In the context of the on-going debate on `Europeanisation' as a result of adaptation pressure on domestic structures emanating from the EU level, the article sets out to describe the particular characteristics of the `European turn' in the urban politics of the cities of Graz and Dortmund. Special attention is given to the effects of Structural Funds programmes on local government structures with regard to `new urban governance'. The conclusions point to different types of path-dependent adaptation to EU policies and norms, to the relevance of mediating local factors to explanations of variation between the cities and to the inevitably different trajectories of `Europeanisation' in cities across the EU. The article contributes to theoretical debates around the utility of historical/sociological institutionalist approaches in research on governance, notions of `download/top—down' and `upload/bottom—up' Europeanisation as well as the conceptualisation of the scope (the `deepness') of the EU impact.
Sustainability indicator sets are increasingly being discussed on the policy level as fruitful contributions to the improvement of political decisionmaking and to the implementation of programs oriented towards the achievement of strategic goals of sustainable development. The vast number of different indicator type tools, their varying contexts of use and their differing objectives indicate that there is no simple answer to what sustainable indicator type tools should look like or could be used for. Instead, more than the final products (e.g. a specific indicators set), the analyses of the discourse on this topic reveal a lot of information. Thus, an innovative research approach is recommended focusing on understanding the production of social meaning and processes of social interaction within political-administrative systems. Firstly, there is a need to identify the development, purpose and use of sustainability indicator sets, which depend on the different interests of policy actors, their relationships and existing governance structures. Secondly, one should identify any reasons for the ineffective use of indicator sets where the goals of sustainability are concerned. The approach of 'interactive research' understood as a research process, in which 'researchers' and 'practitioners' develop knowledge for solving problems in a communicative, reflexive and collaborative way, facilitates this challenging research task. This paper critically examines the approach of interactive research and sheds some light on benefits as well as challenges of it via extracting the lessons learnt in an EU-funded project called 'Promoting Action for Sustainability through Indicators at the Local Level in Europe' (PASTILLE), which applied an interactive research approach.
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.
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