All Things Urban

The notion of “social” is dynamic and can be interpreted in different ways, also with regard to housing policy.

A relational interpretation refers to interpersonal ties. A normative interpretation refers to social equality, forms of supply or support for disadvantaged groups. In the tradition of Viennese housing policy, the social dimension becomes manifest in the goals of “social mixing” and “affordability”.

Today, far-reaching social change is reflected in new family and household forms, a new relationship between housing and work, new mobility concepts, new technologies and other changes that affect living and the importance of housing for making everyday life good and satisfying.

It is a core challenge to capture the relevance of this change for the provision of housing and to adjust the system so that it can respond adequately to the new challenges (and avoid unintended effects through inappropriate instruments).

The program includes sessions presenting projects and discussing scientific results, as well as workshops on current challenges in Viennese housing. There will be three strands of discussion:

• Housing First, affordable housing and the Right to Housing (lead question: how to provide housing for low income groups)

• Diversity in Housing Provision (lead question: what role for cooperative and experimental housing projects in a social housing strategy?)

• Housing and the course of life (lead question: how to avoid transaction costs for moving related to changing needs and household structures?)

Parts of the program will take place in new social housing projects.

The International Summer School invites:

• Contributions relating to concrete innovative housing projects which are particularly concerned with new forms of coexistence, e.g. intergenerational and / or intercultural housing projects. This can be in the form of a project presentation or comparative work. Submitted papers should focus on the innovative interpretations of the „social“ in the cases that are discussed.

• Contributions concerned with the meaning of the social dimension of social housing and/ or with its interpretation and appropriation by inhabitants over time. How were and are, for example, shared (community) facilities used, and how did they contribute to the successful co-living in a residential building / settlement?

• Contributions dealing with the current societal cleavages and the potential of housing policies to strengthen social cohesion. One point of reference could be the right to housing. Contributions to current societal change, developing designs and concepts for housing that support new family, household and mobility concepts.

The International Summer School is open for early stage academics (predoc, postdoc) from all disciplinary contexts as well as for housing activists and representatives of housing and urban policy initiatives who want to contribute to the above mentioned topics. The Summer School is open for 15 participants.

In the framework of the International Building Exhibition (IBA) on “New Social Housing”, which will take place in Vienna in 2022, the TU Wien and the University of Vienna established a research cluster (“ResearchLab”) to encourage interdisciplinary, critical and comparative research in the field of social housing and urban development.

To accomplish this goal, the ResearchLab started in 2018 with a series of annual International Summer Schools on relevant aspects of social housing. In 2019, the Summer School will have a thematic focus on the social dimension of social housing.