ÖREK-Partnership "Räumliche Dimensionen der Digitalisierung" (Spatial dimensions of digitalization)

Cities, municipalities, and regions are in the midst of accelerating and complex change: economic, technological, ecological, demographic, and social. A key driver is digitalization, which has now found its way into all areas of society and the economy and whose effects are increasingly being felt at the concrete spatial level.

In order to investigate the extent to which digitization processes manifest themselves spatially and pose new challenges for planning, the ÖREK partnership “Spatial Dimensions of Digitization” was launched in December 2020. On behalf of the Austrian Conference on Spatial Planning (ÖROK), the future.lab Research Center is leading an interdisciplinary consortium that includes the research areas of sociology and local spatial planning at TU Wien, AustriaTech, the Landluft association, and the Zukunftsorte platform.

The ÖREK partnership is structured as a dialogue-based process. On the one hand, the topic is discussed in a series of workshops together with representatives of the BMLRT, BMK, BMDW, the federal states, the Austrian Association of Cities and Towns, and the Austrian Association of Municipalities. On the other hand, three public specialist events serve to broaden the technical discourse and promote cross-border knowledge exchange. At its core, the ÖREK partnership is about linking scientific findings with practical priorities and challenges. It is about learning from and with each other and about the necessary “translation services” required for this.

The stated goal is to motivate actors at all planning levels to engage in early discussion and to develop recommendations for action for spatially effective digitization processes. The subject of the first phase of work is the creation of a cross-sectional study that provides an overview of spatial trends and effects in various subject areas. The focus will be specifically on developments in Austria. Based on this, two key topics will be selected, which will be examined in a spatially differentiated manner in the second phase of the project.

Duration: 2020–2022
Funding: The ÖREK partnership and study of the same name were commissioned by the Austrian Conference on Spatial Planning (ÖROK).

Projektteam