Communication and participation: SOFT – Gentle urban renewal revisited

SOFT – Gentle Urban Renewal Revisited

VU Communication and Participation: SOFT – Gentle Urban Renewal Revisited
Bachelor’s Course in Spatial Planning and Regional Development
Summer Semester 2023 | 280.972 | 6 ECTS
Judith Lehner, Katharina Kirsch-Soriano da Silva
in cooperation with the Research Unit for Housing and Design (Bernadette Krejs) and architecture students

This course examines forms of participation and involvement within urban development and transformation processes. It looks at spatial configurations and their changes, as well as concrete methods of participation, while also addressing concepts that foreground civic engagement, social inclusion, and the right to the city. Who are the actors shaping the city? How can processes in the context of spatial change be supported, and how can people be enabled to contribute? How can these spatial transformations and social processes be traced through building and neighborhood biographies?

In the summer semester of 2023, the course focuses on “SOFT – Gentle Urban Renewal Revisited.” “Gentle Urban Renewal” emerged in Vienna in the 1970s and marked a paradigm shift: instead of demolition and new construction—which had also met with civic protest—a “careful” approach to the city’s historic neighborhoods became the programmatic foundation of Vienna’s urban renewal policy. Residential buildings were to be renovated affordably and with the involvement of residents; residential environments and public spaces were to be improved—again with participation from local communities and with attention to their needs. A central role was played by the district renewal offices, which, as local actors on site, initiated and facilitated communication and participation. Alongside structural measures, it was often the less architecturally visible “soft” process-oriented interventions that proved essential in their work.

Nearly 50 years after the launch of “Gentle Urban Renewal,” the course takes a closer look at the programmatic concept and its practice—from its origins to the present day. Through specific case studies, various focal points in the development of participatory work within the framework of the district urban renewal offices are researched and analyzed using visual and narrative methods. By examining historical examples of urban renewal, their further development over time can also be explored. “Building biographies” make transformation processes of historic residential buildings visible, while “neighborhood biographies” trace the development of districts, residential environments, and public spaces.

In this way, the course sharpens the focus on processes, actors, spatial transformations, and implemented communication and participation interventions. Finally, the relevance of the analyzed approaches for the current context and discourse of urban development in Vienna is discussed, asking how the narratives surrounding the biographies of the examined places might be continued into the future.

The course takes place in cooperation with the Research Center for New Social Housing (Judith M. Lehner) and with the Research Unit for Housing and Design workshop “SOFT – Drawing Housing Biographies” (Bernadette Krejs) together with architecture students.