In Vienna, globalisation has restructured urban society in terms of de-industrialisation, occupational change, migration and unemployment. This paper focuses on the restructuring of urban society and the related neighbourhood changes in Vienna from 1971 to 2001. The study applies social area analysis and factorial ecology to identify the underlying dimensions in the formation of socio-spatial patterns and neighbourhood change through a cross-sectional analysis. The analysis does not directly reveal a trend towards spatial polarisation but rather supports the concept of emerging structural differentiations in a 'quartered city'. Social housing policies on entitlements and the city's withdrawal as a housing developer just as it was embarking on subsidised urban renewal have contributed to an accentuation of structural differences. Extending the analysis to the Vienna metropolitan region indicates that suburbanisation is reinforcing a socio-spatial polarisation within the city proper, exacerbated by the territorial fragmentation of social housing policies between the city and its suburban region. Copyright (c) 2009 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.
"The postmodern city is a myth, a tale, a telling, a poignant narrative that builds on the past to continually new horizons… The postmodern city is not only an epitomizing model of contemporary social and economic development, but also a metaphysical reality, a place where the real and the imagined are persistently commingled in ways we have only begun to understand…" (Chambers, 1990; Soja 2000). Normative notions on the city have to be dissected as an intersection of the near and the far order of urban societies (Lefebvre, 1996) and as fluid conceptualizations in a heterochronical context. However, cities similarly have to be read as "thirdspaces" (Soja, 1996)-contestations of mythical and real urban spaces and places, continuously re-interpreted and endowing urban spaces and places with even transient meanings. The paper seeks to grasp Foucault's notions on heterotopia as a theoretical framework and èpistemé for approaching these "thirdspaces"-in-between the social relations and their inscriptions into the material reality of cities.
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