shown to be embedded in the historically rooted structure of patrimonialism and capitalism in Brazil. The third section provides an historical analysis of Brazilian popular movements which represent new key actors in civil society. The fourth section offers a detailed description of the process of the participatory budget. In the final section, conclusions are drawn about social innovation in local politics, focusing on the empowering experiments with new public and democratic forms of the local state accessible to civil society and its interests.

Social Cohesion: A Conceptual and Political Elucidation

This article aims to clarify the concept of social cohesion by embedding it within a dynamic, multiscalar and complex understanding of socioeconomic development in the city. Section 1 gives a European perspective on the relationship between differing views of social cohesion and urban policy and how its relation to competitiveness is inherent to contemporary EU cohesion discourse. It examines the ambiguity of policy orientations that seek an answer to this failing functionalisation. Section 2 unravels the complexity and multidimensionality of social cohesion as a problématique. It systematises social cohesion as an ‘open concept’, distinguishing between its socioeconomic, cultural, ecological and political dimensions. Section 3 offers ways of accommodating the tensions and contradictions between cohesion and competitiveness inherent in capitalist market economies, and argues in favour of a progressive neo-structuralist approach, capable of laying out policies to make cities more inclusive for all inhabitants in all their uniqueness and diversity.

The End of Red Vienna Recent Ruptures and Continuities in Urban Governance

After decades of corporatist urban governance dominated by social democracy, Vienna is undergoing a process of economic and political restructuring. This process is expressed physically in large urban development projects, Donau City being the most important. Donau City is a large real estate project on the left bank of the Danube, based on public-private partnership. Due to the liberalization of the housing market, new private actors are increasingly important, influencing decision-making in the Donau City project. In urban planning in general, growing interest in real estate investment has resulted in new planning procedures incorrectly labelled as bottom-up. In fact, this is a fragmented, privatized, opaque and ad hoc form of urban governance accompanied by a new elitist hierarchy formed by leaders of the city’s administration, business and academic worlds. This new, unaccountable elite has elaborated a strategic plan for Vienna with little reference to the citizenry. Therefore, the new liberal form of governance goes hand in hand with important continuities concerning co-optation, exclusion and conflict avoidance. The article ends by stressing the importance of alternative political projects that aim at participatory democracy overcoming deep-rooted authoritarian structures.

Introduction: Problematising urban social cohesion: a transdisciplinary endeavour

Conceptualising, exploring and operationalising different meanings of social cohesion to make them useful for studying the dynamics of `cities and social cohesion in urban Europe: that is what this Special Issue aims at. It is based on research on `Social Cohesion in European Cities within the FP7-SSHProject Social Polis, the first social platform funded by the EC SSH programme

Unequal diversity – on the political economy of social cohesion in Vienna

The article reflects on the contradictory dynamics inherent in policies and political strategies to achieve social cohesion in cities, given the current European political-economic conjuncture of multiculturalism as well as increasing socioeconomic inequality. It takes the history of the city of Vienna with its rich story of social cohesion and of a melting pot of cultures as a historic case study, stressing path-dependency and the necessity of path-shaping. Furthermore, it describes two good practices of socially innovative current attempts to achieve social cohesion. The empirical insights, together with a broad overview of different disciplinary and policy discourses, help to problematize social cohesion as a key issue for European urban development. The article closes by proposing three lessons that can be learned from Vienna: to overcome culturalist reductionism, to be aware of scale-sensitive institution-building, and to reflect on the political and economic preconditions for building a European social citizenship.

Cooperative Housing and Social Cohesion: The Role of Linking Social Capital

Abstract The article examines the role of housing cooperatives for social cohesion in the city by introducing linking social capital which grasps the vertical dimension of social capital. Housing cooperatives represent a crucial intermediate level between residents and urban housing policy, thus providing opportunity structures for bottom-linked citizen participation. Drawing on the case of Vienna, a large-scale household survey and interviews with key informants provide empirical evidence on the importance of a form of social capital which links actors at different levels in the spatial hierarchy: residents, housing managers and political decision-makers. The findings add to our understanding of the opportunities and problems with resident participation in a policy field structured by multi-level governance. Our two-level analysis shows that the dominant model of governance, top-down as well as neoliberal, has structurally limited the room for participatory practices in cooperative housing. Nevertheless, we argue that professional housing cooperatives have a potential to give residents a voice beyond the neighbourhood. Their strong linkages with public decision-makers at different scales can help leverage ideas and resources of residents.

Unequal Diversity as a Knowledge Alliance: An Encounter of Paulo Freire's Dialogical Approach and Transdisciplinarity.

Purpose – The purpose of this self‐reflective paper is to focus on practical efforts to combat inequality and foster intercultural dialogue in education. It introduces “knowledge alliances”, a type of social practice open for education technologies.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is structured in a theoretical and an empirical part. The theoretical part ledge production is divided in two sections: the first one summarizes transdisciplinarity and Paulo Freires dialogical pedagogy as two innovative approaches to knowledge sharing, production and appropriation. In the second section knowledge alliances are presented as innovative forms of lasting learning and research partnerships. The empirical part presents a case study and discusses the potential and limits of this specific knowledge alliance.Findings – The paper demonstrates the importance of a partnership approach to combat inequality and discrimination. Knowledge alliance is a normative as well as an analytical concept to grasp the dynamics of...

Divergence and Convergence of National and Local Regulation: The Case of Austria and Vienna

From a regulationist perspective, this article analyses the conditions under which local and national modes of development can diverge. Taking the modern history of Vienna and Austria as an example, the article considers the dialectics of accumulation strategies and national and local state projects. Four relevant historical periods can be distinguished. The more general conclusion is that heterogeneous regional development is only a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition for a local state project to diverge from the national one. It seems that popular forces can only establish a counter-project at the local level if the national dominant bloc fails to gain mass acceptance for its ideological dispensation and an emerging counter-bloc is able to capitalize on this weakness by formulating its own social project.

Founding transdisciplinary knowledge production in critical realism: implications and benefits

ABSTRACT This article explains the implications and benefits of founding transdisciplinary collaborations of knowledge production in critical realism. We call such equal partnerships of researchers and practitioners knowledge alliances. Drawing on the distinction between the referent to which we refer (the object that our research is about) and our references (our research about this object), we show that practitioners can contribute to the process of knowledge production by providing access to referents and producing references but also by achieving societal relevance. In order to accomplish excellence, knowledge production should be organized in ways that engage different types of knowledge in a constructive interplay and use the respective strong points of researchers and practitioners. Abduction and retroduction, two modes of inference vital to critical realism, are particularly inclined to benefit from involving practitioners in knowledge production. We call such an approach potential-oriented and put it in contrast to problem-orientation and the empiricism of evidence-based research and policy-making.

Social innovation in the field of Roma inclusion in Hungary and Austria: lessons to foster social cohesion from Thara and Tanodas: Changes, Challenges and Policy Implications for Europe in Times of Austerity

Be it the increase in poverty and unemployment, ‘Brexit’, or the current refugee tragedy – there is clear evidence that social and territorial cohesion is at stake in Europe. Historically, struggles for social cohesion were intended to repair the damages done by capitalist modernisation, such as the dissolution of traditional communities or widening class cleavages. Since the 1990s, social cohesion became a key European policy concern. While in line with the Lisbon Agenda the term has been de-politicised and framed as functional to competitiveness (Maloutas et al., 2008, p. 260), social cohesion has to be understood as the contradictory and contested quasi concept with different definitions in different policy fields (Jenson, 1998). From a socioeconomic perspective, it deals with the exclusionary dynamics of social inequality and poverty. While equality was never achieved in centralised welfare regimes, there has been a uniformisation in the access to social services and infrastructure which was often not very attentive to diversity. From a political perspective, social cohesion includes participation, representation and mobilisation, questioning an understanding of citizenship based on nationality. From a culturalist perspective, some stress the right to difference as well as recognition, dignity and belonging, while others focus on essentialist identity-building based on ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’. Due to this complexity, we define social cohesion as a problématique of enabling people to live together and yet to have the opportunity to be different (Novy et al., 2012, p. 1874). It is a complex, multilayered challenge that can only be tackled in a transdisciplinary, multiscalar and multidi-