DPP’s and Shattuck Center’s Post-Doc Felix Butzlaff has published an article with European Urban and Regional Studies

DPP’s and Shattuck Center’s Post-Doc Felix Butzlaff has published an article with European Urban and Regional Studies. Together with co-authors Alina Baernthaler (TU Vienna), Leonie Bleiker (WU Vienna), Michael Deflorian (Sustainability Planning, City of Innsbruck), Mirijam Mock (WU Vienna) & Luise Stoisser (Vrije Universiteit Brussels), they zoom in on why and how in contemporary city planning, self-organized collaborative forms of housing are flourishing. Whereas the research on urban planning has understood the proliferation of co-housing as indicating changing participatory demands of citizens and as an effort to organize social change on an everyday level, critical social researchers have interpreted the rise of collaborative housing not as a democratization, but as a shift of urban governance towards the responsibilization of citizens. In this article, these two theoretical are used to scrutinize the contemporary proliferation of co-housing groups in Viennese urban planning.  The authors conclude that in the case of the Viennese Wildgarten, the self-empowerment of citizens goes hand-in-hand with an increasing top-down steering by a neoliberal entrepreneurial city. Furthermore, that the co-housing groups tend to willingly accept the hierarchy between planning bodies and themselves, which contradicts the political marketing strategies of social transformation and democratization attached to contemporary co-housing. Simultaneously, possibly as a consequence from top-down citizen responsibilization, the findings show that co-housing groups often focus more on a democratized group interior than on transforming society at large.